Health care reform panel set for Thursday night

Participants in the panel discussion include Washington, D.C. resident Donna Smith of the National Nurses Organizing Committee; Rob Stone, a Bloomington, Ind.-based emergency room physician and Indiana coordinator for Physicians for a National Health Program; and William Connolly, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of Evansville and a member of the steering committee of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan.

Dr. Flowers to Dems: Vote Against Obamacare

Dr. Margaret Flowers wants the 86 co-sponsors of the House single payer bill (HR 676) to vote against Obamacare.

Dr. Flowers is a leader of the group Physicians for a National Health Program, whose 17,000 member doctors support a single payer, Medicare for All system for the United States.

Sometimes your words come back to haunt you. I know I had an exchange with someone here about what a jackass Bill Maher is. And, whomever it was said yeah, but sometimes he's right...and I said, no he's a sexist tool who has nothing worthwhile to offer. You only like him when you agree with him, yada, yada, yada. Well, tonight he most definitely has something to offer. If you have HBO, watch. Tell your friends to watch. Tell your neighbors to watch. Tell your Congressperson to watch.

Via PNHP.org

Obama’s doctor on Bill Maher’s show Aug. 7

Over at Alegre's, masslib has posted a nice roundup on the deafening silence around the left critique of "Obamacare" (egads, I hate that name!)

Places you probably visit on a daily basis anyway, but it's good to see them put together like this. Update: Don't miss Ruth Calvo's "Insurance: Collecting Money Without Providing Services Is Theft". Via Avedon, who writes:

My local single-payer activist sends some happy news: Dr. Margaret Flowers of PNHP has been invited by Sen. Kennedy's office to testify at the Senate Hearing on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) on Thursday, June 11 at 3:00.

So, as she says, we can update the latest Healthcare-NOW! action alert: contact Sen. Kennedy's office (Phone: 202-224-4543 - Fax: 202-224-2417) and let them know we are glad to hear Dr. Margaret Flowers has been invited to testify on behalf of national single-payer healthcare reform and that we expect single-payer advocates to continue to have a seat at the table in meetings and senate hearings on health care reform.

Health Reform Lessons from Massachusetts, Part I

Dr. Rachel Nardin, who heads the Massachusetts chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, noted that having health insurance was not the same as getting health care. Thirteen percent of people in the state who had insurance still could not pay for some health services, and 13 percent could not pay for their medicines, she said. Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, explained how the law encouraged the overuse of costly high-tech care while damaging the finances of safety-net hospitals.

...at Change.org ---

All this week, this site hosted a blog debate about what approach we should take on health care reform in 2009. Dr. Don McCanne, a retired family physician now serving as Senior Health Policy Fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program, represented the "single-payer" point of view and Jason Rosenbaum, a writer and activist, and the Deputy Director of Online Campaigns for Health Care for America Now!, represented the "public competitor" point of view.

Who would hold a health care summit and exclude doctors?
Letter from Health Care Now:

White Coats To Crowd the White House Gate Thursday
Doctors criticize exclusion of single-payer advocates from summit

President Obama is holding a Healthcare Summit on Thursday, March 5th. Over 120 are expected to be in attendance, including representatives from Americas Health Insurance Plans, the largest group of private health insurance lobbyists.

PNHP Blog: CBO’s deficient report on analyzing health insurance proposals

What is clear is that each policy decision under this scenario increases the administrative complexities of the financing system, and that the inevitable tradeoffs that must be made can only result in compromises that cause us to fall short on our goals of universality, equity, efficiency, quality, access, and affordability. Once the decision is made that we must build on our current system, there is no possible way to avoid spending more money for reform that would fall so short of a high-performance system.

Chris Frates of Politico writes another let's you and him fight article, but at least single payer advocates get to speak for themselves.

“These guys have unions as part of their coalition, but apparently they don’t understand collective bargaining. If you don’t ask for something, you’ll never get it,” said Chuck Idelson, spokesman for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, the nation’s largest nurses union.

The nurses union believes that by not pushing for a single-payer system, HCAN and its allies are setting Americans up for failure.

Check out this quote by Richard Kirsch, national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now:

Letter to the Baltimore Sun

The Massachusetts health care plan, which was supposed to create universal coverage, has left hundreds of thousands of people uninsured because the premiums and out-of-pocket expenses are too costly for many to afford.

Have you written a letter to the editor?

The transfer of vital organs from the have-nots to the have-mores doesn't just play out in cinematic goings-on in seedy London hotels, but also in the humdrum precincts of the American health (couldn't) care (less) system. In a recent press release, the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) reveal that "People who lack health insurance are about 20 times more likely to donate their liver or a kidney for a lifesaving transplant than to receive one".

One of the arguments heard here in the US from incrementalists in the health care reform debate is that we don't have to go with single-payer -- lots of other countries have multiple, private insurance companies [see item 3 below]. We could just tweak our private insurers to be just as affordable and reliable as theirs!

Not so fast, subsidy-breath. The following is basically a c&p from an article I found at the PNHP site, but I've done a little editing and emphasizing of my own.

International Health Systems for Single Payer Advocates

By Dr. Ida Hellander
PNHP Executive Director

Doctors Criticize Obama’s Health Plan

A group of over 15,000 U.S. physicians has called on President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress to “do the right thing” and enact a single-payer national health insurance plan, a system of public health care financing frequently characterized as “an improved Medicare for all.”

“Our country is hailing the remarkable and historic victory of Barack Obama and the mandate for change the electorate has awarded him,” said Dr. Quentin Young, national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Want to Shut Conservatives Out of Power for Good? Implement Universal Health Care

John Geyman has an excellent post examining all the front groups opposing Medicare for All. Highly recommended.

Who knew (I certainly didn't) that there was a reception at the convention on Tuesday for co-sponsors of HR676, the House bill for single payer health care?

Dr. Claudia Fegan spoke at the reception. It is a very eloquent piece of advocacy and well worth reading. Here is the last bit:

It is time to demand what we deserve. It is time to demand universal health care. We won’t get there by urging the insurance industry to play nice with others. We will get there by demanding a singlepayer national health insurance; Medicare for all.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

On waking from an opium-induced sleep, so the story goes, Coleridge hurried to capture on paper the fantastical world he had dreamed [or hallucinated, depending on who you ask]. He was rudely interrupted while at this task, and when he returned to it, all was gone but the fragment we have today.

Consider the case for a national health program

The words "socialized medicine" are like stink bombs. Drop them into a discussion of health care reform, and everyone runs for the door.

So let's try another phrase. How about "Medicare for all"?

Leon Zoghlin and Peter Mott have been members of Physicians for a National Health Program for decades. And when they talk about reform, they mean Medicare for all. It's been working well for senior citizens since the 1960s. Why not share the good?

Don McCanne responds to TNR’s Jonathan Cohn

Systems using private plans are more expensive, largely because of greater administrative complexity. Equity is more difficult to achieve in a multi-payer system. A system of universal risk pooling would have to be superimposed on the private plans, making us wonder why we would even want to keep them since they would no longer be providing their insurance function of transferring risk.