The crazies are pushing us toward single payer, in spite of themselves.

And now, it's come to this. People want healthcare reform. Big Health and its hired right wing lunatics do not.


Regular people are looking at their painful and bleak healthcare situations, wondering why insurance companies make attaining it according to their own physicians' recommendations next to impossible.

How can people find the money to pay for skyrocketing premiums and escalating out of pocket costs? Why must many people wait to become very ill before they can obtain care, specifically inundating hospital emergency rooms for illnesses that could have been easily prevented and cared for in a physician's office? Why must people lose their health insurance in the event of job loss? Why must people face bankruptcy if major illness/injury strikes, even when they have insurance?


And when regular people make an effort to attend a town hall with their elected officials to gather information and ask questions, suddenly they find themselves surrounded by bullying, screaming right wing mobs who have been organized and sent in by conservative groups fueled by the deep pockets of Big Insurance, Big Pharma, Big Hospitals Inc, Big Medical Equipment Inc. Their sole purpose is mandated to shut down the town hall meetings and any discussion of health care reform.



People are connecting the greed of Big Insurance and its allies with the meager quality of their own health care.

And now, people are connecting the sudden appearances of right wing shout mobs at town halls to the continuation of Big Health Care's astronomical profits.



When every other television advertisement beckons the viewers to "Ask your doctor about _____....,"
or some porn star wannabe cautions men to "see your doctor if you have an erection lasting longer than four hours" as he slips into his-n-hers bathtubs. And with this barrage, another reminder to regular people that male enhancing drugs are "covered" under insurance, while birth control pills are not.


For many people, it comes to the wrenching decision whether to pay for medicines or to pay for food.


It's not getting any better. We've been fighting this battle for decades.



Healthcare for everyone is a moral issue. Single payer universal healthcare (Medicare for all) is a human values issue. How this battle is won will truly tell us who we are as a country.



Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly also weighs in on mob harassment today. Good internal links in the piece as well.

...then don't we still have to come up with the money through higher taxes? How will putting it in the government hands make it affordable?

Is the following statement true or false?

Canadians have free healthcare.

Read it as many times as you need to before you answer.

We don't know that Canadian healthcare isn't actually free. We're just so fucking stupid, that we believe that health care in the US will be free too, all we have to do is pass a bill.

...we're gonna make Congress change the gravitational constant. That will help all the people who feel too heavy!

Hey, if they can declare marijuana "addictive"... :D

I find it oppressive that we can't easily visit other stars!!

It is false in that it doesn't appear from nowhere.

Do you have a point?

we pay twice as much as other countries with single payer that covers everyone. we pay for it in the upwardly adjusted cost of everything at the hospitals to cover the uninsured who can't pay the bill. we are paying it two three times over. I would think that in the end we would be paying less... because instead of small little pools of people where the risk is bigger.... you would have everyone in the same pool, healthy AND sick... and that way the risk is spread around to everyone. that and a focus on prevention instead of how things are now should lower costs for everyone. nothing is free... but just the fact that we pay twice as much as almost ever other country while getting less healthcare and ranking quite low considering everything on infant mortality to cancer rates etc.

Are the Mods gonna let us play with our new toy before pizza is served?:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

any rise in taxes would, for most people, be less than what insurance premiums, copays and deductibles cost them now. At worst, they'd break even.

There was an open letter written by a doctor recently who'd moved from working in the VA to the private sector... and he was advocating single-payer.

The reason? Because in the private sector, decisions about healthcare were influenced more often than not by profit more than patient care, and he found it distressing.

Do some reading. You might just learn something.

We charge according to ability to pay (and trust me, there are plenty with the ability to pay).

We distribute according to medical need.

No one is charged anything that is not affordable. No one is denied necessary care. Voila!

Welcome to DU.

:hi:

Pizza.

Yes, they have free healthcare. Yes, they pay for it. Amazing how it works. See, those higher taxes amount to LESS than Americans are being forced to shell out monthly and yearly to ever-escalating insurance plans that offer less every time with increasingly prohibitive deductibles.

And they get something else that we don't even imagine: freedom from fear. They don't have to worry about being wiped out by one illness. Most Americans would be. Americans WITH our overpriced health insurance.

Everytime you shell out for health insurance, you are paying for the insurance CEO's new yacht, for his wife's sable coat, for his ski lodge, for his children to go to schools that yours will never see. He gets all that by making sure you get the least possible care.

Me, I want my taxes to pay for my health care, not some CEO's Mercedes.

That is what the corporations fear the most. A population that is free of fear.

Imagine if we were able to be educated without debt. Subsistence fed and housed without jobs. Able to access necessary medical care as needed.

Would we then be the docile workforce that the corporate world wants?

If HR3200 forces small businesses to provide coverage to their employees then Liberal healthcare reform will cost American businesses a lot of money.

Read it as many times as you need to before you answer.

Who said Canadians have free health care?

That is why we must increase our federal revenue again to pay for universal health care by taxing these same people who gladly accepted Bush's tax cuts, while the very programs that improve the quality of living for everyone were ruthlessly slashed.


Once we remove the insurance companies' exorbitant marketing and advertising costs, and mammoth administrative costs that the insurance companies foist onto doctors and to all of us, there is even more money available to cover health care for everyone.

Insurance companies are the guilty parties when they accuse any movement toward healthcare reform as "rationing".

When employers decide which insurance providers their employees must use for healthcare, THAT is rationing care.

When the insurance provider decides which physicians will be "in their network", THAT is rationing care.

When insurance companies fabricate excuses not to cover physician-ordered procedures, medicines or diagnostic tests, THAT is rationing care.



Let's talk in facts only.

I seriously doubt my share of taxes would be as much.
Why do you love the insurance industry so much?