The people of New York and the nation should be outraged at the sacrifices being made in health care reform to the detriment of women. After taking a major hit in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed in March, women’s health care faced three more attacks in July alone.

The health care reform package passed in March contains severe new abortion coverage restrictions. Federal funding of abortion has always been prohibited. The new law, however, severely restricts access to abortion coverage in the insurance exchanges, even for individuals who pay for coverage with their own money.

Women (or their spouses, partners or parents) will have to write one check for abortion coverage and a separate check for the rest of their coverage. Insurance industry experts believe the administrative nightmare of keeping these funds separate will dissuade insurers from maintaining abortion coverage in their plans. Congress sacrificed this important women’s health care benefit to pass the reform package.

Attacks on women’s health care continue. In July, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule to eliminate coverage for abortion in the states’ new temporary high-risk insurance plans, with the exception of rape, incest or to preserve the life of the woman. There is no exception to preserve the health of a woman with such conditions as kidney disease or cancer.

This shortsighted decision discounts the fact that women with pre-existing conditions are the patients who are most at risk of experiencing a complicated pregnancy and may need an abortion as an option. Individuals and families will not be able to pay for such coverage with their own money if they are insured through these high-risk plans.

The department also released its list of preventive health care services soon to be available at no cost to consumers. Birth control was not on the list, and its inclusion as a no-cost benefit may not be decided until 2011. Once approved, it could take months for insurance companies to implement it.

There is no reason to wait until 2012 when there is an abundance of medical and scientific data proving the effectiveness of birth control in preventing unintended pregnancies and reducing infant and maternal illness and death.

Yet another attack on reproductive health came in the House Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations Subcommittee. Ranking member Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., proposed an amendment on Health and Human Services funds that was essentially the same as the Stupak-Pitts Amendment defeated during health care reform negotiations that would have banned any abortion coverage in health insurance exchanges, even if paid with personal funds. Thankfully, Tiahrt’s amendment was voted down, protecting women’s health care — for now.

One of the most important health care reform promises has been broken. We were assured that no one would lose existing benefits. However, all women and their families have lost because religious and other anti-abortion activists have continually exercised undue influence over lawmakers, and Congress has succumbed.

Using access to abortion and contraception as a political bargaining chip in major U.S. policy decisions is offensive and shortsighted. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the right to privacy encompasses women’s access to full reproductive health care. Infant and maternal morbidity and mortality have decreased dramatically. We should not have to continue the fight for access to abortion and contraception nearly 40 years later.

Will women’s health care continue to be sacrificed with each new implementation phase of the most sweeping health care reform of our lifetime?

If so, the women who lose are our spouses, our daughters, our sisters and our mothers. Putting greater restrictions on women’s comprehensive health care will never put Americans in a winning position.

M. Tracey Brooks is president and CEO of Family Planning Advocates of New York State.

By David Rosenfeld for The Lund Report –

A loose coalition of single-payer advocates in Oregon has taken the first steps toward developing legislation for the 2011 session

The bill would ultimately work in conjunction with the state’s ongoing efforts to form a health insurance exchange and possibly a public option, supporters say.

State Rep. Michael Dembrow, a first-term Democrat from northeast Portland, is interested in sponsoring a state-based single-payer bill, but first wants to give advocates a chance to reach consensus.

Groups involved in the effort include Portland Jobs with Justice, Physicians for a National Health Program with chapters in Corvallis and Portland, Health Care For All Oregon and the League of Women Voters.

“It’s all very preliminary,” Dembrow said. “There are many of us who feel that ultimately the best way to pay for healthcare is through a single-payer program – not deliver it, but pay for it. It’s something that needs to remain in the conversation.”

States including Vermont, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and California – where a Democratic-controlled legislature twice passed single-payer bills that were vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – are also working on single-payer legislation this year.

A recent letter from U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) to Democratic and Republican leaders in the Oregon Legislature gave encouragement to the idea of seeking federal waivers so states can pursue innovative ideas that go further than the federal law. The letter did not, however, offer any specific concepts.

“I write to lend my support to your efforts to develop an Oregon-specific plan for our state to do health reform its own way,” the letter states. “I believe in the concept of ‘state choice,’ and that every state has the right to provide healthcare to its own residents in its own way, as long as the goal is to provide all citizens with quality, comprehensive coverage.”

