2 Points of View on Health Care Reform

http://ironink.org/index.php?blog=1&title=health_care_insanity

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/18/dennis_kucinich_and_ralph_nader_a

Nader's view:

Well, this is the latest chapter of corporate Democrats crushing progressive forces both inside their party and against third parties. There’s nothing new here. It’s being pointed out in my former running mate’s autobiography, the late Peter Camejo, which is coming out in a couple weeks from Chicago.
What we’re seeing here is a legislation that doesn’t even kick in until 2014, except for one or two items on staying with your parents’ insurance policy until you’re twenty-six. That means that there will be 180,000 Americans who will die between now and 2014 before any coverage expands, and hundreds of thousands of injuries and illnesses untreated. This bill does not provide universal, comprehensive or affordable care to the American people. It shovels hundreds and billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the worst corporations who’ve created this problem: the Aetnas, the CIGNAs, the health insurance companies. And it doesn’t require many contractual accountabilities and other accountabilities for people who are denied healthcare in this continuing pay-or-die system that is the disgrace of the Western world.
For the drug companies, it’s a bonanza. It doesn’t require Uncle Sam to negotiate volume discounts. It allows these new biologic drugs, under patent, to fight off generic competition—that’s a terrible provision. And it doesn’t allow reimportation from countries like Canada to keep prices down.
Congressman Kucinich’s points are not respected, either. There is no public choice or public option in order to keep prices down, so it’s an open sesame for these giant insurance companies that are concentrating more and more power, in violation of the antitrust laws, over the millions of American patients. And it doesn’t safeguard the states from the kind of litigation that’s heading toward Pennsylvania and California, that are now trying single payer.
So what we should recognize is nothing is really going to happen in this bill, if it’s passed, until 2014, because there’s a gap here, including a presidential campaign and the contest in 2012 and a congressional elections in 2010, for the single-payer supporters in this country. Majority of the American people, majority doctors and nurses, support single payer. They’ve supported Dennis Kucinich all over the country on this. They have supported singlepayeraction.org, which I hope a million people will visit in the next few days in their outrage over what’s happening here.
So I think what we have to do, Amy, is see this as a four-year gap before this bill kicks in and try to get the single payer as a major issue in the 2010 campaign and as a major issue in the 2012 campaign and try to save some of those 180,000 Americans that will die because they cannot afford health insurance to get diagnosed or treated. And that figure comes from Harvard Medical School researchers.


First of all, that won’t even begin until 2014, 180,000 dead Americans later. Second, there’s no guarantee of that. The insurance companies can game this system. The 2,500 pages is full of opportunities and ambiguities for the insurance companies to game the system and to make it even worse.
And let’s say there are more people covered, right? Well, they’re being forced to buy junk insurance policies. There’s no regulation of insurance prices. There’s no regulation of the antitrust laws on this. Everything went down that Dennis was fighting for. There’s no regulation that prevents the insurance companies from taking this papier-mâché bill and lighting a fire to it and making a mockery of it. There’s no shift of power. There’s no facility to create a national consumer health organization, which we proposed and the Democrats ignored years ago, in order to give people a voice so they can have their own non-profit consumer lobby on Washington.


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Well, just the cost of the war in Afghanistan, which is expanding rapidly, is more cost to the taxpayer than the supposed yearly cost of this health insurance bill that’s about to pass. So that’s just one country. That doesn’t even count Iraq. Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist, whom you’ve had on the show, estimates the Iraq war to cost $3 trillion.


But how about the human costs? Two countries blown apart, millions of people dying, many millions refugees from their own country—such as Iraq, four million refugees out of 25 million people—more people displaced, more people sick, injured, our soldiers dying, coming back traumatized with illnesses, family split apart. This is madness! And the American people have got to really come together here. Nobody is going to do it for them. Dennis Kucinich is not going to do it for them. Nobody’s going to do it for them. They have got to start marching. And there’s going to be a big rally on Saturday—I hope Dennis will be there—in Washington, DC, in opposition, among other things, to Obama’s war in Afghanistan.


You know, Eisenhower was so prescient when he warned the American people in 1960 about the military-industrial complex. It’s devouring over half of our operating federal budget. The Pentagon budget, which is over half of the federal operating budget in Washington, isn’t even auditable. The General Accounting Office of the Congress every year declares it’s not auditable. You know what that means. That means there’s no control on how the money is spent, and so they’re hiring private contractors, as the New York Times reported, to engage in homicidal activities and military activities, totally unaccountable, in the dark shadows of the war in Afghanistan.


So the key question, Amy, is, how do we motivate the American people to start acting on what they already believe, that these are wars that are eating at the heart of America and damaging its status all over the world, and that we’ve got to bring those soldiers back home, and we’ve got to shut down these wars, because all they do is fuel the insurgencies, as General Casey and many others have said over the years? Our military occupation in Afghanistan is fuelling the insurgency. It’s producing huge sectarian revenge animosities and killings, and it’s propping up a very corrupt government that is loathed by most of the people in Afghanistan. And all this on the back of the taxpayer, while we don’t have any money to fix the Americans’ public works and all the things that Dennis has talked about. How do you get the American people angry? That’s what your show should try to—to try to inquire in.