The LA Times used the word “bonanza” recently in describing what Obama’s and Congress’ health care “reform” will mean to the insurance/pharma industries. Criminalizing the uninsured, i.e., making purchasing insurance mandatory, will bring massive profit-making for an industry whose profit-making already has crippled the present health care system so badly that 45,000 uninsured Americans die each year prematurely – unnecessarily — according to a recent Harvard study.

What our President and Congressional representatives, ostensibly employed by and committed to us, seem to be doing these days is exchanging true health care reform for their own campaign financing needs. It is the proverbial elephant (and donkey) in the room. To shift animal metaphors, these representatives are entrusting the public hen house to the foxes, in the guise of reform for citizens. Yes, waiving “no pre-existing conditions” would be of significant value, but what will be the giveaways? What devastating, small-print, loop-hole ambushes will unfold as painful epiphanies in our individual futures?

What happened to universal health care as a mandate because it is a basic human/civil right? The human or civil right aspect seems to be postponed to future generations to fight for. Meanwhile this President and Congress publicly celebrate their 5-bill “work in progress” and its agenda as so significant in history in terms of US health care reform. History will more likely record their greed and cowardice, as well as our obtuseness and/or cowardice as citizens.

The reality of the sham reform being negotiated right now is one of the best kept secrets in America, thanks to the corporate media and the crazy-making spin and collusion of both parties in their Faustian and Faustian-lite contracts with the predatory industrial medical complex.

Also, this “getting-over” is a well kept secret since so many of us are learned-helpless, authoritarian followers, one more time undergoing the manipulation trap of “mystification”. Maybe “come into my parlor said the spider …” is a better way to describe it. The old power play: “Trust us. This legal-insurance-ese stuff is just too complex for your little brains and we will make sure your needs are taken care of.” That is how the banking industry got its no strings check of $700 billion in one shot. They presumably were the only ones smart enough to fix and regulate the disaster they had made. Anyone else feeling a queasy spell of déjà vu?

As Progressives protest right now over the disrespect to the public option by Congress and the President regarding the Baucus Finance bill, the “public option” is also a sly game. A public option would prove ultimately powerless against the healthier-patient cherry-picking advantage of the massive medical industrial complex. A complex which is now battling full-throttle with Congress over even the smallest of concessions. At the same time, through the corporate media, it bombards citizens with feel good disinformation about itself. Such self-aggrandizement is not unlike Goldman Sachs and the banking syndicate’s callousness to the plight of the citizenry – their daunting refusal to self-regulate and arrange a win/win scenario with a desperate citizenry. Profit uber alles.

I wonder if Obama and some of the Democrats in Congress will throw in, at the eleventh hour of negotiations, a wobbly public option or “trigger-promise” to pacify us progressives. This would be akin to that moment one has standing before a slot machine when, frustrated and close to surrendering, the tinkle of a few more coins renews one’s hope, re-enthralls one’s heart.

While all of this kabuki of reform is playing out in the faux-hallowed halls of Washington, as well as from the seductive corporate media, the Single Payer Medicare for All Plan is recognized by more and more political-and-media-elite-ignored Americans as the true opportunity for humane and affordable health care reform.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/october/the_singlepayer_alt.php

Dr. Andy Coates, member of Physicians for a National Health Program and co-chair of Single Payer New York asserts that the Single Payer Medicare for All Plan, HR 676 or S 703, is “the only alternative that can solve the crisis of the health care non-system.” Dr. Coates:

Meanwhile the public option, as a posture, has lured progressives and liberals to support a reform that is a huge giveaway of taxpayer money to insurance companies.

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Many good-hearted people have latched onto this proposal today because they think that the private health insurance industry is simply too powerful to conquer. These people aren’t against single-payer. They simply lack confidence that we can achieve a Medicare-for-all single-payer system in one step. They’re looking for an incremental route.

In PNHP, some of us like to say, “You can’t jump a chasm in two leaps.” In the insurance marketplace, the winning company keeps the healthy and wealthy customers and avoids or jettisons the sick and the poor.

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In the best-case scenario, the public option will not cover everyone, improve quality, redress disparities or guarantee the choice of physicians. PNHP founders David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler estimate that the maximum cost savings it would offer would be only 9 percent of what single-payer would offer. It would also add yet another insurance entity to the 1,300 different insurers we have now. And it won’t end the fundamental problem with health care—the profit motive. That’s what lies behind the health care crisis in America.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/october/docs_as_props.php

Dr. Paul Hochfeld, Oregon emergency room doctor who traveled with the Mad As Hell Doctors to publicize Single Payer Medicare for All also dismisses the effectiveness of a public option:

“The public option is a sham. It will cost more and serve fewer people than a single payer health plan. Obama’s plan is going to be one public plan swimming in the shark infested waters of private health insurance industry. The public plan will accept the sick and the poor. The wealthy and the employed will be excluded from the public option. The public option will struggle and fail.”

