Yes, Say the Word

by Stephen Fleischman

Single Payer National Health Insurance.  Horrors! We can’t have that! That’s Socialism!

Yes, say the word, Socialism!

We can say it and we can have it—at least a little bit of it; even in a capitalist country. A little government for the people—not the corporations—might be a good thing.

Insurance is defined as a promise of compensation for future losses in exchange for a periodic payment. We’ve been sold every kind there is—life insurance, fire insurance, auto insurance, health insurance…

Health doesn’t belong in that group. You can’t put a price on a person’s health. Health care is a right, like education, and not a privilege.

Insurance Companies are in business for profit. Health insurance companies are in business to make a profit on your health. There should be a law against that!

The health insurance companies, in this country, have made so many billions of dollars on peoples’ health, have created so powerful a lobby, bought up so many legislators, it’s going to be a mammoth job to get rid of them, but that’s what we have to do. Health insurance companies are useless and unnecessary. They’re just blood suckers.

Meanwhile their minions, and that includes President Barack Obama, are trying to put on a show. There’s a lot of palaver about health care “reform”.  “Cut health care costs” is the mantra. Have the American people fallen to the level where they will believe that drivel?

It’s a red herring. Billions can be saved by getting rid of the health insurance companies. It can be done with the stroke of a pen. But that’s the chippie. The purpose of the desperate obfuscation is to save the health insurance industry’s sacred profits.

Going in the wrong direction, Obama is gunning for cuts in Medicare and Medicaid? Why pick on the old and the poor, for God’s sake!

To use an aphorism of your professed role model, Abraham Lincoln, you’re trying to fool all of the people all of the time.

Why do the minions of the health insurance companies cringe when they hear the term “single payer”? Because they know it means real universal health care, the kind civilized, industrial nations, around the world, offer to their citizens.

The health insurance companies (we’ll call them bloodsuckers) won’t allow the term “single payer” or the term “public option” to be used in the so-called debate that’s going on now in the halls of Congress.

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat from Montana, is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, one of the committees whose job it is to craft some legislation performing the miracle of “health care reform”. Recently, in the course of one of these debates, he threw some advocates of the single payer system out of his office. And furthermore, they were arrested! And they happened to be some prominent people in the health care field.

Psychiatrist Carol Paris, one of “the Baucus 13” who got arrested, told The Billings (Montana) Gazette, “The next 60 days are critical; we need to keep the heat on Sen. Baucus (and Congress and the president).”

In an interview with The Gazette, Paris said she used to believe that the private health insurance market could be reformed to improve health care, and she spent several years lobbying for it.

“After a few years, I came to the conclusion that it was just a phenomenal waste of time,” she said. “At that point, I just said, there has to be a better place for me to put my time and energy.”

Paris is now a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, whose 16,000 members are pushing for a national, publicly funded insurance plan that would replace private health insurance.

When she joined PNHP, to push for a single-payer system, Paris and other members found themselves basically ignored by Congress. They felt they had to do something dramatic to gain attention.

The Billing Gazette reports that they deliberately planned to protest – and get arrested – at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on health reform, chaired by Baucus.

Paris and her colleagues showed up the morning of May 5, spread themselves around in the gallery audience and, one by one, interrupted Baucus as he started the meeting.

“I interrupt this so-called public hearing to bring you the following unpaid political announcement: Put single-payer on the table,” Paris said before she was arrested. “My name is Dr. Carol Paris, and I approved this message.”

Capitol police arrested the protesters, who have been charged with disrupting Congress.

Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” reports that Senator Baucus has received more campaign money from health and insurance industry interests than any other member of Congress. “In the past six years, nearly one-fourth of every dime raised by Baucus and his political-action committee has come from groups and individuals associated with drug companies.

Dr. Paris said her experience in private practice has convinced her that true reform can happen only if private health insurance is replaced with national, public insurance for all.

“No longer would physicians’ staff have to spend hours dealing with multiple insurers on billing, and no longer would patients have to worry about which doctor they can go to,” she said. “You can go to any doctor of their choice. It’s in the private insurance industry where choice is restricted.”

Dr. Paris says she hears “over and over and over again” how people are frustrated by the current system, and that as soon as they understand how single-payer would work, they usually support it.

“I think that the only thing that keeps this from happening is the lack of political will by the president and our Congress,”

So, yes, say the word.

A little bit of Socialism, anyone?