Wyden said he authored section 1331 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to give states the ability to continue working toward cost-effective healthcare while retaining access to federal funding.

“We don’t see ourselves as acting in contradiction to anything people are doing in Salem,” said Peter Shapiro, an organizer with Portland Jobs with Justice. “We just see it as part of the mix.”

While the details of the proposed bill haven’t been ironed out, the tenets are strong. There would be a dedicated tax based on ability to pay, universal access, and a shared risk pool to increase purchasing power and reduce administrative costs.

“The basic principle is equity,” Shapiro said. “Everybody should have the same access to treatment regardless of how much risk they are or how much money they have in the bank.”

The group will soon begin working with a consultant on the costs of such a plan and the barriers, including ERISA that governs employee benefits, that could be overcome with federal waivers.

The Oregon State Public Interest Research Group is also pushing state healthcare leaders to do more with what’s already allowed in the federal law passed earlier this year. OSPIRG’s efforts, however, have focused on strengthening the health insurance exchange and creating a strong state-based public health insurance option, not a single-payer plan.

Laura Etherton, OSPIRG’s healthcare lobbyist, is pleased Oregon is among the first states to get out of the blocks to establish an exchange where individuals and small groups can purchase insurance that’s highly regulated and possibly subsidized. But, thus far, the draft plan which was released on Aug 14 falls short, Etherton said.

“Just an exchange by itself is not going to solve all the problems in healthcare,” she said. “But it’s a great tool to help us drive solutions.”

Etherton said the draft plan doesn’t allow the exchange to negotiate premiums on behalf of its members. It could include small businesses with more than 50 employees earlier. It needs stronger public accountability. And it lacks adequate protections to prevent the insurance industry from undermining the exchange’s stability, she said.

According to OSPIRG, the exchange as currently drafted would “let insurers cherry-pick only the healthiest people, and enroll them in plans only available outside the exchange. This would leave older, relatively less-healthy people inside the exchange.”

“The details matter,” Etherton wrote in comments to the draft plan on OSPIRG’s website. “Done right, the exchange will pool the buying power of hundreds of thousands of Oregonians, so all of us can get a better deal on healthcare. But done wrong, the exchange will just be a nifty website with the same expensive plans and spotty coverage.”

Single-payer advocates hope the state goes a whole lot further.

“There are a lot of people who want to see the conversation about single payer still happen,” Dembrow said. “I hope the federal plan will work. I’d like to see the state really seize the moment.”

Will you help us build the base of the single-payer movement one postcard at a time?

We need talk to all kinds of people and organize them directly, which is why we are asking you to get out there and gather as many signatures as you can on these postcards (.pdf).

If you can get just ten new people to sign a postcard, we’ll make you a Healthcare-NOW! member for a year! You can download (.pdf) and print the cards yourself, or you can email (info@healthcare-now.org) or call (800-453-1305) us and we’ll send you 25 for free (let us know if you need more). All cards will be delivered directly to Congress.

Upcoming Labor Day marches are a perfect opportunity to talk to folks about single-payer healthcare and the importance of preserving Medicare and Social Security. Join Healthcare-NOW! in building the movement one person at a time!

My guest today is Lynn Petrovich, a CPA and long-time advocate for universal health care. Welcome to OpEdNews, Lynn. You recently wrote an op ed piece about your own adventures in the health care system, “Hospital Accounting: It’s Complicated.” Up until a family member’s unscheduled visit to a local emergency room, you had assiduously avoided the health care system, although you do have health insurance. Why is that?

Joan, the for-profit health insurance industry has set up so many road blocks to payment for health services that it makes even those who have health insurance skittish about using the system.

About two decades ago, one Saturday afternoon,I came home from shopping and, noticing my husband’s car not in the driveway,walked through our front door to see a blood trail leading from the back room to the kitchen to the refrigerator to the freezer to the bathroom to the phone to the back door,down the steps and ending where his car would have been parked. It was apparent something terrible had happened. I was in a panic.

He had been working around the house and severely cut his hand using a hatchet. Despite the loss of blood and in severe pain, he was able to wrap his hand in ice and towels and drive himself to the emergency room…about a 10-minute ride.

The wound was deep enough to require extensive stitching from a surgeon, bandaging,and subsequent rehabilitation. He was lucky.

