Community | August 18, 2009 | 17 comments

Dennis Kucinich: "The 'Public Option' is Dead"

HEALTH CARE WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE

The masquerade is over!

The "public option" is dead.

Health care reform is now a private option: WHICH FOR PROFIT INSURANCE COMPANY DO YOU WANT? You have to choose. And you have to pay. If you have a low income, under HR3200 government will subsidize the private insurance companies and you will still have to pay premiums, co-pays and deductibles.

The Administration plan requires that everyone must have health insurance, so it is delivering tens of millions of new "customers" to the insurance companies. Health care? Not really. Insurance care! Absolutely. Cost controls? No chance.

You will next hear talk about "co-ops." The truth is that insurance company campaign contributions have co-opted the public interest.

I need your help to spread the word and rally the nation around true health care reform which covers everyone and maintains fiscal integrity without breaking our nation's bank! Your contribution will empower our efforts to continue to fight for the single-payer, not-for-profit health care bill, HR676 "Medicare for All," which I co-authored with Rep. John Conyers. The bill now has 85 sponsors in the House.

The hotly-debated HR3200, the so-called "health care reform" bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform. It is a convoluted mess. The real debate which we should be having is not occurring.

Removing the "public option" from a public bill paid for by public money is not in the public interest. What is left is a "private option" paid for with public money. Why should public money be spent on a private option which does not guarantee 100% coverage nor have any cost controls? A true public option would provide 30% savings immediately which would then cover the 1/3rd of the population who presently have no health care.

Unfortunately, under HR3200, the Government is choosing winners and losers in the private sector; proposing to spend public funds on subsidizing insurance companies who make money not providing health care. This process will insure only the expansion of profits. Gone is the debate over cost.

As a result of current negotiations, the Medicare Part D rip-off will continue for another decade, further fleecing senior citizens. Drug importation has been dropped, so no inexpensive drugs can be accessed from other nations.

Instead we are told the pharmaceutical companies will accept a 2% cut in the growth rate of their profits - they call this cost control!

If the matter were not so serious, it would be farcical: The executive branch pretends that the proposed health care reforms are something they are not. The legislation is being attacked for something it is not. Congressional leadership and the White House defend the legislation, pretending it actually is the very proposal that is being attacked. But it is not.

A commonsense government health care reform policy would insure that every single American has full access to health care by expanding Medicare to cover everyone under a Single Payer System. We are already paying for a universal standard of care, it is just we are not getting it.

I need your help to spread the word and rally the nation around true health care reform which covers everyone and maintains fiscal integrity without subsidizing insurance and pharmaceutical companies and breaking our nation's bank!

My voice in Congress will continue to challenge the special interests who do not want "single-payer" to succeed. I need you to join me in combating the special and corporate interests who spend millions to try to win this Congressional seat. With your help WE will win again. With your help I will continue to represent your concerns, be YOUR VOICE in the United States Congress, and be the voice for health care for all Americans!

With your help, we can accomplish ANYTHING in America. Persistence, dedication, truth and courage will lead the way and win out in the end.

Thank you,
Dennis Kucinich
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17 comments // Dennis Kucinich: "The 'Public Option' is Dead"

  • Marilynn_Murray
  • unclecharlie
  • Marilynn_Murray
  • unclecharlie
    • 0
      unclecharlie  

    • Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead! The Wicked Witch is dead! I don't want the government telling me that my tax dollars are going to support a racist, eugenicist organization like Planned Parenthood so they can abort more Black babies. Politically correct racism? I'll never support it. This whole health care bill is filled to the hilt with government telling us whose healthcare they will pay for and who they won't, and telling Granny ("counseling") her that her expiration date is way past due....(I'll probably get a lot of grief from the Obamaites on this one........)

    • 2 years ago
  • AnotherEducatedWhiteGuy
    • 0
      AnotherEducatedWhiteGuy  
    • unclecharlie:

      Are you like one of the last people to be on this? Read the news! There is nothing in the bill about selective healthcare. In fact, that's sorta why were having to do this stupid healthcare bill anyways. Both Republicans and Democrats have read the bill in its entirety and it happens to be a very well planned out bill. I've read it myself and I, as an unbiased liberal, think it's much better with a public option, but that's not gonna happen. Anyways, the point is you should get up to date before you go spouting these crazy comments.

