“You Do Not Cut Deals with the System that Has to Be Replaced” says Ralph Nader

More from Ralph Nader:

"...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."

Excerpt from above link, Ralph Nader:

"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."

At least someone is speaking truth.

By the way, I love you Ralph Nader. What a different country we would have if Ralph or Matt Gonzalez were President.

Pharmaceutical companies will always come out on top.

there is only one reason NOT to have universal health care... the insurance buisness, god forbid these leeches lose anything huh?