When the claim was processed by our insurance company, it was denied for the following reason:His injury was not considered an emergency.

The health insurance industry has finely tuned health “providing”into a set of definitions and procedures that are absolutely cumbersome, contradictory, and outright ridiculous. I’ve talked to many people who just give up and end up paying the bill out of pocket.

Over the next 15 years, when my daughter played sports throughout her school years,the insurance company’s madness intensified. The paperwork was enormous…and oftentimes hilarious. After one injury she incurred during a basketball game, the seven-page “Required Compensation Claim Damages” form received from the insurance company after her visit to the doctor asked, “What was the patient doing prior to be injured?” I responded, “Sitting on the bench waiting to go in the game.”Here’s another question: “What was the patient doing during the injury?” I responded, “Setting a screen so her teammate could drive to the basket.”

It often took three or four “appeals” to get the payment processed.

Five years ago, my husband had hernia surgery in a day-stay operation at our local hospital. The insurance company – Interstate Compensation Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Jersey and Pennsylvania (which I nicknamed ICBS) refused to pay the hospital for the operating room. I fought them for four months. No payment. Finally it went to collection.

It would have been much easier for my husband not to have had the surgery. I mean he would have gotten some funny looks at the 7-11 and the movies what with his intestines hanging out and all…but it would have been much easier than going through all this nonsense with the insurance.

The operating room invoice ($900 for 1 and a half hours) after nine months finally was paid by insurance. But the damage was done. Our credit reflected an account in collection.

What a horror story. Now, I understand why you avoid the health insurance system like the plague! And I’ve heard that, in the majority of the bankruptcies caused by medical issues, most of those individuals had health insurance. Can that be true? If it is, we’re all truly one medical “incident” away from catastrophe.

Yes, if you think about it, the majority of American citizens are basically one incident away from becoming insolvent. We work The American Dream, buying a home, saving for our children’s colleges, building up equity in our homes, trying to save and plan for the future only to be faced with enormous medical bills should a loved one become sick, injured, or chronically ill. Many hospitals require tens of thousands of dollars up front prior to cancer treatments (and that’s if your insurance company hasn’t denied the treatment).

I prepare many tax returns for senior citizens. In fact I’d say the majority of my clients are over 65.I always ask them about medical bills which many new clients don’t seem to think is important. After I walk them through the process, that is, asking them:Did you have any dental work? How about doctor appointments? Lab work? Prescription drugs? Co Pays? Deductibles?Medicare B (which is shown on their SS statements and additional insurance (which many have through AARP)? Don’t forget you can deduct mileage for treatment to doctors and hospitals.

It is not unusual for these clients to have spent $10,000 to $15,000 on medical expenses/insurance during any given year – and don’t forget these are people who already have TWO separate health insurance policies.

You’re a CPA, so you see this health care mess in a different way than most people do – up close and personal, through the tax records of your clients. So, use your special perspective, Lynn, and tell us what your recommendations are for fixing this wholly unworkable system.

Well, that is an interesting question because I’m fortunate to see tax clients on a multitude of economic and social levels.

For the last decade, I’ve been involved with several tax clinics preparing tax returns pro bono, two of which are in an economically depressed City at the Jersey Shore. These clients are mostly the working poor, that is they’re employed full time but earning very little – places like WalMart, Burger King, Taco Bell,to name a few.

Medical expenses are always a topic of conversation; many of these clients are chronically ill, disabled, and, not surprisingly, many suffer from depression. Yet, they consider themselves lucky because they are managing their pain. They worry about those that cannot. I’ve never prepared a tax return for a WalMart/fast food restaurant employee who made more than $22,000 a year. Most do not pay into the health insurance system at these places because they can’t afford the premiums and then the co-pays and deductibles. So they end up either on Medicaid,which is a government health program for the poor, and also many are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit which is another federal program(NJ also has such a program) which gives refundable tax credits (money paid out over and above tax withholding).

So, instead of offering living wages and affordable health care, these corporate giants are able to (legally) push the responsibility of the health and welfare of their employees to the taxpayers which (of course) increases the profitability of the companies. It looks good for Wall Street…but not Main Street.So I ask: Isn’t that a form of corporate welfare?

