Health: A Fight For Rights

An excerpt:

Health care must become the civil rights movement of our time. And it is becoming clear that achieving guaranteed health care for every American will require all the tools that helped win earlier civil rights fights.

Earlier this month, eight health care advocates, including me and two other Maryland physicians, stood up to Sen. Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and the Senate Finance Committee during a "public roundtable discussion" with a simple question: Will you allow an advocate for a single-payer national health plan to have a seat at the table? The answer was a loud, "Get more police!"

Single-payer is a system of public financing that will guarantee everyone, without exception, all medically necessary care with no co-pays or deductibles. You would go to the doctor (most of whom would remain in private practice) and hospital of your choice.

By replacing today's wasteful, fragmented, for-profit private health insurance industry with a single, streamlined system of paying medical bills, similar to how traditional Medicare works, we would save more than $400 billion annually, enough to assure comprehensive, quality care to all.

[snip]

Dr. Margaret Flowers is co-chair of the Maryland chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program. Her e-mail is nose1 [at] aol [dot] com. Her statement was co-signed by representatives of Labor Campaign for Single Payer; Single Payer Action; Healthcare-NOW!; B'more Housing for All; and ProsperityAgenda.us.

Am planning to follow up with a letter to the editor in support.

the Editors of the Sunday OREGONIAN, the remaining daily newspaper serving Portland, apparently have adopted the Village view on Single Payer. A box appears each Sunday in the large letters section which tabulates the numbers of letters to the editor, the number published, and the most mentioned subjects.

Today May 17th they reported receiving close to 500 letters during the week, of which 73 were published. The most letters received were on the topic of Single Payer health care, of which they published exactly 1.

The stated reason for publishing only one of these letters was that they received many very similar letters and they somehow (?) deduced that they were the consequence of an email campaigns emanating from ChangeNow and DailyKos.

So obviously, the topic itself could not be legitimate if there was an email campaign involved? They further commented that if such letters have been sent to senators they probably suffered the same fate...round file.

The corporate media is so much a part of our problems in this country. I think this paper is part of the Gannett chain.

he deserves it. i hope he gets lots more of it.