OK. I’m officially freaked out by what is happening around health care reform after watching Bill Moyers’ Journal.
Link: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05222009/watch.html
Single payer, which was implemented successfully by every other developed country in the world, has been dismissed as “too disruptive.” Instead, we are going to get some hodgepodge combo that will neither lower costs nor decrease paperwork in medical offices, but WILL preserve the insurance industry.
It you don’t like to click on video links (above), here’s the transcript from the first 20 minutes of the show, where a representative of the California Nurses Association, who was insured and had Aflac and a Health Savings Account, tells how she was bankrupted anyway by the illnesses of her family.
Link: http://ushealthcrisis.com/2009/05/time-to-be-freaked-out-about-the-direction-of-health-care-reform/#more-231
This doesn’t even include the testimony in the other half of the show from a representative of 16,000 physicians who are also in favor of a single payer plan, although the last time around it was the AMA that fought what it thought was “socialized medicine.” Now the doctors realize that the alternative is NO medicine.
Raise your voice, people. I already live under socialized medicine: Medicare. It’s fabulous, but it is going broke because the rest of the system is incentivized to send the oldest, sickest people to the government. You may not be sick now, and you may think you are insured now, but let me tell you that nobody gets out of this life alive :) It’s worth raising your voice for decent health care and not being sure the government will come to some kind of compromise, abetted by insurance industry campaign donations, that will protect you.