Those taxpayers represent one slice of my clientele.I also prepare tax returns for teachers, professors, police officers, security brokers, engineers, corporate executives, retirees, etc. and they offer up additional insight into our health care system. Most of them have health insurance either through employment or as retiree benefits and yet the paperwork and out of pocket costs are enormous.I hear a lot of grumbling, especially from expectant and new mothers. Since these taxpayers are in the for-profit corporate health insurance industry pool, I often hear them complaining about “corporate greed”.

That’s when I have to explain the principals of our economic system: There is no such thing as corporate greed.A corporation’s sole purpose is to maximize profit and shareholder return. Period. They must cut costs to satisfy Wall Street and the investors in their stock who are ordinary citizens, money market fund managers, internet day traders, and beneficiaries of most pension plans. They must, by charter, deny benefits for health care and annually increase premiums if they adversely affect profit. The more important question is why have we allowed this for-profit corporate system to have control (literally) over our lives for something which should be considered a basic human right?

The only answer to this question is universal single payer health care which, aside from controlling costs and increasing employment,takes the “care” of our citizens out of corporate control and puts it into a system similar to our very successful, long-running, low administrative cost Medicare program.

In his best selling book, Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes about his in-depth investigation into our corporate controlled animal factory farms which genetically alter, incarcerate, maim, torture, and slaughter as much as 90% of our meat in America. He points out:

“What the [food] industry figured out -and this was the real revolution – is that you don’t need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable.”

Yes, sick animals (or humans) are more profitable. So the next time you boast of making a killing on that health care stock, you are absolutely correct.

Well, you lay things out pretty clearly here, Lynn. Anything you’d like to add before we wrap this up?

The only thing I’d add to what I’ve already said is this:In addition to the numerous medical expenses which citizens pay for health care as I outlined in my previous answers, I also see that my tax clients are forced to pay for something known as the “Donut Hole” which is an out of pocket cost most senior citizens inevitably get caught paying thanks to the George W. Bush Medicare D prescription drug program (which, by the way,took two years to implement so the taxpayers could “fund” the pharmaceutical industry billions of dollars to think about how they could “work” it….err, I mean…how it could work). The donut hole is the thousands of dollars per year each senior citizen is forced to pay out-of-pocket for prescription drugs – all because of a well defined math equation -calculated by the drug industry.

As one client said to me recently: “I think the government just doesn’t want to deal with old people any more.”

Sadly, it does appear that way. Thanks so much for talking with me and sharing your perspective on our health care system, Lynn. Good luck to you. And stay healthy!

On Monday, August 16, a terrific creative action to challenge the collusion between corporate and elected power was organized by Backbone Campaign’s Roger Fulton with support from Jared Middle Calf and crew. We joined with collaborating Heath Care activists in a great demonstration outside the conference of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), while the lobbyist vultures divided the spoils of the Obama plan inside.

Briefly…

• Federal Health Care legislation (PPACA) was signed into law last March
• That law requires the NAIC (National Association of Insurance Commissioners) to advise HHS on how to implement key areas of PPACA
• These 50 state commissioners met in Seattle Aug 12-17
• In addition to the commissioners, ~1400 lobbyists for Corporate Medical Insurance and Big Pharma attended to “help” the commissioners with their recommendations

We were there to challenge these public servants — the 50 insurance commissioners — with, “Which Side Are You On?”…Count Bleed-Ya-Dry representing insurance industry – OR – We The People? The tug-of-war continues.

During this successful event, all 200 of our flyers were passed out, and we had lots of opportunity to interact with passersby. Wendell Potter, former CIGNA insurance executive who is now a champion of universal, cost-effective health care, stopped by and briefly chatted with us. While in Seattle to attend the NAIC conference as a consumer representative, he was interviewed on the Countdown with Keith Olbermann program. Watch this very informative interview here.

Lastly, our huge thanks goes out to Bob Wickline, whose “Hootenanny-style” singing took the event to a higher level of effectiveness and fun!

This event was cosponsored by…

Physicians for a National Health Program – Western Washington
United for Single Payer
Health Care For All – Washington
The Backbone Campaign

Healthcare-NOW! members have submitted three testimonial videos addressing economic and social rights. Now all we need is your votes! (deadline is 8/23 at 1pm (E). The individual who wins the contest wins a trip to Geneva to participate in the UPR.

Tim Lachman on The Human Right to Health Care

Elizabeth Rosenthal on The Human Right to Health Care

Dev Rogers on The Human Right to Health Care

Please direct as many people as you can to vote through the following various platforms.

