Lawrence O’Donnell on Single-Payer and the Birth Control Mess
From MSNBC –
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell explains how President Obama’s healthcare bill traded old problems for new problems by keeping the employer-based insurance system in place.
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Lawrence O’Donnell is such an arrogant and smug jerk that I cannot take anything he says seriously. It is clear that he is on TV solely to amuse himself with his self-proclaimed brillance. If he was as awesome as he thinks himself to be, the ratings of his show wouldn’t be so miserable.
Don’t be a hater.
@Batgirl. It’s a sad commentary on how a closed mind can have a ripple effect when one such as yours cannot even attempt to focus long enough to HEAR the content of what someone is saying! Open your mind! TURN OFF FOX and LEARN SOMETHING! You are just too ignorant for words “GIRL!”
You go girl! The pea-brains would rather listen to FOX PROPAGANDA instead of learning the facts about single payer healthcare! I live in SC (how embarrassing to admit that); and SC’s answer to “guaranteed acceptance” healthcare is a premium of $2,600 per MONTH (last time I checked). For a couple over 63 years of age the cost would be $5,700 per MONTH! All it takes is a little knowledge to know nothing would be better than single-payer healthcare! Unfortunately, “you can’t fix stupid!” By the way, I’m a transplant from the North or Yankee as Southerners still refer to me. Once again, “You can’t fix stupid!”
Lawrence O’Donnell is arrogant because he’s brilliant and has a right to be. You are missing the message because your small, uneducated mind apparently can’t grasp the content. What he is saying is no doubt in YOUR BEST INTEREST! It is in MY best interest and I resent your ignorance because it hurts me and a lot of other people! Go back to your dark cave “batgirl.” How old are you anyway?
You Batgirl do not know what you are saying about Lawrence and how he stands on health care for this country? He was in congress and knows the ins and outs? You must have wonderful health care and are not having to fight to get care with cancer in this greedy society? Yes, one comment you lose your insurance if you lose a job and then try to find any you can afford? No,you cannot get medicaid unless destitute or and Immmigrant? We are a very rich country and we need a one payer system to help all of our citizens? Come to my Pickens cty , Ga free health clinic Good Samaritan and see daily many coming in to get health care no where else to go? The ER is expensive and they only do so much anything else good luck? I am a retired RN I have seen the greedy health care system? Try to get insurance when not working and see if you can afford this? The Republicans are daily we will get rid of health care and then what? Do you hear them giving a choice besides the high cost health insurance companies who are just like our gas companies greedy jerks? Batgirl ck out before you say ridiculous things that are not for real today?
This is the most impassioned speech on mainstream tv that I have ever heard supporting single-payer healthcare. I think this shows that despite the money spent and propaganda spewed to downplay single-payer healthcare, the fact is that we need it and more and more people are talking about it. Onward!
While everything may look like nail to people equipped only with a hammer, in fact reproductive health care is one of the few areas in which the case for a single payer system is vulnerable. Political conservatives in state governments are already restricting access to the full range of family planning services. GW Bush did the same for every national program he could get his hands on, which consisted mostly of implementing the gag rule against even mentioning abortion in foriegn countries that receive US aid for health care programs, and replacing actual sex ed programs with the notoriously counter-productive abstinence-only approach. No, this fight is about diverting the political conversation away from core issues like democracy and the economy, by further demonizing women and our health. We need to firmly defend reproductive health care services, as well as reproductive rights and justice, and get on with the rest of the organizing agenda ahead. We should not tolerate interference in our control over decisions about whether and when to have children by churches, or employers, or the state.
Hopefully he will keep on beating this drum—and the point that what the leading supporters of so-called “Obamacare” health reform plan knew was the only just and reasonable plan was single payer, and they never even allowed it to be considered. Most Americans do not understand what single-payer is and they won’t until the networks give it air time.
Lets be honest-insurers are the only industry to routinely and legally kill Americans through rescission, the denial of coverage after, say, 20 years of premium payments, for failing to mention a grass allergy when you were 10 and you now have cancer so actually NEED insurance. Read about those killed here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105680875
What Massachusetts and now the nation’s healthcare delivery system represents is the grandest money laundering scheme ever hatched where our premium dollars are scrubbed clean by insurers then used to lobby against any kind of movement towards slowing the rapid siphoning of what little disposable income remains for the ailing American consumer who is now mandated to buy insurers deadly product.