    • 2 years ago
  • biggranny
  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  

    • AARP: MEDIA CIRCUS STILL WHIRLING

      Unfortunately, what people want may not be as important as the media circus on the issue. The AARP reports: “Now it’s getting down and dirty. As expected, the gloves are off in President Obama’s push for health care reform. Democrats and Republicans are battling over how to fix a system they all agree is broken—that’s how Congress is supposed to work. But this summer something new has entered the political arena—a tsunami of rumors, myths, fear-mongering and misinformation about the proposals that surges around the Internet in nanoseconds. “I’m totally confused about what’s going on,” one reader wrote to the AARP Bulletin. “How do I know who to believe?”

      Misinformation spreads at rapid speed

      It’s a good question. Another is how this new phenomenon—the ability to spread misleading information at rapid speed through chain e-mails, blogs, text-messaging and “tweets”—will affect the reform debate.

      “What we’re seeing is a flood of viral content that distorts the Obama effort to reform health care,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who codirects www.FactCheck.org, a website that examines questionable claims from all sides of the political spectrum.

      Today’s opposition tools are very different from those used against previous attempts at health care reform in the Clinton era. Then, the key means of attack available were television advertising and direct-mail campaigns, which were expensive and took time to organize.

      “Extremists and people who are so locked into their own ideology that they’ll distort anything have been out there forever,” Jamieson says. “But they haven’t had a way to reach out to as many people as efficiently as they have now.”

      COMMENT: “This is Reform?”–BOB HERBERT IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

      “It’s never a contest when the interests of big business are pitted against the public interest. So if we manage to get health care “reform” this time around it will be the kind of reform that benefits the very people who have given us a failed system, and thus made reform so necessary.”

      HEY' THAT SOUNDS LIKE THE BANK BAIL OUT !

      “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein

      "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group," - Franklin D. Roosevelt

      "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power" - Benito Mussolini

    • 2 years ago
  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  

    • USA No1 USA No1 USA No1 INDEED ;)

      The sickest nation on earth?

      The statistics are undeniable.

      Americans are the least healthy people among
      the world's developed nations (Japan, Australia,
      Germany, Canada, France, England etc.)

      In fact, there are even undeveloped nations that have healthier populations.

      What's going on?

      How can the richest country in the world also be
      the sickest?

      Is it the so called "health care" system? That's part of it.

      But one of the root cause is something the corporate
      giants and their friends in the news media and government have done a first class job of keeping out of public consciousness...until now.
      http://www.therealfoodchannel.com/page/30.html

      BACK STORY

      So leading industrialists funded public schools—at once gifts to the working class and powerful tools for growing a more docile labor force. They hired education reformers, like Stanford’s Ellwood P. Cubberley, to design a public school system based on a Prussian method that sought to produce what he called “mediocre intellects . . . and ensure docile citizens.” Cubberley modeled our public schools after “factories, in which the raw product [the children] are to be shaped and fashioned . . . according to the specifications laid down.” - Douglas Rushkoff LIFE INC http://rushkoff.com/

    • 2 years ago
  • JonRaymond
  • RussRuss
  • asherp
  • stopnoise
    • 0
      stopnoise  

    • I do not want to read any thing about co-ops and the time is up for President Obama. I think we Journalists gave him and his administration a lot chances. We end up with a terrible energy bill, bad health care option still on the table and destruction of our environment is going forward with coal. What else do we need to know to wake up and start to shake the branch?

    • 2 years ago
  • Marilynn_Murray
    • 0
      Marilynn_Murray  

    • Single Payer: From Off the Table to On the Floor of the House

      Single payer health care will come to a vote in the House this fall. Ask
      your Member of Congress to vote "yes" on the Weiner HR 676 Amendment.

      On July 31 in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Anthony Weiner
      (D, NY) sought to replace Division A of HR 3200 with the text of HR 676,
      the “U.S. National Health Care Act,” sponsored by Rep. John Conyers. This
      would effectively transform HR 3200 into single-payer legislation.

      Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Elliot Engel (D-NY), Mike Doyle (D-PA), Jan
      Schakowsky (D-IL), Peter Welch (D-VT), and Bobby Rush (D-IL) joined
      Congressman Weiner in sponsoring the HR 676 amendment.

      Representative Weiner and his colleagues spoke eloquently for this single
      payer amendment. Chairman Waxman, in asking Weiner and the others to
      withdraw the amendment, promised that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is
      committed to allow this amendment to be introduced, debated and voted on
      by the full House this fall.

      Weiner and his colleagues agreed to withdraw the amendment in response to
      the Speaker’s promise. The full 17 minute debate and solution in Waxman’s
      Committee can be viewed at this link. The video ends with Weiner and
      Baldwin celebrating the victory with a high five.

      http://unionsforsinglepayer.org/videos/2009-07-31-weiner_amendment

      The Weiner amendment presents an historic opportunity for Members of
      Congress to register their support for single-payer national health
      insurance as the best way to solve the U.S. healthcare crisis. It will
      most likely come up in the House in late September or October.

