Healthcare “reform” or a huge, unsustainable bonanza for profiteering health insurance and drug companies?

July 29, 2009 BOB GOODMAN Leave a comment

So why are 46,000,000 people uninsured and millions more under-insured? Because our healthcare nonsystem is run by profiteering, parasitic, blood-sucking insurance companies whose main goal is ALWAYS to maximize profit for their shareholders and Wall Street, not provide healthcare. They maximize profits by DENYING health insurance to those who need it the most and DUMPING their own policyholders when their claims get too high.

So the logical way to “reform” healthcare would be to get private health insurance out of it, right? Not if you’re a legislator whose palm has been greased by millions of dollars from health insurance companies! All of the bills being considered in Congress would actually provide huge new subsidies to health insurance companies. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars would be used to prop up a failed system — not to provide healthcare directly thru a publicly-funded universal single-payer, Medicare for All system as proposed by John Conyers’ HR 676 in the House and Bernie Sanders’ S. 703 in the Senate. No wonder Harry and Louise love these plans!

What’s actually in those “health reform” bills Obama and Congressional Democrats are supporting? Bill Moyers sits down with Trudy Lieberman, director of the health and medical reporting program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and Marcia Angell, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

By the way, Obama finally admitted that single-payer, Medicare for All healthcare is the ONLY system which would actually provide universal coverage, which is one of his three “principles” for healthcare reform.

But at least we’ll get a “robust public option” which will give us a choice and be big enough to bargain with drug companies to hold drug costs down and cheaper than private insurance plans, right? That was the original idea, but those hopes are vanishing. The “elephant” public plan originally proposed has become a “mouse” in the actual legislation:

Luckily, the Repugs can be counted on to remind us that there are more important things to worry about than universal, affordable healthcare:

Single-payer universal healthcare, improved and expanded Medicare for All, is still the answer. Educate yourself. Speak out. Yes we can:

www.healthcare-now.org

http://www.pnhp.org/

http://guaranteedhealthcare4all.org

http://conyers.house.gov