Fw: [Peace-discuss] Pay or Die

[unionyes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "unionyes" <unionyes at ameritech.net>
To: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
Sent: Friday, August 14, 2009 11:57 PM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Pay or Die


>" In exchange, PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and
> Manufacturers Association, the lobbying association for the drug 
> companies,
> agreed to cut $80 billion in projected costs to taxpayers and senior 
> citizens
> over ten years. "
>
> Which may sound like a lot of money, but it is only 2 % of their PROFITS 
> annually !
>
> Obama is a phoney, he is the
> " good cop " of the
> " good cop / bad cop " TEAM.
>
> David J.
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
> To: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
> Sent: Friday, August 14, 2009 9:43 PM
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Pay or Die
>
>
>> AMY GOODMAN: President Obama is headed to Belgrade, Montana today and 
>> Grand Junction, Colorado tomorrow, on Saturday, for a pair of town hall 
>> meetings on his healthcare reform legislation. The meetings are part of a 
>> final public relations push by the President to answer critics of 
>> reforming the healthcare system before the Obamas go on vacation.
>>
>> While much of the media coverage has focused on right-wing criticism of 
>> the bill, there is also growing concern by advocates of reform that the 
>> Obama administration secretly made concessions to the healthcare industry 
>> and drug companies.
>>
>> A recent article in Business Week was titled “The Health Insurers Have 
>> Already Won.” The piece details how UnitedHealth and rival carriers have 
>> maneuvered behind the scenes in Washington and shaped healthcare reform 
>> for their own benefit.
>>
>> Meanwhile, the Huffington Post has obtained a memo that shows the White 
>> House and pharmaceutical industry have secretly agreed to precisely the 
>> sort of wide-ranging deal that both parties have been denying over the 
>> past week. The memo says the White House agreed to oppose any 
>> congressional efforts to use the government’s leverage to bargain for 
>> lower drug prices or import drugs from Canada and also agreed not to 
>> pursue Medicare rebates or shift some drugs from Medicare Part B to 
>> Medicare Part D, which would cost Big Pharma billions in reduced 
>> reimbursements. In exchange, PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and 
>> Manufacturers Association, the lobbying association for the drug 
>> companies, agreed to cut $80 billion in projected costs to taxpayers and 
>> senior citizens over ten years.
>>
>> ...we’re joined by former presidential candidate, longtime consumer 
>> advocate, Ralph Nader.
>>
>> Ralph, you have looked at what came out in the Huffington Post. Explain 
>> what it is now that we’re understanding is the deal that the White House 
>> has, well, denied over the last week.
>>
>> RALPH NADER: What is emerging here is what was being planned by the Obama 
>> White House all along, which is they would only demand legislation that 
>> was accepted by the big drug companies and the big health insurance 
>> companies.
>>
>> You can see this emerging over the last few months. President Obama has 
>> met with the heads of the drug companies and the health insurance 
>> companies. Some executives have met with President Obama four to five 
>> times in the White House in the last few months. He has never met with 
>> the longtime leaders of the “Full Medicare for Everybody” movement, 
>> including Dr. Quentin Young, who is a close friend of his in Chicago; Dr. 
>> Sidney Wolfe, the head of the Health Research Group of Public Citizen; 
>> Rose Ann DeMoro, the leader of the fast-growing California Nurses 
>> Association—not once in the White House.
>>
>> That’s all you need to know to realize that the deal that’s being cut 
>> here is from Obama to Senator Baucus, the Blue Dog senator from Montana, 
>> who is cutting a deal, largely in private, with right-wing Republican 
>> senators and getting it through the Senate and presenting Henry Waxman 
>> and John Dingle and others in the House with a fait accompli. So whatever 
>> they pass in the House will be watered down in the Senate-House 
>> conference. And what we’ll end up with is another patchwork piece of 
>> legislation, allowing huge and expanded profits for the health insurance 
>> companies and the drug companies, and continuing this pay-or-die system 
>> that has plagued this country for decades, a system that takes 20,000 
>> lives a year, according to the Institute of Medicine of the National 
>> Academy of Sciences. That’s about fifty to sixty people who die every 
>> day.
>>
>> The big mistake that the Obama administration made was they did not have 
>> continual public congressional hearings documenting the greed, the fraud, 
>> the $250 billion in billing fraud and abuse alone that the GAO years ago 
>> has documented. They didn’t document the $350 billion of waste, the 
>> overhead of Aetna and UnitedHealthcare and other health insurance 
>> companies with their massive executive salaries and bureaucracies. They 
>> did not document the deaths, the injuries, the sickness that hundreds of 
>> thousands of Americans go through every year because they can’t afford 
>> healthcare. And by not doing that, by playing this behind-the-scenes game 
>> with these executives from the big health-industrial complex, they were 
>> vulnerable to the split in their own party in the House, with the Blue 
>> Dog Democrats emboldened by an apparently wavering and indecisive 
>> President Obama, and they made sure that they were placed on the 
>> defensive.
