Medicare for all, made simple
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Alan Grayson’s Four-Page Medicare Buy-In Bill Introduced WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW |
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By: David Dayen Wednesday March 10, 2010 8:54 am [print_link] As quixotic efforts go, I’ll take Alan Grayson’s HR 4789, a four page bill which “allows any American to buy into Medicare at cost.” You cannot possibly get more simple than that, it would not add one cent to the federal deficit, and it would offer people the option of purchasing Medicare (and its provider network) or purchasing an insurance product from a private company. Howie Klein writes:
This evening Alan Grayson, Orlando’s spectacular and effective fighter for ordinary working families in a Congress that overwhelmingly caters to wealthy and powerful special interests, introduced the most real and straight forward healthcare reform bill that’s come up so far. Unless Obama makes the House leadership kill H.R. 4789– a distinct possibility– this should pass the House more easily than anything that’s been proposed for healthcare reform so far. And I bet it could even win cloture in the Senate! His bill offers the opportunity for everyone in the country to buy into Medicare. “Obviously,” said Grayson, “America wants and needs more competition in health coverage, and a public option offers that. But it’s just as important that we offer people not just another choice, but another kind of choice. A lot of people don’t want to be at the mercy of greedy insurance companies that will make money by denying them the care that they need to stay healthy, or to stay alive. We deserve to have a real alternative… The government spent billions of dollars creating a Medicare network of providers that is only open to one-eighth of the population. That’s like saying, ‘Only people 65 and over can use federal highways.’ It is a waste of a very valuable resource and it is not fair. This idea is simple, it makes sense, and it deserves an up-or-down vote.”
I’m not as sanguine about its prospects, but I don’t expect HR 4789 to go away. This bill, like other public option or single payer bills, ought to be introduced year after year, with a movement built around them, and stands taken in primaries, and discharge petitions attempted. Grayson seems like a better candidate to actually accomplish this – under his leadership, an audit the Fed bill that Ron Paul had sitting on a shelf somewhere for two decades got well over 300 co-sponsors in the House. I’m also thoroughly unsurprised that Grayson pitched the most readable, simplest, most intuitive health care proposal of this entire two-year debate. UPDATE: And there’s already a companion website at WeWantMedicare.com. Freedom Rider: Health Care DeceitAs if we needed (by now) further proof of Obama’s and the Democrats treacherous nature. When will Americans learn that the so-called two-party system is a cruel hoax?
The health care fiasco has bared the cowardly underbelly of the Democratic Party, which is putty in the hands of President Obama and his co-conspirators in the insurance industry. The “public option” has been stripped down to a tiny two percent of the people, while the private insurers get tens of millions of captive, subsidized consumers. The conclusion is inescapable: “Barack Obama and the majority of the Democrats never had any intention of bringing reform to health care.”
“Barack Obama and the majority of the Democrats never had any intention of bringing reform to health care.” As an Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama enthusiastically called for single payer health care. He said he wanted a system with “everybody in, nobody out.” Now that the very same Barack Obama is president of the United States, single payer is nowhere to be seen on his agenda. The words of the ambitious politician are inconsistent with his actions now that he is the president. Not only did State Senator Obama say that he wanted single payer, but he laid out a road map [1] for achieving his stated goal. “Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.” Now that all of those conditions have been met, he is the person currently occupying the White House, the health care “reform” plan currently under discussion does not include single payer. What we do have is a plan to force the uninsured into purchasing health insurance. Single payer, Medicare for all, call it what you will, is now off the presidential and congressional table. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t even allow a vote on a Dennis Kucinich plan to give individual states the right to seek a public option. The little bit of change in the so-called reform amounts to nothing more than a bailout of the health insurance companies responsible for making American health care the deadly disgrace that it has become.