Ways of voting:

Testify Project Website: Go to www.ushrnetwork.org/testify and if you leave a comment on any of the videos it counts as a vote. So click the blue quote box in the top right corner of the video you would like to vote for.

Facebook: Either create a new account or use an existing account. Then, go to www.facebook.com/TestifyProject. Once there watch our videos and click “Like” to vote. (You can vote for as many as you want so “Like” all of them)

YouTube: Either create a new account or use an existing account. Then
go to www.youtube.com/group/TestifyToTheUN. Find our videos listed on the column to the right, click the video and it should open at the top of the column. Underneath the video click “I love it”. (You can vote for as many as you want)

Voting ends Monday, August 23, at 1 pm (EST) so please vote ASAP, and thanks for contributing.

There is still time to testify. The second round of testimonies will be submitted on October 8th. Learn more here.

One can hardly find a more caring, morally upright, and socially responsible person than Kate–someone who has devoted her life to working with homeless LGBT youth and at the same time takes care of her elderly father with Alzheimer’s.

Both Kate and her lawyer thought the meeting went well, so it was an unpleasant surprise that the DA is still refusing to drop the case and officially re-filed the charges against Kate. The DA decided not to go through the process of re-arresting Kate or having Kate turn herself in, but simply to calling Kate to return to court to re-open the case on Sept 15.

This gives us time to organize in support of Kate Barnhart.

Healthcare-NOW! is asking for you to three things right now to raise awareness about this unfair targeting of a health activist.

1) Call the DA and tell them to drop the charges against Kate Barnhart – (212) 335-9400.

2) Mark your calendars to join Kate at a demonstration outside of the NYC Courthouse on September 15. More details coming.

3) Sign, and circulate widely, this petition to “Stand with Kate Barnhart.”

We have to organize loudly against the unfair treatment of Kate. These kind of actions from the DA set very bad precedent for activists fighting for justice in the future.

By Rob Stone, MD –

“The new health care legislation is a step toward elimination, by slow strangulation, of private health insurance and establishment of government as the ‘single payer.’”
- George Will, in his weekly newspaper column, Sunday July 11, 2010

Everyone loves to pick on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and well they should. This 2,000+ page contraption, this heap of handouts to the special interest lobbyists with a few shiny baubles thrown in to placate the common folk, was not only written by the for-profit health insurance industry but now will be implemented by former WellPoint/Anthem Vice President Liz Fowler who actually penned much of the law in her role as Max Baucus’ chief healthcare counsel for the Senate Finance Committee. You don’t have to make this stuff up, as Sam Stein reported in the Huffington Post July 16, titled “Obama Administration Defends Hiring Of Ex-Health Insurance Exec To Oversee Reform”

But what about George Will’s fine whine that the insurance industry faces strangling regulation? Robert Pear wrote in the New York Times on August 2 that the new law will lead to more regulation of the industry, and “the transition is full of risks and uncertainty for all involved.” If the Obama administration is going to “regulate the industry for the benefit of consumers,” he noted, then “they can’t help but destabilize or disrupt the existing market.”

Wall Street doesn’t like uncertainty. It detests being destabilized. Stock analysts are not missing out on this. The brokerage firm Edward Jones “downgraded the ratings on the stocks of the three health insurers it covers – UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint and Aetna — to ‘sell’ from ‘hold’ late on Friday [7/30]. Those companies are the three largest U.S. health insurers.” (Reuters 8/2/10)

This new blow comes after legendary investor Warren Buffett pulled the plug on WellPoint, selling all Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings in the insurance giant during the first quarter of 2010 (“Buffett bails on WellPoint)

Speaking in Virginia, former House Speaker and presumed presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said on May 14, “The employer-based system will collapse because [the ACA] encourages businesses to drop health care coverage and incur the fine. When employees realize the high costs of the health care exchanges, they will demand a nationalized health care system,” according to the Washington Post.

It only gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective. According to Gingrich, the business community is going to lead the call for single payer Medicare for All.

And well they should. Gingrich wasn’t making this up. On May 6, CNN Money released documents showing that “many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government… AT&T revealed that it spends $2.4 billion a year on coverage for its almost 300,000 active employees, a number that would fall to $600 million if AT&T stopped providing health care coverage and paid the penalty option.”