>>
>> And, Amy, when you’re on the defensive in a battle like this, with all 
>> these right-wing websites and Swift-boat-type people filling town hall 
>> meetings around the country, it’s very hard to get back on the offense. 
>> And when you’re cutting deals, as Obama is, with these big corporations, 
>> you will never focus the public attention on the sources of the abuse and 
>> cruelty.
>>
>> AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, President Obama is going to be in Montana 
>> today. Democracy Now!, we traveled through Helena, Missoula, Bozeman, 
>> other parts of Montana in April. There was a very strong progressive 
>> healthcare movement, healthcare activists, throughout Montana. But the 
>> senator who really is in charge of this healthcare reform, Max Baucus 
>> from Montana, let’s just say wasn’t their hero. The Montana Standard 
>> reported he’s received more campaign money from health and insurance 
>> industry interests than any other member of Congress in the past six 
>> years. Nearly a fourth of every dime raised by Baucus and his political 
>> action committee has come from groups and individuals associated with 
>> drug companies, insurers, hospitals, medical supply companies, and other 
>> health professionals. The significance of this?
>>
>> RALPH NADER: Well, the significance is that Obama is being undermined by 
>> his own party in Congress, because the Blue Dogs are getting far more 
>> money from these corporations and campaign contributions than the 
>> so-called liberals in the Democratic Party.
>>
>> But, you see, I say “undermined”—I’m not quite sure that Obama is 
>> objecting to this. He has set the whole atmosphere of catering to these 
>> giant corporations. He has made every mistake that the Clintons made in 
>> 1993, ’94 with their health insurance plan, except that he’s leaving 
>> Michelle Obama out of it. He’s made every mistake.
>>
>> You do not cut deals with the system that has to be replaced, which is 
>> the health insurance system and the monster costs imposed by the drug 
>> corporations, all of which are getting huge taxpayer subsidies, by the 
>> way.
>>
>> So, what Obama failed to do, because he’s never done it when he was 
>> campaigning, he did not pay adequate and due regard to the folks that 
>> brung him to the White House. He has not mobilized the progressive base 
>> in this country. He has not done anything but, you know, humor the labor 
>> unions. And as a result, he doesn’t have a base out there.
>>
>> You point quite clearly to, or you imply, that there a lot of people for 
>> a single payer, a full Medicare-for-All system. And that’s true. Every 
>> poll has shown a majority of the American people, majority of doctors, 
>> majority of nurses, are for the single-payer system.
>>
>> So why isn’t the President of the United States, who was elected in large 
>> part by these same people, why isn’t he representing them in Congress and 
>> in the White House? Because he is not a transforming leader. He is a 
>> harmony ideology person. He’s a concessionary person. He wants any bill 
>> with the label “health insurance reform” on it, no matter what. He’s not 
>> even willing to draw the line and say there will be no bill, I will veto 
>> any bill that doesn’t have a vigorous public option, not a phony public 
>> option that will allow—that will allow people to be dumped into the 
>> public option when they’re the sickest and leave the healthiest people 
>> for the profiteering insurance companies.
>>
>> AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, last week we interviewed Democratic Congress 
>> member Henry Waxman, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, 
>> you know, absolutely key in healthcare. And I asked him why he withdrew 
>> his support for HR 676, the bill to create a universal, single-payer 
>> healthcare system. Take a listen.
>>
>> REP. HENRY WAXMAN: A single-payer bill does not really have a chance to 
>> pass the Congress. It would be a radical transformation of our healthcare 
>> system. Some people could say, “That’s fine, we should do it.” But I don’t 
>> think the Congress would have any realistic chance of passing a bill like 
>> that. You’d have to take all the insurance coverage that’s provided on 
>> the private sector and switch it over to the government. There would have 
>> to be massive taxes, increases, to make up for the lost money that’s now 
>> being spent by employers for their employees. And by the time we would be 
>> through trying to accomplish something like that, the Republicans would 
>> demonize it. So what President Obama suggested was a practical compromise 
>> way to accomplish the goals that we wanted.
>>
>> There are other ways to get universal coverage, as well. Senator Wyden 
>> and Bennett had an approach that would end employer coverage by in effect 
>> giving people an opportunity to go buy private insurance. That would 
>> work. I have some misgivings about it, but it also is a radical 
>> transformation of healthcare.
>>
>> AMY GOODMAN: So, why did you support it for so long?
>>
>> REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Well, I wanted to argue that this was a way to cover 
>> people, and it’s the way many countries provide health insurance. And if 
>> we were starting from scratch in this country, we might well decide that 
>> that would be the way for us to go, but we have right now a system that’s 
>> been in place since World War II, where most people have their insurance 
>> through their jobs. And we thought it would be much too disruptive and 
>> people would be much too anxious, if we took things away from them with 
>> the promise that they’re going to get something else. And I didn’t think 
>> Congress could pass it.