Dr. Coates also criticizes Obama’s mandatory insurance purchase plan.

Yes, Massachusetts mandated that everyone buy health insurance. And this hasn’t made premiums affordable. To reduce premiums, policies have things like very high deductibles and large co-pays.

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Massachusetts subsidizes insurance premiums for everyone who makes less than 300 percent of the federal poverty line. This guarantees a constant flow of money into private health insurance companies, while it exacerbates the state’s budget deficit.

And to address the deficit, Massachusetts has cut safety net health care! They have taken hundreds of millions of dollars out of programs that would have helped poor and low-income patients—the very people most need the care and whom the reform should have most helped.

Dr. Coates explains that the Single Payer Medicare for All plan is the only plan that has a solid, 5 prong foundation: 1) affordable costs, 2) quality care, 3) guaranteed access, 4) lessened disparities and 5) protection of the provider-patient relationship.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/october/doctor_care_for_all.php

Patricia McCarter interviewed Dr. Pippa Abston, an Alabaman pediatrician:

What Abston wants is a single-payer system, with that payer being the federal government. Under the plan she supports – as pitched in House Bill 676 by Democratic Congressman John Conyers of Michigan – private health insurance would go away.

From cradle to grave, the government would pay for citizens’ medical coverage, via a payroll tax of about 4.5 percent, “which is considerably less than what people pay for health care premiums.” It would cover doctor visits, hospital stays, preventive medicine, home health care and prescription drugs.

Abston said the cost would be substantially less than what is currently spent on health care because the government could negotiate better costs, and high salaries of insurance executives would go away. By everyone, rich and poor, having the same insurance, she said the wealthy and powerful will make certain it has excellent benefits.

Dr. Abston also points out that the United States now ranks 50th in life expectancy among developed nations.

According to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, one main reason Canada spent only $3,895 per capita on health care in 2007 compared to the US $7,290 amount, with inferior care of the Americans not to mention with 16% of the population totally uninsured, was reduced administrative costs. 30 cents out of every health care dollar in America goes for time-consuming and wasteful administrative paperwork and bloated executive pay.

Dr. Coates contends that the practicality of the Single Payer plan cannot be refuted. He also alleges the idea is gaining momentum among citizens.

Remember, Medicare was implemented 45 years ago within one year. The government enrolled and guaranteed benefits for every single person over 65 in an era before personal computers, with typewriters and carbon paper. In the 1990s, the Taiwan government studied health reform and concluded that single-payer, modeled on our Medicare system, was the best way to go. They pushed it through within a few tumultuous months. And the health finance system in Taiwan has been successful and popular ever since.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/october/a_death_every_12_min.php

As for the sobering negative statistics of our present system, John Geyman expresses serious outrage:

Americans are dying at a faster rate — 1 every 12 minutes, 5 an hour, 120 a day, 45,000 a year — not from war or natural disaster, but from lack of health insurance.

That’s the stunning finding of a study published today in the American Journal of Public Health by leading researchers at Harvard Medical School. The report, “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults,” reveals that the uninsured have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those with private insurance, resulting in 45,000 preventable deaths annually.

He also asserts:

We’re not talking about a third world country. This is the United States, one of the most industrialized nations in the world. But increasingly, we look more like a developing country — 42nd in the world for life expectancy (behind Japan and most of Europe), and ranked last among 19 OECD countries in preventable deaths that should not occur in the presence of timely and effective health care.

Meanwhile, the charade goes on, as our elected representatives in Congress dither over health care reform. None of the bills in Congress will resolve the affordability and access problems.

As for the present bills being considered, he observes:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the House health reform bill would still leave 17 million persons uninsured and that Sen. Baucus’ bill, unveiled yesterday, would leave 25 million uninsured. That translates into tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths every year.

Geyman addresses the formidable power of the moneyed insurance lobbies to stifle consideration of the Single Payer Plan, and points out that the present bills do not set limits on what insurers can charge for premiums:

Dr. Coates (aforementioned) takes both the Republicans as well as President Obama to task for their cooperation with the medical industrial complex:

… the Republican Party recently came out foursquare in defense of Medicare, after decades of calling for its abolition. Of course, the Republicans want to protect Medicare Part D, a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry, and they love Medicare Advantage, a privatization of Medicare that has proven lucrative for private insurance companies.