Is the Affordable Care Act unaffordable? Isn’t it at least a step in the right direction?

Those questions can only be answered by considering whether the ACA ends up strengthening or weakening the health insurance corporations. Progressive critics of the bill point out that the new legislation hands over $350 billion in government subsidies to the private insurers while mandating consumers to buy the industry’s shoddy products. That, combined with a lack of price controls means the ACA could prove to be a bonanza for the corporate stakeholders in the medical-industrial complex.

On the other hand, the changing marketplace is full of perils, even if the conservative icons quoted above are exaggerating them to stir up fear of Socialized Medicine (and maybe scare up some donations).

If we stand back and rest on our laurels, believing that the ACA will save us, then we are doomed. The industry lobbyists are working overtime to take the best parts of the bill and weaken them, while destroying any good that is in the bill (see Wendell Potter in the Huffington Post on July 27, Health Insurers Leaning on State Insurance Commissioners to “Reform” Reform).

“We believe that Medicare for All is inevitable in the United States. It is up to all of us to determine when the inevitable becomes the reality.”
- Representatives Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), John Conyers (D-Mich.), and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), statement for Medicare’s birthday, July 29, 2010

If you’re not inclined to believe George and Newt, then how about Dennis, John, and Bernie: “It is up to all of us to determine when the inevitable becomes the reality.”

The reality is that single payer, Medicare for All, is not inevitable, nor is there any guarantee the ACA won’t bankrupt us while enriching the corporations that lobbied for it.

It reminds me of a slogan we have in Indiana, “Healthcare Reform: We’re Still For It, and We’re Not Done Yet!”

From California to Vermont, Medicare for All advocates are working for bills to create state single payer systems. The grassroots are pushing up thru the disappointment of the Affordable Care Act.

Nationally, with the growing recognition that the health insurance giants stand as the greatest barrier to affordable healthcare for all, investors are beginning to see that this is not an industry socially responsible stockholders should be in (Huffington Post May 12, Napalm, Big Health Insurance, and Divestment).

I went to medical school to take care of sick people. The insurance companies fulfill their fiduciary responsibility to their investors by finding ways not to pay for the care of the sick. All their innovation and creativity go to this goal of not paying for care. No other sector in our crazy healthcare system operates under this incentive.

It will take a mass movement, like those for women’s suffrage and civil rights. It will take a divestment campaign like the one against apartheid in South Africa. We must keep the pressure up, shine a light on their nefarious deeds, drive down their stock prices, and expose them for what they are: parasitic middlemen who add no value while sucking billions out of our economy.

Rob Stone, MD is an emergency physician and Director of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan in Indiana. He is on the board of directors of Physicians for a National Health Program.

President Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, decided to attack single payer health care, a system used very effectively in many first-world countries, as some wacky, crazy idea.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

It pains me to see a Democratic administration attacking the idea of single payer as an idea so unrealistic that you must be high on drugs to push for it. The push for universal single payer health care, Medicare for all, has been was a goal of the Democratic party for decades. Virtually every single health care economist or policy expert on the left, after examining the domestic and international data, has concluded that single payer either is the best way or is among the best ways to provide universal health care. I guarantee that you won’t find a single expert on the left who thinks the system created by the new health care law is markedly superior to single payer.

We know that single payer is a fair and dramatically cheaper way to provide health insurance. America’s single payer health care system for those over 65, Medicare, is very popular and is a clear success.

As recently as seven years ago, even Barack Obama was a public supporter of adopting single payer health care. So, according to Gibbs, I guess we should question whether Obama was under the influence of drugs when he advocated for that logical position.

I’ve long accepted that we didn’t elect a Democratic president who is willing to fight for single payer health care, but today is truly a new and sad low. I never thought that we would have a Democratic administration that would actively mock and attack the idea of Medicare for all. Yes, the right wing and the private health insurance industry have won. Even a Democratic administration has thrown empirical evidence out the window and is now attacking “Canadian healthcare” as crazy for some reason.

I guess someone should tell Canadians, or even American seniors on Medicare, how terrible their single payer health care systems are, with their dramatically lower costs and much higher life expectancies. Either tell them, or parhaps just order up a whole heck of a lot of drug tests for them.