“The so-called reform amounts to nothing more than a bailout of the health insurance companies.” The systemic corruption in the Democratic Party has never been more obvious. The proposals put forward by Pelosi and Harry Reed are by the insurance companies, for the insurance companies and of the insurance companies. Not only is the party’s allegiance to corporate interest becoming clearer all the time, but so is their intention to do nothing for the people who gave them electoral victory. Obama is not alone among Democrats in repeating the well-worn lie that they will be different and better than Republicans once they are in office. If a Democrat is president and if Democrats control the House, and if they have not only a majority but the magic number of sixty in the Senate, why is there no plan for true health care reform? There is no plan for health care reform because too few Democrats really care about the issue in the first place. Some may care but have greater fear of insurance industry power and money going to bat for an opponent in a future campaign. And as in all other things, the fish still stinks from the head. President Obama made it crystal clear that his previous words on health care reform were nothing but empty campaign promises. He didn’t even directly involve the White House in crafting a bill. He left that to conservadem Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. It must have been the first time in history that a president handed off an issue to a member of congress who never even claimed to want the same thing.
“The uninsured will be forced to buy insurance at a rate up to 125% of current costs.” The public option plan currently under consideration would cover approximately 2% of the public [2]. Most workers will be in the same position after the over hyped “reform” takes effect in 2013. If they are lucky enough to be employed and to be offered coverage they will see no change in price, or quality of coverage. The uninsured will be forced to buy insurance at a rate up to 125% [3] of current costs.A true public option will only be available to those without insurance who live in states choosing to opt in instead of out. Red staters will in all likelihood be out of luck. Business Week magazine hit the nail on the head [4] all too succinctly in their analysis of health care reform. “The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable.” Republican posturing against the insurance company victory is just that, posturing. They are struggling with a moribund brand which has no appeal beyond their ever shrinking base. They obstruct for the sake of obstructing. The tea parties, town hall riots, and opinions of hateful pundits like Beck and Limbaugh are currently of no consequence and should not play a role in Democratic strategy. Their enmity does nothing but give Obama and the rest of the Democrats another excuse to stab the people in the back. “No matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable.” The unnecessary bowing and scraping to Senate Republicans like Olympia Snowe is a farce meant to keep us quiet and fool us into thinking that single payer is an impossibility. Sadly, the ruse will probably work. Too many progressives are the cheap dates of politics and will swoon if their idol emerges with a bill, any bill. In the end, they will all claim that the final product is the only possible outcome and those of us who dare to say otherwise ought to be ignored. No one should be fooled by the idol worshippers. We are entitled to our opinions, but not to our own facts. The facts in this case are not debatable. Barack Obama and the majority of the Democrats never had any intention of bringing reform to health care.The citizens of this country won’t have true change in health care or anything else unless they fight for it and unless they acknowledge they will be fighting Obama and the rest of the Democrats too.
 Margaret Kimberley Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/freedom-rider-health-care-deceit
Links: [2] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091101/ap_on_go_co/us_health_care_public_plan [4] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_33/b4143034820260.htm
If Democrats Don't Pass Health Insurance Reform This Year, What Do We Lose? And What Do We Gain?The recent defeats in Virginia and New Jersey are likely to stampede the cowardly Obama and his Democrats in precisely the wrong direction–further to the right.
By Bruce A. Dixon, Managing Editor, Black Agenda Report [BAR] Created 11/04/2009 [print_link]
 "Yeah, stop with that single payer whine. It's beginning to annoy me." The version of health care reform championed by the White House and Congressional Democrats will force millions to buy crappy insurance from private providers with no interest in health care but plenty of interest in profits. Its pubic option is a cruel hoax that will not take effect till 2013 and even then will leave tens of millions uninsured. Now Democratic leaders in Congress say it might not pass this year anyway. Is that really so bad?
