Fraud

No Surprise Guess what the most important issue in Washington is. Healthcare reform? Wrong.

I just saw a news bulletin. The House Democrats have produced HR II, their 1,018 page version of healthcare reform. Well, now, not exactly.

So, what, exactly?

Listen closely. They actually produced a bill calling for marginal changes in health insurance. You think that health insurance and healthcare are synonymous? Not in my thesaurus.

I have no interest in health insurance, reformed or otherwise. My concern is for solving the healthcare crisis the American’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhARMA), the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Hospital Association (AHA) have created.

I should make one note here. Fifty-nine percent of physicians find single-payer acceptable or actively support it. The AMA’s membership includes 19 percent of all physicians. Opposing the AMA is not necessarily the same as opposing your family practitioner.

By the way, two Senate committees have also created their own Frankensteins.

The growth in healthcare costs is three times that of the overall economy. That is unsustainable, even for those who might be satisfied with their present coverage. We have no choice. We have to change this system. We already allocate one of every six dollars in our entire economy to this one area.

Let me put the burden on you. Explain how you take the most expensive system in the world, the least efficient system of any advanced country, give the people who created the mess millions of additional subsidized customers, spend an additional trillion dollars and call it healthcare reform. Explain how one justifies calling it a way of saving money.

The House of Representatives alone could save over a thousand pages per copy of their bill by simply making it Medicare-For-All.

The former CEO of HCA, who caused it to have to pay the largest fine in history, who funded the Swift Boat Veterans campaign against Kerry during the 2004 race, is now your champion. He is funding millions of dollars of issue ads to defeat healthcare reform. Do you trust him to have your best interests in mind? Do you believe the claims of those ads about how terrible other systems are? Why are they not screaming at their leaders to adopt our system?

As I was writing, there was an interview on television with a mother who lost her daughter. Why? Because the health insurance company claimed that a liver transplant was experimental. Really? If you want to ask Steve Jobs about his experimental surgery here in Tennessee, I’ll try to get his email address for you. See how well our system works, for billionaires? At least she didn’t have to wait in one of those lines for a flu shot.

Any politician speaking on the subject who supports any reform that is not single-payer should not be taken seriously. S/He is merely repeating the talking points of AHIP, PhARMA, AMA and AHA. It may be because they are being paid to do so or because they are gullible. Does it make a difference which, if they are going to support one of the faux reform bills?

Either it is a single-payer system or it is a fraud.

Crawford Harris - Polymath