Every once in a while, Richard Kirsch, does a “happy dance” article celebrating his own Health Care for America Now campaign for health care reform, whose outcome of course was the wonderful bill legislated by the Congress last Spring. Kirsch, who is now a Senior Fellow at The Roosevelt Institute, posted his latest happy dance at The Nation, whose “liberal media bias” was nowhere in evidence near his article.

I have only a few comments to make on his description of the process of bringing this “progressive victory” to us all, since, no doubt, Kirsch is the leading expert on this process. However, I will say something about an aspect of the process which he’s neglected to describe and then go on to talk about the results of his noble efforts.

On process, Richard fails to talk about the successful efforts of HCAN to work with the Obama political team and other “progressive” organizations in Washington, to take Medicare for All “off the table” as an option that would receive serious consideration in Congress. HCAN persuaded most other progressive organizations based in Washington with significant funding to shut up about single-payer and get behind the public option proposal.

At first a comprehensive version of a public option bill outlined by Jacob Hacker was used to seduce the left organizations. It was claimed that it would be much more acceptable to the health insurance industry than single-payer, and had a much better chance to pass. Then as the public option alternative was de-fanged, a little more at each stage of the political process, HCAN held the coalition of progressive organizations together, in the “veal pen,” and prevented the resurrection of single-payer as a viable alternative.

In order to carry out its effort, HCAN and its predecessor organization, The Herndon Alliance conducted biased polling, manipulated the media, used its very substantial funding to flood the media with PO-based stories, did its best to label single-payer advocates as “unrealistic,” and, generally, to tell people that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” while preparing to support legislation that was very far from being either perfect or good.

The story of the efforts and manipulations of HCAN, the “bait-and-switch tactics;” the lack of honesty with the public about the continued diminution of the public option as the legislative process moved forward; it’s unwillingness to say a loud “no” as the bill moved farther and farther away from either single payer, or the original public option compromise, and closer and closer to its final state as a pure bail-out for the insurance industry, delivering very little value to people, can be traced at the Physicians for a National Health Program (pnhp) web site. Please read Kip Sullivan’s many blogs to see a picture of real perfidy on the left, and to understand that the worst thing that could have happened to the left’s campaign for national health insurance was to have it led by HCAN and its objective of getting the Public Option “sparkle pony” passed into law.

A more general account, from the viewpoint of George Soros’s favorite notion of reflexivity, of the multi-stage de-generative political process engaged in by the left, under the leadership of HCAN is here. In short, the process engaged in by HCAN, under Richard’s leadership was, in my view, nothing short of a progressive disaster. It is one we must never duplicate, if we value the continued existence of the progressive movement and progressive values.

Moving on to the outcome of HCAN’s process, the Administration’s final health care reform bill, which Richard is pleased to call a “victory;” I doubt that there are very many progressives who would characterize it that way outside the land of Washington organization spin. Most people blogging or commenting at FireDogLake certainly thought it was a defeat and that it was worse than no bill at all. Of course, everyone in the Medicare for All movement thought it was a great betrayal, and there were many in the blogosphere generally, who thought the bill was a great failure, and that progressives should have been hanging their heads in shame over it, rather than doing happy dances.

I posted my own opinion of the bill in a piece called “J’Accuse” here and here, before the final compromise occurred, but none of my central criticisms were blunted in the final bill. The bill that Richard Kirsch calls a victory, is one that fails to stop hundreds of thousands of fatalities, and millions of bankruptcies, and home foreclosures, before it goes into effect in 2014, and even then dooms people to an additional 127,000 fatalities between 2014 and 2019, if there is no further reform.

The outcome of Richard’s process, which he celebrates, is not the victory he also celebrates, but a travesty of progressivism, a true failure and a catalog of sell-outs to corporate interests at every step of the way. Further, Richard’s “happy dance,” constituting a self-evaluation of the significance of his own efforts, holding it forth as a model for others to follow is itself a travesty, reminiscent of the efforts of Dick and Lynne Cheney to recast Dick’s own legacy of failure.

One of the most disturbing trends in Washington in past years has been the increasingly frequent efforts of politicians and those associated with them to give themselves credit for outcomes that only they and very few others recognize as worthy of praise. It would be in much better taste, and also much more conducive to learning the real lessons of the past, if they waited for others to praise them, and until then, kept a respectful silence, before they began “the happy dance.”