Man on The Street: The Vote Wants You To Get Out for It on Health Care
I stood outside of a town hall meeting the other day to interview people who had participated and recorded this really amazing interview with one of the more influential speakers on health care reform.
Me: "Hello, may I stop you for a... yes, please. I'm doing a follow-up to the town hall meeting that you just attended. Can I ask you a few questions?"
Him: "I really don't want to talk I'm a little depressed...."
Me: "What's troubling you? Something you heard in the meeting?"
Him: "Well no... Yeah I guess. People.... All right, you want to know? The president calls me out. The president mind you, to try and remind people that they have a little power to change things, y'know? But I... How did we get to be so damn dumb?"
Me: "We being?"
Him: "Americans. You, me... That guy in there wearing tin foil to repel government mind-rays repeating what he heard on Glenn Beck's show last week. How did we get to be so ignorant?"
Me: "Health care reform frightens a lot of people."
Him: "It shouldn't. Obama says if you like your health plan, keep it. That should be pretty simple. It scares the Insurance companies. They will have to compete with a public option, which might keep them honest.. anyway. Everyone wants to tell you about every horror story that they have heard. Woman waits six months to get her gallbladder out in a London suburb and comes out with a third arm and a godless athiest too. I'm supposed to come in, do my thing and we're good, but no.
Me: "What is 'your thing?'
Him: "Me? I'm the most important part of the whole process."
Me: "Which would be --"
Him: "I'm The Vote. If you don't get me out there, nothing happens, right? After my cousin, The Money, I'm probably the only other fella that anyone on Capitol Hill cares about."
Me: "I'm sorry. I didn't recognize you. You usually only make appearances during election years."
Him: "That's when everyone pays attention, but I'm here in all of those other years, for all of the issues, big and small. Used to be you couldn't have a war or a highway project or a big spending bill without me, but since the Bush administration was so good at bullying the Congress and doing things without asking anyone, I had to take a little holiday.
Me: "You were a bit neglected in the Bush years, yes."
Him: "That's okay. The president called me back into service about two years ago. It was nice. People welcomed me back, even threw big rallies to get me to come out. You know how politics goes. That was then. This is now. I just guess that I didn't have much luck today in there. I'm just venting."
Me. "That's too bad. You were hoping to have what happen in the Town Hall?"
Him: "What was I hoping? I was hoping that my fellow citizens in there would tell their members of Congress what most of them wanted. Or at least what my friends the polls, you know, that nice couple down the Hill who have all those politicians and journalists camped out in their front yard... Yeah they told me the other day that they think Americans are really looking for a public option in health care to give everyone coverage and to keep the private insurance companies honest. Those big companies, like the ones in insurance or hospitals or the big drug companies who don't want things to change, are filling the airwaves with a lot of scary stuff that makes my job that much harder."
Me: "So you think that people are listening to the scare tactics?"
Him: "They're going positively nuts. 'They're going to turn the oxygen off on grandma!' one woman cries.. And the ones who think that health care reform is the first step to them losing their guns.. Oh! The guy, on the way out there side, the guy who swore that socialized medicine would cause GE to use its broadcast satellites to call in the first wave of the space aliens' armada... Says he heard that one on O'Reilly."
Me: "It gets pretty absurd, then?"
Him: "Some of these folks make Forest Gump look like a Rhodes Scholar. They're calling the president a Nazi, even though he said over and over again that the public option was not mandatory, and the biggest proposals in the health care package don't begin to approximate what they have in Canada or the UK. They spend $4,000 less per person than we do on health care and get similar results. They spend millions less on paper pushing, insurance for doctors, trial lawyers. That's what scares all of these big interests who have millions that flow their way now. I don't get the little guy, though. Why anyone wants to fight their insurance company, which loves them when they're healthy but does not want to hear from them if they get really sick, is beyond me."
Me: "Nobody had anything smart to say about the public option or the health care bill?"
Him: "A few people did. Look around though. A tiny handful of people in that room and how many are out here, walking around like none of this affects them. Or they think that just because you vote for someone, that they'll do what you want, without doing anything themselves. The folks with The Money know that. They count on me falling down and not doing my job, which, let me tell you, is not easy when you live in a country where people don't read and don't follow much of the important stuff even on TV."
Me: "What would you expect them to do? They already picked their leaders, right?"
Him: "President Obama told us that change doesn't happen with just him. It takes everyone being out there, being activist. The kranks and the kooks are out there waiving signs and carrying side-arms to political meetings because yeah, maybe they don't have a life, or they're just that scared, but we need to hear from everyone, especially the sane and the sensible.
