We're about to find out whether Americans are as suspicious of the right's anti-health care reform propaganda as Iraqis are dismissive of America's lame hearts-and-minds campaign in Iraq.
"These commercials are boring, poor and annoying," Noor Sabah, an engineer in Fallujah, told the Washington Post's Ernesto Londono. Thanks to George W. Bush, over the past six years the U.S. has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a TV, radio, billboard, pamphlet and faux-newspaper media barrage in Iraq. But its "morning in Iraq" message is almost universally ridiculed by Iraqis.
Back at home, a lobby called Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR) is spending tens of millions on a multimedia ad and infomercial campaign to kill Obama's plans to fix the health care mess. The public relations firm coordinating it is the same one that spread the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" lies about John Kerry, and the mastermind behind it, CPR chairman Richard Scott, ran the largest - and most crooked - health care company in the world.
In one of the TV ads, Scott warns of "government control over your health care choices.... Not only could a government board deny your choice in doctors, but it can control life and death for some patients." That scary board, CPR says, was smuggled into the economic stimulus bill. The ads contend that Obama intends to impose British- and Canadian-style socialized medicine, where bureaucrats ration treatment.
But the ads don't say that Obama - to the dismay of some of his supporters, including me - won't even let advocates of a single-payer healthcare system have a seat at the policy-making table.
Nor do they say that no plan under consideration would force Americans to leave their doctors or leave their insurers or join a public health insurance program.
They don't say that though the Canadian doctor who appears in the ads is critical of the Canadian system, his Web site - as the Annenberg Public Policy Center's respected factcheck.org points out - "praises the health care systems of countries like Switzerland, Austria, France, Belgium and Germany, all of which have nationalized health care."
The ads don't say that the "innocent-sounding board" in the stimulus bill that supposedly puts us on the road to healthcare serfdom is actually a research council with zero legal authority over insurance coverage, reimbursement policies, or clinical guidelines for payment, coverage or treatment. The council's only job, factcheck.org notes, is "something the government has funded since the late '70s... scientific research into which medical treatments are most effective and, in some studies, which are most cost effective." Is research into medical effectiveness and cost effectiveness dangerous? Not nearly as dangerous as the Medicare time bomb ticking in our future.
Nor, of course, do these ads tell the colorful story of Richard Scott. As The Century Foundation's health beat blogger Maggie Mahar documents in her book, Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Healthcare Costs So Much, Richard Scott, a mergers and acquisitions lawyer from Dallas, was asked in the late '80s by Texas financier Richard Rainwater "to join him in 'doing for hospitals...what McDonald's has done in the food business and what WalMart has done in the retailing business.'" Scott rose to the challenge, ultimately becoming CEO and chairman of the for-profit megachain Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp.
Columbia/HCA's business plan was to destroy the competition. One of Scott's tactics was to buy out the other hospitals in a community and shut all of them down but one: his. Teaching hospitals and children's hospitals, whose operating costs are highest, couldn't compete with Columbia/HCA's cost-cutting: cheap medical supplies, downsized nursing staffs, admissions triage. "Do we have an obligation to provide health care for everybody?" Scott asked. "Where do we draw the line? Is any fast-food restaurant obliged to feed everyone who shows up?" In other words, today's health care Paul Revere, warning of rationed care and lousy care, turns out to be the architect and advocate of exactly that strategy.
In 1997, the FBI busted Columbia/HCA for the most massive healthcare fraud in history: stealing billions from state and federal healthcare programs, while giving kickbacks and perks to doctors who funneled patients to its hospitals. Three Columbia/HCA executives were indicted, the company pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and it paid an unprecedented $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines. Shocked, shocked to find that fraud was going on in here, the company's board ousted Scott, though not without a $10 million severance package and 10 million shares of stock then worth more than $300 million.
Today, among the propaganda tools in Conservatives for Patients Rights' arsenal is a 30-minute infomercial that ran after Meet the Press a few weeks ago on the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. It's hosted by Gene Randall, whose face is likely to be familiar, and reassuring, to audiences; he's a former CNN correspondent. As ConsumerWatchdog.org explains, "Scott must have seen what Randall did in his expensively produced 30-minute video for Chevron, meant to counter a real 60 Minutes report on the lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador, where predecessor company Texaco left behind a toxic stew in the rainforest." If you don't pay close enough attention, you might think the CPR hit job on health care reform is the news.
"'The millions spent on this is wasted money,' Ziyad al-Aajeely, director of Iraq's nonprofit Journalistic Freedom Observatory, said as he flipped through a recent edition of Bagdad Now," a psychological warfare Arab-language newspaper supported by your tax dollars. "Nobody reads this." Other words Iraqis are using to describe the American multimedia campaign: "childish," "ineffective," "crude." They liken it to Saddam Hussein's propaganda, which they also mocked.
I wonder whether Americans will be equally as skeptical about Richard Scott.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and e-mail me there if you'd like.