Meanwhile, we have the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association of America, led by former Republican congressman Billy Tauzin. Tauzin was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying that the White House promised not to negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry—promised to preserve Medicare Part D, and also not to allow the import of drugs from Canada or other countries where they would be cheaper than American prices. In exchange, PhRMA is going to spend $150 million advertising in favor of so-called “reform.”

So PhRMA and the White House and the Republicans all appear to be in alignment, defending Medicare Part D from reform. Perhaps Obama was accurate when he said recently that there was 80 percent agreement on the proposals. Yet we hear “government takeover!” as if someone were actually proposing such a thing.

So PhRMA has assured Obama it will advertise the “success” of a reform that will be in actuality less reform since it will be compromised by this backroom dealing. Ugly irony.

http://www.alternet.org/politics/143114/corporate_media_performing_miserably_in_health_care_debate_?page=1

Peter Dreier and Todd Gitlin reveal just how much money the medical industrial complex is using to fight true health care reform:

Since 2007, the insurance industry and HMOs have spent $51 million in campaign contributions, targeted disproportionately to key members of the Congressional committees drafting health reform bills. They also spent at least $191 million on lobbyists, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

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There are now 3,300 health industry lobbyists running around Washington, D.C., trying to shape the small print to their advantage in whatever bill finally gets passed (if any). The insurance and pharmaceutical companies and their hangers-on are spending $5 million a week to block real reform. Suffice it to say that none of these companies have the best interests of the uninsured or the underinsured at heart.

Drier and Gitlin also emphasize the near black-out of corporate media over earnest citizens demonstrations for true health care reform:

For several months, HCAN—a national coalition of religious groups, community organizations, unions, senior citizen groups, health care professionals, and consumer advocates—has been organizing polite demonstrations, rallies, and public forums, trying to put faces on an industry that has spent multiple millions of dollars lobbying against reform, while angry protests at town meetings swelled August’s big national story.

On Sept. 22, HCAN sponsored about 150 demonstrations at various insurance company headquarters around the country. The Los Angeles Times did not bother to report about the several hundred demonstrators at WellPoint’s California subsidiary office, located a few blocks from the newspaper’s office. Nor did The Philadelphia Inquirer note those who descended that day on CIGNA, nor The New York Times those outside UnitedHealth in midtown Manhattan.

When hearing this I flashed on that dark scene in the Frank Capra movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, when thugs from the monopolistic newspaper machine overturn the little red wagons and bikes of the earnest kids trying to help spread the real truth with their primitive newsletters. Perhaps today, instead of the gangster in-person thuggery, there is, aside from all that lobby bribe money, the slick health care industry commercials ever-seducing viewers and the corporate media newsrooms ignoring any corporate-threatening activities and assertions.

It was also Drier and Gitlin who disclosed that UnitedHealth’s executive, Helmsley, in 2008 earned a whopping $57,000 a day. With the upcoming “bonanza” of Obamacare, will that figure obscenely increase? Michael Moore claims that by now the top 1% of the population controls 95% of the national income. This must change. And not for the worst for the majority of us.

There is an old saying about the three categories of people. 1) those that make things happen, 2) those that watch things happen, and 3) those that ask “Whaaaaat — TF — happened?” We are said to be the Seinfeld generation of watchers, category 2, or have been. Maybe it is time to move into group 1.

Support Single Payer Medicare for All, HR 676 or S 703. Give the president a call at 1-800-578-4171, and/or call a Congressperson or more. Four toll-free switchboard numbers for the Senate and House: 1-800-828-0498, 1-866-338-1015, 1-866-220-0044, and 1-800-473-6711.

Useful websites: www.phnhp.org, www.healthcare-now.rg, www.passHR676.org, www.singlepayeraction.org, www.medicareforall.org, www.health-justice.org.

Michael Moore on his website has an index of all our House Representatives and their stances on HR 676 (link below).

http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/what-can-i-do/boxscore/index.php?action=print

Email this diary or other diaries to members of the choir and non-choir to spread the Single Payer story.

One million of us Ralph Nader recently called on to make real change in health care. If one of 300 of us do some homework for this country we can still make a huge difference for our lives and the lives of our children and their children. Another good slogan to keep in mind, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.”

Rahm Emmanuel on the Newshour last night warned, “Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.” Apparently he was giving high marks to the health care work-in-progress of Congress and the President. Well, Rahm, Single Payer Medicare for All may not be perfect but it is change we can truly believe in and benefit from. And what is being concocted now, my guess not at all inconveniencing the likes of a $57,000 pay-a-day insurance executive, doesn’t begin to come close to “good.” And if President Obama razzle dazzles that it does, maybe he deserves an Academy Award more than the Nobel Peace Prize!