The folks who turn out for me in the general elections. We need their activism on big ticket votes like this. Sure, let the guy you elected sweat out the money for the railroad crossings at the edge of town. When it comes to something this important, you should contact your members of congress."
Me: "That's a lot of work, finding out how and where to do that. You need a pen and paper and stamps and.."
Him: "They're on the Internet. You never heard of Google?"
Me: "How many people Google to write a letter to Congress?"
Him: "You see? This is what I'm talking about. They can reach their senators here:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
They can reach the representatives here:
Just put in your zip code and it will take you to the right person. Ok?"
Me: "No one really reads those things, though, right?"
Him: "They really don't read them as much as they count them, and categorize them by subject. Your email does not have to be long. Just tell them what you want, things like the public option. I read a great article which tags all of them for how much they got out of Money during the current election cycle. They should take a look at that and let them know that standing behind me, The Vote, makes them just as big of a deal as all of those special interests standing behind The Money.
Me: "You think that will work?"
Him: "It worked to get Obama elected. We marched him in chanting Change, but unless y'all change how you participate in our government now that the hard work is here, and do as much to backstop the President that you had me put in office, I don't think he is going to last all that long. That's why I'm depressed."
Me: "Well, I wish you luck getting the public out to you on health care reform, Mr Vote."
Him: "Thanks, and it's The, not Mr."
Me: "We should do this more often on big ticket legislation."
Him: "It would be nice."
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i used the links...not that i need them as they are favorited... but i wrote to my representatives.. just now, in favor of HR676 ... a good bill by Kucinich and Conyers... to extend medicare to all... HR 676
Thanks.
If you are concerned about receiving "real" health care reform in this country, please take the time to watch a video on our current system. The video was created by Oregon physicians who are advocating for the single-payer option. The video is very informative and helped me to gain a better understanding of various aspect of health care, as we know now it.
https://www.madashelldoctorstour.com/Mad_as_Hell_Video.html
These Oregon physicians are in the process of organizing a caravan designed to inform the public about the benefits of the single-payer option. At last count they will be stopping in approximately 23 states, on their way to demonstrate in Washington. They need volunteers and our support. Please spread the word.
Sign the electronic petition at http://www.standwithdrdean.com
I wish there was some way I could go to Washington on Sept. 13. I've done everything I can on this end we need to show in numbers!
Read the medical decision analyst literature. They specifically discuss "resource allocation by utility related medical decisions". Kassirer has numerous articles on "cost effectiveness in allocating medical resources". They have proposed computer models to use the global health data base to evaluate your marginal utility for health care.
Not sure who "they" is... Insurers, actuaries, and the government all do this as a means of trying to determine what is effective and what is not. As for the "global health data base" which one would that be, exactly? There are many fractional ones, but other than the one at the HQ of the President of the World (You know, the black helicopters cruising the house late at night), I think that they might be suspect.
It is very important to read the proposed health care bills in detail. There are persons co-opting universal health care to push some very unliberal causes. One example of many, is the health care IT and data base. The medical decision analysts have been working for decades on the computer equations to determine the "marginal utility" of the individual. Thus, a person with AIDS, on dialysis, etc will receive a lower "health treatment survivability" score and treatments will be adjusted accordingly.
Don't buy their facade of liberal verses conservative. There are more dimensions involved and they exploit right vs left to hide their ill intent. Read the bill, stand on your principles, don't let them talk you into supporting things that violate your principles.
Another of the irrational fears.. If they actually organize all of the data, they'll euthanize Uncle Bernie with AIDS. If records were consistent and not sitting in disparate medical offices, it would hugely cut down on costs, medical errors, improve doctors ability to follow a patient's medical history birth to grave, improve family survival rates for congenital disease, etc.
This is not socialized medicine, people. In fact, in the scenario that our friend posits above, if the patient's private company, or even the public option did that, under the reform plan they would have the right to find another insurer who doesn't. Assuming that even if there was some vast conspiracy of insurance companies to kill Uncle Bernie because of his wellness score, there will be some entrepreneurial company looking for the money and/or government subsidies who will carry him, possibly at some additional premium. That is really no different than the situation that we have now, save the promise of portability of insurance without resorting to expensive options like COBRE.
Medical records are entirely separate from how medicine gets paid.
This is a better plan than ObamaCare -
http://64.203.97.61/SolutionsLab/Solution.aspx?Guid=2d50363e-00be-44e8-9251-9a6589ba820d
Single payer is also better than ObamaCare, but is also problematic because it incentivizes the most expensive care possible, doesn't promote healthy living, promotes pill popping, over testing, surgery, doesn't do anything to foster competition and about half a dozen other problems that my plan does not.
Thank you, Brian Ross, for this excellent article.