Put another way. I dislocated my shoulder. But if I had the choice between having it fixed 100% and leaving it as is, but collecting $100,000, I'd take the $100,000 because my shoulder is good enough for my needs. and I could put the $100,000 to better use. Roger Clemens during his career would have chosen differently, because his throwing arm earned him millions of dollars per year.
When the govt becomes the only purchaser of health care how do we value such products as MRIs? When there is no free market for such a machine, who sets the price? I think those in favor of a single payer system are vastly underestimating how much of a role the US's partially private system provides in pricing services not just in the US, but globally. When that is taken off the table, prices will be assigned arbitrarily and the incentive to create new cost effective devices will be reduced. You better be careful what you ask for, because the "public option" could send us back to the stone age of heath care.
I choose healthcare for all. We all support each other. We all share many resources.
I choose wellness for all American citizens.
Try to pull his DOD jacket for his Navy service. He enlisted after he got a low Army draft number.
Another hero of the people. I don't think so. Mission Accomplished!
Of course not! Because that child has a RIGHT to medical care. Health care is not a privilege; it's a right.
So no one will believe a single word that he has to say on the subject of Health Care.
He is clearly concerned about his salary and NOT the American public!
http://progressnotcongress.org/blog/?p=1666
A government owned and operated, civilian VA style system funded by a national sales tax, distributing Medicare, Medicaid, and all government funded programs, including care for everyone, rich or poor, choosing to use the new public system for care, could distribute care at a fraction of the current costs, with better outcomes. All prescribed care and medications would be free, no insurance, no co pays, no precondition exceptions, free period for every individual in America that selects public care. Businesses selecting public care for their employees would not have to pay for or be involved in health care in any way. Private insurance and care providers would no longer be required to subsidize indigent and pre condition patients. Individuals happy with their private systems could continue paying for, either by self pay, company pay, or private insurance etc, and using the systems that they like. The Veterans Administration has been controlling the problems with access, cost, quality, and malpractice successfully for years.
(The Best Care Anywhere by Phillip Longman)
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html
An opinion from the Office of Management and Budget on the economic impacts of this plan compared to all others would be fascinating.
Everybody healthy and financially better off, why isn't everybody demanding this?
But I am sure the hype republicans will make it the moral and ethical equivalent of abortion.
Two ways to cut and then control costs:
1. Outlaw direct to consumer advertising. Advert budget drops off the cost of doing biz that is factored into our premiums.
2. Limit the profit that can be made, which makes it sound like Ins Co's will go out of business, but that's NOT what happens. From an April 2008 broadcast of "Sick Around The World" on PBS:
Question from Minneapolis: What happens to the private insurance agencies and hospital systems when a country makes the change over to a national health care system?
Answer from program host T.R. Reid: In Switzerland, which switched to nonprofit in the '90's, the health insurance companies are still going strong. They can't make a profit on basic health insurance coverage, but they use the basic plans to draw in customers, to whom they can sell their supplemental (like Medi-gap) health insurance, plus life insurance, etc. The companies are all bigger today than they were when the switch was made.
For example, the left is the side that wants the revolution to proceed, the right is the side that wants the revolution to stop, as described by the seating arrangements in the French Legislature after the revolution.
The left questions the authority of the establishment to govern, wanting the government to govern for everybody else instead, against the interests of the establishment. It does not question government, it questions the authority of the establishment to govern.
The left wants the government to continue to evolve and expand, to get better and serve more interests than the establishment, even in the case that it hurts the interests of the establishment.
The right wants the government to stop, to devolve and shrink. The right, not the left, questions the role of government, and wants the government to free the establishment of government interference in the relationships between the establishment and everybody else.
What scares me is the very real possibility that (as is happening right now with the energy bill, which is being rewritten to include huge giaveaways to the oil and coal industries instead of doing anything at all to fight global warming) the "health care reform" we will eventually be presented with will be a mandate to buy private insurance--which will be under no obligation to offer affordable premiums, reasonable deductibles, or preventive care coverage.
Why is it that, whenever the public demands reform, all Congress and the White House ever seem to hear is "More corporate welfare! Quick!"?
So you like the healthcare product you're paying for now? You think it's a good deal? Then you have no idea where your money is going. For starters, just think about the fact that a large percentage of what you're paying isn't going to the doctor/hospital -- any healthcare provider... it's going into the pocket of some insurance company CEO, that is if you're lucky enough to actually have insurance. Many millions of Americans do not. What are they supposed to do, lay down some place out of the way & die?
Oh, the fact that you can be treated for a life-threatening disease and you WON'T have to declare bankrupcy? Or the fact that if you find yourself with even a minor illness you can be treated and not have to worry about a huge bill?
The fact is that governments are SUPPOSED to take care of their citizens. What we have here in America is atrocious at best, criminal at worst.
So prepare to be disappointed.