Excerpted, edited by Carolyn Bennett

Health care is a right
The private health insurance industry is
Too cruel
Too inhumane
Too arbitrary
Too bureaucratic
Too inefficient, and
Must be replaced

Our private health insurance industry-dominated system permits 45 million people to live without health insurance, denying them access to preventive and routine care, resulting in the death of at least 35,000 people a year.

Our private health insurance industry-dominated system tolerates private health insurance companies making life-and-death rationing decisions for millions of people with only minimal accountability.

Our private health insurance industry-dominated system lets private health insurers refuse to take sick people as customers and to engage in endless manipulations to discard its customers if they do become sick.

Our private health insurance industry-dominated system features a system in which medical bills and illness contribute to almost two of every three personal bankruptcies - even though three-quarters of these bankrupt people had insurance when they became sick.

Our private health insurance industry-dominated health care system translates into a private health insurance industry-dominated political system. As a result, too many politicians refuse to consider real solutions.

Cure all for these ills: Medicare-for-All, single-payer system, in which the government pays medical bills (thus operating as the 'single payer').

In a Medicare-for-All system
Health care is available as a matter of right
No one is denied treatment because they cannot pay
No one is mandated to buy coverage
No one is denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions
No one goes bankrupt paying medical bills
We save $400 billion in costs - enough to cover all of the uninsured
No scandalous CEO pay packages
No money siphoned out of the system by rent-seeking intermediaries
No needless paperwork and bureaucracy
We succeed by doing away with the private health insurance industry

As State Senator, Barack Obama supported this approach but as President, instead of advocating the approach, which he maintains would be superior if a system were being designed from scratch, his administration has sought to reach an accommodation with the insurance industry, hospitals and Big Pharma. This strategy has led to a policy debate, which has spiraled downward into ever more trivial reform proposals and has diverted attention from the underlying problem: rip-off insurers, price-gouging Big Pharma, and increasingly profit-hungry hospitals.

But the grassroots movement for Medicare-for-All - animated by the idea of everybody in, nobody out - has refused to accept official Washington's determination about 'political feasibility.'

Thanks to patients, nurses, doctors and everyday people talking to their neighbors, calling and e-mailing their members of Congress, writing letters to the editor, rallying, researching, testifying, conducting civil disobedience and more, Medicare-for-All is gaining momentum.

Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has successfully introduced an amendment in one of the House health care bills that would facilitate states' adopting their own single-payer system. Representative Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) has obtained assurances that he will be able to introduce H.R. 676, the stand-alone Medicare-for-All proposal, in the House of Representatives as an amendment in full House consideration of health care legislation. This will represent the first time either the full House or Senate has voted on a Medicare-for-All proposal.

Supporting Medicare-for-All are a majority of nurses, a majority of doctors, and a majority of the American public.

It is only a matter of time before a congressional majority supports Medicare-for-All.

Source
"U.S. Health Care System Dominated by the Insurance Industry Must Be Replaced With 'Medicare-for-All'" - Public Citizen President Robert Weissman, September 29, 2009, http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=2970

Posted by Bennett's Column at 2:24 PM 0 comments
Labels: health care for all, people versus Big Pharma, politics of health care, private versus public health care, Public Citizen reports, right to health care

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Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett -author, independent journalist Blog: Today's Insight News Blog: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/
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