      Ask your representative to vote "yes" on the Weiner HR 676 Amendment.
      Call (202) 224-3121 and ask for your congressperson. If your union has
      endorsed HR 676 let your representative know.

      Then call Congressman Weiner (202) 225-6616 and congratulate him for his
      courage in bringing HR 676, national single payer health care, to the
      Floor for this historic debate.

      You can find out more details and send a letter to your representative
      here: http://www.pnhp.org/amendment/
      Weiner’s bold stand is beginning to make news. His appearance on MSNBC’s
      Joe Scarborough Show is here:

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tUmUk-jLDo Part One
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toXQGSqIWP8 Part Two

      Distributed by:
      All Unions Committee For Single Payer Health Care--HR 676
      c/o Nurses Professional Organization (NPO)
      1169 Eastern Parkway, Suite 2218
      Louisville, KY 40217
      (502) 636 1551
      Email: nursenpo@aol.com
      http://unionsforsinglepayerHR676.org
      08/18/09

    • 2 years ago
  • AnotherEducatedWhiteGuy
    • 0
      AnotherEducatedWhiteGuy  

    • Wrong. The presidents nowadays spend too much on campaigning and getting people to like them. Who's to know if Obama is actually what he says he is. So far he hasn't done anything close to Roosevelt. We need a better way to elect a president than to find a rich guy who can get along with the people. Check out my group MNEP if you want to know more about how we can make people like Obama, who don't do what they say they will do, and Bush, who do what they say theyre gonna do, but it's money grubbing and pure christian propaganda, just go away. Or message me if you still want to know even more.

    • 2 years ago
  • JanforGore
  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  
    • Image

    • GO DENNIS GO !

      WAKE UP AMERICA, WAKE UP AMERICA, WAKE UP AMERICA !
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv0smG7ptcM

      "At what point do imbalances in access to money, media, and society’s administrative apparatuses constitute the censorship of dissent?" - Harvard Anthropology Prof Lorand Matory

      “Washington has become Versailles. We are ruled, entertained and informed by courtiers. The popular media are courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are courtiers. Our pundits and experts are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games. We are being had.” - Chris Hedges

      "The only difference between the GOP & DEMs is the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock at the door." - Ralph Nader

      “They call it the 'American Dream' because you have to be asleep to believe it.” - George Carlin

      As usual Greg Palast is spot on ;)

      Obama on Drugs: 98% Cheney?
      http://www.gregpalast.com/obama-on-drugs-98-cheney/

      I searched all over the newspapers and TV transcripts and no one asked the President what is probably the most important question of what passes for debate on the issue of health care reform: $80 billion of WHAT?

      Hey, in my neighborhood, people think $80 billion is a lot of money. But is it?

      I checked out the government's health stats (at HHS.gov), put fresh batteries in my calculator and toted up US spending on prescription drugs projected by the government for the next ten years. It added up to $3.6 trillion.

      In other words, Obama's big deal with Big Pharma saves $80 billion out of a total $3.6 trillion. That's 2%.

      Hey thanks, Barack! You really stuck it to the big boys. You saved America from these drug lords robbing us blind. Two percent. Cool!

      Nader comes out swigging too ;)

      “Now Make Me Do It “

      Never much of a fighter against abusive corporate power, Barack Obama is making it increasingly clear that right from his start as President, he wanted health insurance reform that received the approval of the giant drug and health insurance industries.

      The whole secret process is seedy and demonstrates cruel disregard for the millions of American who, whether in dire need of medical services or not, voted in “change we can believe in.”

      “Make me do it” was the advice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to reformers when faced with legislation he desired but did not have the votes for in Congress.

      The Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121. The full Medicare, single payer bill (backed by nearly ninety legislators) is H.R. 676. The go-to citizen group for your sustained engagement is singlepayeraction.org.

      The rest is up to you, the majority, who want to put the people first.
      http://nader.org/index.php?/archives/2134-Now-Make-Me-Do-It.html

      “You Do Not Cut Deals with the System that Has to Be Replaced”
      Ralph Nader on Secret White House Agreements with the Drug Industry
      http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/14/you_dont_cut_deals_with_the

      BusinessWeek: “The Health Insurers Have Already Won”
      http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/17/business_week_the_health_insurers_have

    • 2 years ago
  • Marilynn_Murray
asherp
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