Single-payer advocate on Colbert Report TONIGHT
From PNHP –
On Tuesday, July 21, at 11:30 pm EDT, watch Dr. Aaron Carroll talk about single-payer health reform on The Colbert Report, the Emmy award-winning satirical television program on Comedy Central.
Dr. Carroll is a board member of Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org), an organization of 16,000 physicians, medical students and health professionals who support single-payer national health insurance.
The episode with Dr. Carroll will also be available online about 24 hours after the initial broadcast at here (Episode # is 5097). It will be rebroadcast on the Comedy Central network on Wednesday, July 22, at 2 a.m., 9:30 a.m., 2 p.m., and 8:30 p.m.
Dr. Carroll, who is an assistant professor of pediatrics in the Children’s Health Services Research Program at the Indiana University School of Medicine, published a study last year showing 59 percent of U.S. physicians now support national health insurance, a jump of 10 percentage points from just five years earlier.
In an opinion piece, Dr. Carroll writes: “There are now more uninsured people in the United States than at any time since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-1960s. … These numbers represent extraordinary suffering, unnecessary disability and premature deaths — at least 18,000 deaths per year, according to the Institute of Medicine. …
“There is one sure-fire way to make these numbers come down. It worked for seniors in the 1960s and it still works for them today. You may hear politicians demonizing government-run health insurance, but you will hear none run on a platform of eradicating Medicare; nor will any turn it down for themselves when they turn 65. Call it whatever you want: National health insurance, Medicare-for-all, ‘single payer’ or socialized health insurance; it doesn’t matter. Research shows that Medicare-for-all could save enough on administrative waste (over $350 billion) to cover all the 47 million uninsured and improve coverage for everyone else. A single-payer national health insurance system is the only way to drop the number of people lacking health insurance to zero.”
Rep. John Conyers Jr. has introduced a bill in the House, H.R. 676, that would implement a single-payer system; the bill now has 85 co-sponsors. Recently Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a single-payer bill in the U.S. Senate, S. 703.
Watch Dr. Carroll on The Colbert Report!
If we can’t go to Washington on the 30th are there other events or activities locally (Albuquerque, NM) that we can participate in?
I don’t know about Albequerqe, but here in Madison WI, there is going to be a march and rally for health care reform downtown, starting at the library mall and ending at the state capital, starting at 2PM. Thanks for trying to inform the people about this issue. I found you because I saw Dr Carroll on Colbert and googled afterwords. I also listen to Ed Schultz on 92.1 the mic, and he’s advocating hard and trying to set up a fact finding trip to Canada.
Dr. Carol did well in his interview with Colbert. I think he got his point across. Yet, I still can’t understand why Single Payer is not getting more media attention. It’s almost as if… wait it IS as if the media and elected officials are afraid to mention it…. or mention it as if it were the loc ness monster… bummer.