The public option, folks, is an excellent idea. Congressman Dennis Kucinich also has a bill, HR 676, that would give Medicare to all.
We can pay for health care by bringing our troops home from Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea and Europe
AND cutting the Defense Department budget by 30 % .
Use the links in Brian's article to tell Congress that a public option will help bring down the cost of health care.
Theme : The public health is a fundamental human right.
1. When the public health is also one of commodity like a house, we come to a tragic conclusion : As to for-profit business, the more ill patients get, the more profits they make.
2. Under the free market theory and the premise that the public health is also one of commodity like a house, if the demand decreases on a large scale, accordingly the price tends to reflect it, as in the case of house price, and it never happens for the price to spiral up. One step forward, in case the price is spiraling up, to be sure, the remaining clients should withdraw the contract or choose the other options. Sadly, no way-out other than the prohibitive ER is allowed in America. Therefore, the victims today and tomorrow deserve an overdue protection from non-profit Government.
3. When some part of our body is ailing seriously, we are going to lose competitiveness, equally, when some part of a nation is ailing servery, it is going to loose competitiveness, too.
4. Unlike the original financial concern over recovery from Catrina catastrophe, the recovery work is going smooth with no big problem, to my knowledge. The last thing to want would be for this health Catrina to be left untreated. And there is enough room for savings from the unsustainable wastes.
Public health, like peanuts and oil, is a commodity that you have the freedom to buy or not buy.
beeoplentee is wrong.
Public Health is NOT a commodity. When you have an automobile accident, it is not a question of " you are free to buy or not to buy health insurance ".
When the ambulance comes and you have a broken leg, your face is bleeding and you have lost a lot of blood, they will take you to a hospital.
What a stupid comment, beeoplentee.
Health is not a peanut though. A peanut that you eat if you feel like it. It is something that you work hard to keep all your life. And if ever you lose it, then and only then it is quite a shock to see it has become a commodity. Suddenly the question is not to consume it if you feel like it. It becomes a matter of consuming it or being consumed. The question is : "can I afford to restore it" ?
For those who have never been sick, who have no family or no friends that have been in need, it is easy to say health is like a peanut.
For others, aware of suffering around them, it is painful to see that the ones that need more are those that possess the less. And they have no difficulty filling their heart with other's distress and lending them a helping hand. Simply because they are me and I am they.
Have to agree, Bee. You shoot yourself in the foot like that, or get it stuck in your mouth, and they will have to take you to an emergency room or a few seminars in college to get it healed up. The only other option is getting an anchor gig on Fox News, and unfortunately there are already six people dumber than Glenn Beck trying to get his job as it is.
Our government representatives shouldn't be in this country is independents. They are smart independant thinkers who get there news and informaation from a number of trusted sources. They may be a silent majority but they are not ignorant and they can not be easily manipulated. They are the one who will determine who will win in the next elections and they voted for change when they elected Obama.Implicite in that eletion was knowing that he would do something about health care reform. Any congress person who wants their support better get down to serious work and pass something that doesn't reek of lobbyest influence and special interest.
Have you emailed your congresspeople, independent awake?
Brian, Absolutely awesome article!
Folks, It is unconscionable for our Congress people to receive health care from us tax payers, yet many of them are trying to make it impossible for us to purchase an affordable plan of our own.
http://www.petitiononline.com/PubOp676/petition.html
There is also a good Public Option petition at http://www.standwithdrdean.com
Thanks, Brian! Ahead of you tho'...signed it a while back! :)
It's becoming more and more apparent that the very best would be for us to go all out single-payer.
It's simply the best way to control and really REALLY cut costs.
Other top Industrial countries spend less then 11% of their costs on Healthcare.
America spends well over 16%.
There it is... Right there. The very nexus of our problem.
All the greed, all the BS whirls around it, but that's the central nut of our problem. What solidifies it is the fact that in our country, healthcare is a luxury. That's not right. Healthcare should not be a luxury, it should be a right.
The public option would help, I guess would be in the right direction, but eventually, single payer's where we'll need to be.
Yes, Healthcare companies would have to lay off 2/3 of their workforce, but the savings we'd all feel would open vast volumes of growth and more jobs, so they wouldn't be idle long, and would likely go to much better jobs.
Yes, CEO's would no longer be able to pay themselves 400 times what their average employee makes, but I think the great majority of us could live with that.
Yes, that is why 72% of Americans want single payer. Obama said that single payer was the only way to solve our health care crisis just 2 weeks ago. Now here are the real benefits. Not only would health care get immensely better for all Americans, but the health Insurance Industry would pretty much disappear unless it saved it self by offering supplemental insurance at an affordable price. For every 2 jobs lost in the health insurance industry 3.5 jobs would be created as there will be a need for more health care people. Other jobs would increase as the need for more medical facilities caused more construction. The AMA would no longer be able to set quotas on the number of doctors trained in order to keep earnings high for doctors. Every hospital, every doctor, nurse, radiologist would become part of the system.
And you are absolutely right, the only people who would be hurt by this switch would be the greedy parasites who are murdering people to keep their profits high enough so they can give themselves huge salaries and benefits so they can buy $78 million homes!
There's another benefit to single-payer that no-one will discuss. In countries with single-payer, their health care is so much better than ours--because they have an enormous pool of health daya to work with, that is accessible by researchers. It's so easy for researchers to see much faster than we do whether a certain drug is dangerous, or whether some alternative remedy works, or whether pollution in a certain area is contributing to health problems, because everyone goes to the doctor--and they report ALL their symptoms, because they're not worried about getting dropped by their insurance company for asking. In the USA, I actually had a visit with a neurologist who left my file blank after the consultation because he feared what the insurance company would do to me if they got hold of what we discussed.
We could have been decades ahead in our medical research with single-payer, and yet every day we are falling further behind other countries. No wonder their citizens live longer.
WTF? Where did you see THAT poll number? Please provide a link. Maybe 72% of extreme liberals.
Single payer has WAY too many problems -
lack of competition,
practitioner 'malaise'
too many pills
too many surgeries
too many tests
not enough healthy living
no real competition
waste/fraud/abuse
etc, etc, etc
I have a plan that will drop the per capita health expenditure to less than half of the current spending and provide better outcomes.
You forgot the thousands of people in medical offices and hospitals who spend their days chasing down payments from insurers as well. Nice take!
I've been saying this for a while. Where are the people who helped Obama get into office.....sitting online complaining and attacking Obama instead of working to get the public option.
EXACTLY!
And you know exactly what all of the other people in this country are doing? How? Wire taps? Or is this just another factless obsevation that you made up like the other tinfoil hatted folks. Just maybe, we don't work with Obama because he is the Great Bipartisanmaker who wants to give us a pig in a poke! We want, and are working on, single payer! Anything less is worthless! obama said that if the People made him President and gave the Democan'ts the majority in both houses we would get single payer. He admitted 2 weeks ago that single payer is still the solitary solution to health care and yet he is working for some sort of public option that may or may not be essential to his plan! i know waffling when I see it. He's covered in butter and syrup. So what exactly, pray tell us do, what you are doing except whining and complaining online?
TheHandyman......I'm a part of Organizing for America....I have been canvassing for declarations of people who want the public option(we got 150) saturday at a local festival......now since I am a data entry leader tomorrow I will meet with the group leader, to gather the forms and then stay up half the night entering the information into vote builder so it can be sent to Washington......we had a meeting on Thursday and at the end of our 5 to 6 weeks of canvassing and entering data we are having a big party.
That's what I've been doing NOW tell me what you've been doing.
Have you signed the petition at standwithdrdean.com? Emailed your reps and senators? My senators are pretty useless. Nelson doesn't want to make much of a spash on this for fear of alienating our bazillion seniors on Medicare, and our Republican, Mel Martinez, announced he's done 16 months early.
There is sadly talk of state senators and congressmen trying to end run the legislation by nullifying it at the state level. Anyone else hear about this?
Thanks for the link Brian, I've signed petition but since I'm not sure if I've signed this one, I'll signed it just to be sure.
NOT EXACTLY.
I went to the two sites ( see links by Brian Ross in this article ) AND SIGNED THE PETITIONS.
I sent email messages to US Senators Casey and Specter and Congressman Kanjorski. I also called their local AND WASHINGTON offices and told staff members " I support the public option".
I called Senator Max Baucus , in Montana and said "I support a public option".
I post blogs like this one.
And I support the efforts of MOVE-ON. org for a public option and/or a single payer system.
See!!!
Please do the same so you become one of the smart voters!!!
The trick is to get the non-motivated (off-web) voters to write their congressmen and sign the http://www.standwithdrdean.com petiton. There are not the millions of dollars in television commercials other than AARP's, and there aren't the big grassroots election centers like there would be in an election year.
Why isn't the Democratic Party spending a little of that swag from their very nice war chests on opening a few temporary offices to get out the public response? This is a significant issue, and that kind of win on the grass roots level would do a lot to make the next big agenda item easier to pass. It would also make the 2010 campaign that happier and smoother, I think.
I have been to visit my elected officials in person. I thought that was the most effective statement.
How much cash did you have on you when you met? How much did you come out with? That would speak volumes about how well they listened.
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