The president said it himself in early September. His public option will be neither public nor optional for any more than a tiny percentage of Americans, and unlike his wars and bank bailouts, has to be “deficit neutral.” It will force millions under penalty of law to buy the deceptive and defective products of greedy private insurers. Most alarmingly, the Democratic version of the public option will be rigidly means-tested to ensure that only the poorest get in, and financed with a John McCain style tax on those who receive nearly adequate benefits from their employers. This is a patented recipe for ghettoizing and socially stigmatizing those who do avail themselves of the public option, setting one segment of society against another poorer one, the exact reverse of the everybody in, nobody out spirit of social security and Medicare. And though we are told that insurers will not be able to deny policies on the basis of pre-existing conditions, there is mounting evidence that insurers intend to enforce the same discriminatory requirements by claiming that conditions such as diabetes, overweight, smoking and more are the result of patient behaviors and “lifestyle choices” for which the insurance company cannot be liable unless it is able to charge more. The president has even deceitfully lowered the number of uninsured referred to in all the Democrats’ pronouncements by subtracting the 12 or 15 million undocumented from all its numbers, as though they are expected to live in our midst as an underclass with no access to health services. In the year since the last election the president has made concession after concession to drug and insurance companies, to private health care providers and their lobbyists. The White House, establishment Democrats and their echo chambers in the corporate media and even on the internet have worked hard to suppress voices advocating the simple, practical and elegant solution of single payer Medicare For All, which is still favored in polls by a substantial majority of Americans. The longer the health care reform drama takes to unfold, the shabbier the president and his party are looking. With overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress, the Republicans can no longer be blamed for anything, and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are sending signals that they may not be able to pass the president’s health insurance reform this year. They can’t blame Republicans for this because there are not enough Republicans to stop legislation in either chamber. The Republican talking point on health care now is that the president is spending too much time on it, and needs to concentrate on something, anything else, like sending another 40 or 50 thousand troops to Iraq. Ever men and women of their word, Democratic leaders in Congress have stripped out of the president’s bills any chance for states to pursue their own single payer regimes, and backtracked on promises to allow a floor vote on the Medicare For All measure, HR 676. Deceit has its price. The initiative has passed to the forces of single payer, the solution championed by Barack Obama up until his 2004 election to the US Senate. In dozens of cities and towns across the nation Americans are seizing that initiative. The wave of demonstrations and sit-ins at the offices of insurance companies continues to grow. At the beginning of October, www.mobilizeforheathcare.org [1] initiated actions in New York and DC. A month later more than a thousand people have volunteered to be arrested to put single payer back on the table in cities and towns across the country. Sit-ins are planned for more than two dozen cities today, and by year’s end at this rate, will be occurring in more than sixty cities by the end of the year.
What Single Payer Health Care Will Do For Ordinary Families
In fact, the next job for most Wal-Mart workers will be very like the last, and the next after that one too. But if workers in dead-end jobs had the security of guaranteed health care, they’d be much more inclined to stay where they are and organize and fight for better working conditions. Service workers are underpaid not because of the nature of the work, any more than west coast dockworkers seventy years ago were underpaid because they were drunkards and thieves. They are underpaid because they have not succeeded in organizing and fighting for their rights. This is why elite bodies like the US Chamber of Commerce are stubbornly resisting anything like Medicare For All. The economy, and the present health insurance regime serve them well, and they want to preserve it. Medicare For All, single payer will enable the working poor to make a stand where they are, and lift themselves out of poverty by organizing for and demanding a greater share of the wealth they produce every day. By removing the dread of financial ruin due to illness or injury, single payer will enable working people to fight for their own collective economic uplift. That’s why the struggle for guaranteed and universal single payer, Medicare For All is the real deal right now, the key to unlocking a better life for millions in the near future, a concrete focus of the civil and human rights movements of our time. It’s time to mobilize for Medicare For All, now. Go to www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org [2] and take your future, your family’s future into your hands. Donate to provide legal assistance and bail money and other expenses. Volunteer to be present at a legal demonstration, or to put your body on the line in a nonviolent demonstration for health care now at the offices of an insurance company near you.
 The incorruptible Bruce Dixon. Bruce Dixon is based in Atlanta, and is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. He can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.
Links: [1] http://www.mobilizeforheathcare.org/ [2] http://www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org/ |
By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley