THE SINGLE PAYER SYSTEM OF HEALTH CARE IS THE ONLY SYSTEM WHICH MAKES SENSE

The official numbers say twenty thousand people are dying every year because they do not have health care. Undoubtedly it is more. Bill Moyers interviewed Dr. Sidney Wolfe from Public Citizen and Dr. David Himmelstein one of the founders of Physicians for a National Health Program. They discuss why Obama's public option plan is not going to be the best choice and why the single payer system is not even an option at this time. The insurance industry promised to cut costs during the Carter administration, yet they increased them. Now President Obama has made a deal with them and they have guaranteed to reduce costs again. For those who want to know the truth about health reform I posted this video. It is refreshing to listen to someone who knows what they are talking about on this important subject.

In the video they advocate for lots of activism Such as "Doctors coming down to Washington in white coats". I would love to see a bunch of militant doctors march on Washington and I know there are a lot of pissed off nurses who would go with them. I had a doctor go in my evil supervisor's office and at the top of his lungs yell that if she did not stop trying to run me off he and his partner would take their patients down the street where I would be working because their patients were still alive in the morning when I took care of them. I've seen doctors refuse to admit patients or step on the grounds of a hospital to honor a nurse's strike  There are a lot of doctors who have just had it. I watched some excellent doctors leave the practice of medicine because they felt they could not be a doctor in the system we have. We have to compel the Congressional Budget Office to compare the cost of a single-payer system with the cost of other health reform proposals. http://action.citizen.org/t/6693/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27576&key=0.

I have known the insurance companies were behind the high cost of health care since shortly after I became a nurse in 1983. On night shift we looked up the cost to patients of the items we were using and were shocked. We watched people loose everything they had to pay for hospital bills even though they had insurance. We are forced to have health care which does not work because the insurance companies have mandated the standards. We had people in the ICU simply because they could not afford insurance to take care of a health problem which then developed into a life threatening problem.We bitched and complained about not being able to take care of patients according to medical and nursing standards rather than insurance industry standards. It only got worse and worse. They set up a system which wastes money. If we got rid of the insurance companies we could save billions of dollars.

In New Mexico I worked for Community health Care which I believe may be associated with Hospital Corporation of America. Both companies practiced billing fraud for years and stole unbelievable amounts of money from all of us. In 2002 I reported it to several agencies, a senator and Governor Richardson. There was no response. It was like calling governor Quitter's office here in Alaska. They said I would have to come up with specific documents from billing with the patients name on it. I had no access to them. Nothing ever happened until now, seven years later. That is how much power they have in this country.  http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386.htm

Here are some quotes from the show I liked so much I wrote them down:

"Everybody in and nobody out."

"If you are afraid of the insurance industry you are afraid of doing the right thing"

"There is absolutely no barrier other than the insurance industry"

"The only people that suffer are the patients"

"You can't actually have a health care system that works if you keep the insurance industry alive.

"We need a culture of courage as opposed to a culture of cowardess"