Have you sent your fax?
My local single payer activist passes along the following:
It appears that Congressional leaders are being deliberately dismissive of single-payer to the point of ludicrous statements. It’s like they have put their fingers in their ears and are yelling “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you.” Here they are in all their Congressional member glory:
Baucus a few days ago: “Everything BUT single payer is on the table. Single payer is off the table.”
Pelosi: “In our caucus, over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it’s not going to be a single payer.”
Pelosi’s aide: “Where are the phone calls, e-mails and faxes in support of single-payer? Speaker Pelosi has been in favor of single-payer for a long time. Now make us do it.”
OK. We are up to the challenge. He wants to see the faxes. Let’s break their damn fax machines with the faxes.
You can send a fax right now to Pelosi, Baucus, the aide and the White House.
Send one now and send another in a few minutes. Give them enough faxes that they have to run get more paper (or electronic ink, as the case may be.) Then when they have received all of these, we will do it again. And again. And we will print them out and dump them on Pelosi’s office desk.
So let them see what happens when they ask for faxes. Then maybe they will have to take their fingers out of their ears.
Thank You
Clark Newhall MD JD
Physician & Attorney
Law Office at
57 W. 200 South, Suite 101
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
http://www.cnewhall.comI sent my first fax just now.
I just did too. What are you waiting for?
Don’t lose your job or don’t get sick
Go read Maven’s post, and watch the video. Let me know if you can make it through without tears of rage and grief. I couldn’t.
Billions upon billions being thrown to the bankers, but cancer patients can’t get care?
Ann Onn Everything weighs in much more eloquently than me.
“He didn’t care. He didn’t want his wife stuck with bills after he died.”
Go read this and come back and tell me that we shouldn’t, or can’t, do universal, single-payer health care. The whole article will break your heart. Unless you don’t have one.
The man came into University Medical Center with symptoms associated with an inoperable brain tumor.
Dr. Dale Carrison, head of emergency services, discussed options with the patient, hoping to provide some relief.
“He didn’t want me to do anything because he knew he was dying,” Carrison said. “I told him, ’You need to know what your alternatives are, that your quality of life the next six months or so could be better than being not functional.’
“He didn’t care. He didn’t want his wife stuck with bills after he died.”
Disgusting
Health insurance companies are rapidly adopting a new pricing system for very expensive drugs, asking patients to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for prescriptions for medications that may save their lives or slow the progress of serious diseases.
[...]
But the result is that patients may have to spend more for a drug than they pay for their mortgages, more, in some cases, than their monthly incomes.
The system, often called Tier 4, began in earnest with Medicare drug plans and spread rapidly. It is now incorporated into 86 percent of those plans. Some have even higher co-payments for certain drugs, a Tier 5.
So, Medicare cannot negotiate for lower drug prices, and now we find out that Medicare recipients may have to pay ridiculous amounts for some drugs, on top of their Medicare D premiums AND dealing with the donut hole?
Private insurers began offering Tier 4 plans in response to employers who were looking for ways to keep costs down, said Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents most of the nation’s health insurers. When people who need Tier 4 drugs pay more for them, other subscribers in the plan pay less for their coverage.But the new system sticks seriously ill people with huge bills, said James Robinson, a health economist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is very unfortunate social policy,” Dr. Robinson said. “The more the sick person pays, the less the healthy person pays.”
Traditionally, the idea of insurance was to spread the costs of paying for the sick.
“This is an erosion of the traditional concept of insurance,” Mr. Mendelson said. “Those beneficiaries who bear the burden of illness are also bearing the burden of cost.”
I am speechless. If they can’t afford their lifesaving drugs, what then?
Wellcare declined to say what Tykerb might cost, but its list price according to a standard source, Red Book, is $3,480 for 150 tablets, which may last a patient 21 days. Wellcare requires patients to pay a third of the cost of its Tier 4 drugs.“For everybody in my position with metastatic breast cancer, there are times when you are stable and can go off treatment,” Ms. Bass said. “But if we are progressing, we have to be on treatment, or we will die.”
Oh. I see.
Krugman does it again
From the 8/27 New York Times (behind the firewall:)
A Socialist Plot
By PAUL KRUGMANSuppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free government-run education.
They’d have a point: many American families with middle-class incomes do send their kids to school at public expense, so taxpayers without school-age children subsidize families that do. And the effect is to displace the private sector: if public schools weren’t available, many families would pay for private schools instead.
So let’s end this un-American system and make education what it should be — a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn’t have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America’s education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models.
O.K., in case you’re wondering, I haven’t lost my mind, I’m drawing an analogy. The real Heritage press release, titled “The Middle-Class Welfare Kid Next Door,” is an attack on proposals to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Such an expansion, says Heritage, will “displace private insurance with government-sponsored health care coverage.”
And Rudy Giuliani’s call for “free-market solutions, not socialist models” was about health care, not education.
But thinking about how we’d react if they said the same things about education helps dispel the fog of obfuscation right-wingers use to obscure the true nature of their position on children’s health.
The truth is that there’s no difference in principle between saying that every American child is entitled to an education and saying that every American child is entitled to adequate health care. It’s just a matter of historical accident that we think of access to free K-12 education as a basic right, but consider having the government pay children’s medical bills “welfare,“ with all the negative connotations that go with that term.
And conservative opposition to giving every child in this country access to health care is, in a fundamental sense, un-American.
Here’s what I mean: The great majority of Americans believe that everyone is entitled to a chance to make the most of his or her life. Even conservatives usually claim to believe that. For example, N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chairman of the Bush Council of Economic Advisers, contrasts the position of liberals, who he says believe in equality of outcomes, with that of conservatives, who he says believe that the goal of policy should be “to give everyone the same shot and not be surprised or concerned when outcomes differ wildly.”
But a child who doesn’t receive adequate health care, like a child who doesn’t receive an adequate education, doesn’t have the same shot — he or she doesn’t have the same chances in life as children who get both these things.
And insurance is crucial to receiving adequate health care. President Bush may think that lacking insurance is no problem — “I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room” — but the reality is that the nine million children in America who don’t have health insurance often have unmet medical or dental needs, don’t have a regular place for medical care, and frequently have to delay care because of cost.
Now, the public understands the importance of health insurance, even if Mr. Bush doesn’t. According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an amazing 94 percent of the public regards the fact that many children in America lack health insurance as either a “serious” or a “very serious” problem.
So how can conservatives defend the indefensible, and oppose giving children the health care they need? By trying the old welfare queen in her Cadillac strategy (albeit without the racial innuendo that made it so effective when Reagan used it). That is, to divert public sympathy from people who really need help, they’re trying to change the subject to the supposedly undeserving recipients of government aid. Hence the emphasis on the evils of “middle-class welfare.”
Proponents of an expansion of children’s health care have, as they should, responded to this strategy with facts and figures. Congressional Budget Office estimates show that S-chip expansion would, in fact, primarily benefit those who need it most: the great majority of children receiving coverage under an expanded program would otherwise have been uninsured.
But the more fundamental response should be, so what?
We offer free education, and don’t worry about middle-class families getting benefits they don’t need, because that’s the only way to ensure that every child gets an education — and giving every child a fair chance is the American way. And we should guarantee health care to every child, for the same reason.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes.
About
Democrat in Exile, now registered Non-Partisan, who loves her country and is appalled at what we have become.
I believe in not shying away from truth, no matter how much it rattles my preconceived notions about the world.
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Cindy Trigg for NV-02
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I do not need a god to be good. And you?
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