>>
>> AMY GOODMAN: That’s California Congress member Henry Waxman, chair of the 
>> Energy and Commerce Committee. Ralph Nader, your response?
>>
>> RALPH NADER: Well, first of all, Henry Waxman is going to be shoved aside 
>> even on his modest proposal, because the deal is being cut between Obama, 
>> Baucus, Grassley, Enzi in the Senate. And he’s not going to have much 
>> left, given the rebellion in his own ranks by the right-wing Democrats, 
>> even to put forth what he is proposing, which is a huge step backward 
>> from HR 676, which was the single-payer bill that he was on for a long 
>> time before he dropped out, before Nancy Pelosi and Obama, in effect, 
>> persuaded him to drop out.
>>
>> But, you know, this business of “it‘s impractical, they don’t have the 
>> vote,” well, these are self-fulfilling prophecies. How many times could 
>> that have been said to the civil rights movement, to the women’s rights 
>> movement in the past? Well, they didn’t have the votes in Congress. So 
>> did these advocates of civil rights and the women’s rights movement, did 
>> they back down? No, they worked. They fought. They were transforming 
>> leaders. These people are concessionary leaders.
>>
>> Let’s give Henry Waxman some slack here. He says that Full Medicare for 
>> All is too disruptive and too fast. Alright, why don’t they set a system 
>> that’s described in an interview with the New York Times yesterday of Dr. 
>> Marcia Angell, who was formerly editor of the New England Journal of 
>> Medicine? She says the following: you could do Medicare, step by step. 
>> Right now Medicare kicks in at age sixty-five. In the first stage, you 
>> could take it down to fifty-five years or older, and then take it down to 
>> forty-five years or older. They don’t even want to do that.
>>
>> That’s why the people who are building this movement called 
>> singlepayeraction.org, which confronts each senator as they’re going in 
>> and out of meetings and puts it on their website, that’s why they say 
>> there’s no piecemeal. They don’t want piecemeal. They want a continuation 
>> of the present system with more co-pays, more deductibles, enormous 
>> inflationary cost, and the fraud that’s enormously pervasive in the 
>> billing system, and the waste in the administrative bureaucracies of 
>> these health insurance companies.
>>
>> AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, I wanted to get your comment on the Whole Foods 
>> CEO, John Mackey, who wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal, an 
>> editorial criticizing Obama’s plan to create a government-funded public 
>> healthcare option, dismissing the single-payer healthcare system of 
>> countries like Canada and Britain. He said he doesn’t believe in, quote, 
>> “an intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter,” and said those are 
>> best provided through, quote, “market exchanges.” Again, this is the CEO 
>> of Whole Foods, John Mackey. Single Payer Action, the group you just 
>> mentioned, is calling for a boycott now of Whole Foods.
>>
>> RALPH NADER: Well, first of all, you know, he’s a libertarian, very right 
>> wing. And there is going to be announced a boycott of Whole Foods, 
>> because he is a clear menace to the fundamental system of community 
>> caring that should be a trademark of our country. We should care for one 
>> another. To leave it up to the market leaves it up to the funeral 
>> directors. Twenty thousand people a year, at least, are dying because 
>> they can’t afford health insurance. Nobody dies in Canada or Belgium or 
>> France or England or Germany because they can’t afford health insurance, 
>> because they’re insured from the day they are born.
>>
>> And right now, people don’t have free choice of doctor and hospital when 
>> they’re under these HMOs. What’s happening here is a Goebbels-type 
>> propaganda attack on Full Medicare for All, accusing Full Medicare for 
>> All of everything that the present system is furthering: rationing of 
>> care by these HMOs, number one; bureaucracy, number two; huge cost 
>> increases, number three; and making the taxpayers subsidize their 
>> profiteering corporate greed.
>>
>> AMY GOODMAN: If you were President Obama today, what exactly would you 
>> do?
>>
>> RALPH NADER: I would go for full Medicare for everyone, because people 
>> understand Medicare. Forty-five million people get it. They have free 
>> choice of doctor and hospital. It’s a three percent administrative 
>> burden, compared to 20 to 25 percent for the Aetnas and the private 
>> health insurance bureaucracies. It’s something that people understand. It’s 
>> something we should have had in 1964; instead of just for the elderly, it 
>> should have been across the board. That’s what I would go for. It’s 
>> supported by a majority of the people, majority of the doctors, majority 
>> of the nurses. It’s clear. It’s understandable ... [and] a free choice in 
>> doctor. See, all this is simply taking the health insurance industry, 
>> [and] replacing it with a government insurance system, as in every 
>> Western country...
>>
>> http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/14/you_dont_cut_deals_with_the
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