I think he’s brilliant and this commentary is spot on. I so admired Hillary Clinton for her unselfish hard work, when she was First Lady, in trying to bring Nat’l HealthCare to the US that I worked on her campaign for president. As a Physical Therapist for over 40 yrs, I’ve witnessed the corruption within the HealthCare system and I am frustrated by the fact that the people within the “Castle walls” can give themselves all the luxuries, including HealthCare, by heavily taxing us “peasants”
Re the Catholic church, which I turned away from many years ago, they operate with a Middle Ages mindset ( or pre-middle ages) trying to keep the masses suppressed,especially women.
While Lawrence doesn’t approach the success of, say, Glen Beck
(whom I assume bats**tcrazygirl would prefer, but he can’t be found – no doubt due to his ‘success’& ratings)
he does know how to make a compelling case –
all the while, unlike those on Fox, hobbled by …FACTS.
As for the appeal of train wrecks and other natural disasters, well…perhaps popularity only rules in the corporat(ist) world of ‘rob, impoverish, kill, & torture for profit.’ No gore here, keep moving please. I recommend Current or Link for a heavy dose of TRUTH about what you support – and how well it supports YOU.
Laura B you’re totally right! We need people like Mr. Donnel to run for president. I’m one of the 30 million people (more like 100 million) ppeople that don’t get Health Care Insurance from the employer and cannot get private coverage on a $17,000 p/year salary earned with many hours and hard work. I’m 62 without Health Care.
Great comment by O’Donnell – until he gets to the part where he claims that this mess was not Obama’s fault – a total non sequitur from his video clip where Obama abandons single payer, then refuses to put it on the table, then proceeds to make all sorts of backroom deals with Big Pharma and the insurance industries, not to mention strong arming Kucinich (a previous supporter of single payer and critic of Obamacare) into supporting Obamacare.
Obamacare was a gift to the insurance companies who were getting nervous about the growing push for single payer – a ploy to blunt that push by pretending he was doing something to help. Obama is an enemy of single payer – about time O’Donnell called it like it is …
I don’t think that O’Donnell is saying that the reform mess is not Obama’s fault. The commentary makes it very clear that Obama caved to the health insurers and big pharma. All O’Donnell says is that the people who are uninsured are not Obama’s fault (meaning Obama did not cause their unemployment), they are uninsured because we have an employer based system. As for Jill Stein, who is a great advocate for single payer, please tell me how, if you cannot get a majority through the Democratic Party primary system, you expect to get a majority in the general election where we have to contend with the Republican nut cases and the Glen Beck devotees?
The vast majority of Democratic voters already support single payer and we need to replace corporate Democrats with progressive Democrats (I wish Jill Stein was one of them). Mathematically, that is much easier than trying to win as a third party (which is why we only have one independent Senator and he is from a tiny state).
By the way – want to support someone for Pres. that is a strong advocate of single payer?
http://www.jillstein.org/
What I take from Mr. O’Donnell’s speech is that the USA’s health care system is employer-based. If you lose your job, you lose your health insurance.
I hadn’t realized that until he said it straight out, even though I knew when my sister’s husband lost HIS job he also lost HIS health insurance, even though I knew my sister ended up paying about $8,000/year for catastrophic health insurance for herself when her husband turned 65 and went on medicare.
Another thing I learned from Mr. O’Donnell is that there are 30 million (10%) Americans NOT covered by Affordable Health Care plan, and that most of them are women.
So I find Mr. O’Donnell’s comments very enlightening.
How can we fix our political system? We have to get money out of politics, first, I agree. To do that means, I think, one slow step at a time, one legislator replaced after another…and that means having an informed electorate. That takes so much effort. It means knowing the history — how IS Vermont doing with single payer health insurance? I didn’t know it had single payer health insurance until someone else here mentioned it. Then once we know something, we need to share it so eventually everyone else knows it too. I’m not very good at Facebook, etc., but “social media” did make a difference in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, did it not? Perhaps it can make a difference in the USA too.