Howard Dean on health care: let the American people choose
Posted by Thomas Nephew on June 12th, 2009
This is a cheap post — just an embedded video, a bit of transcription, and a big “thank you” to eRobin who’s working hard on this issue.
Dean is great at turning the debate around to where it needs to go: a public option offers freedom of choice and builds the American economy. He also subscribes to the notion that single payer can evolve from the “public option,” rather than insisting on going directly to “Go” and collecting the savings that would result that way. Great quotes:
This is about the future of the American economy. We’re not just losing jobs to China, we’re losing jobs to Canada because their health care system is better for business than our health care system is. [...]
You can sign up for a public plan like Medicare or you can sign up for a private plan. You get the choice. You get the choice. And that’s … why the Republicans are in trouble here. They want to keep the choice for themselves, they want to make the choice for you, but we think it’s time now that the American people get to make the choice themselves. [...]
The only way we’re going to get to a single payer is if that’s what the American people want. … Look we had some health insurance companies leave our state when we forced all the insurance companies to issue health insurance regardless of the health of the individual and when we forced them to not charge more than 20% more for their sick patients than for their healthiest patients. And the bad ones left the state. And that was a good thing! We need to get some of these health insurance companies to behave themselves, and the best way to do it — the only way we’ve discovered in 40 years — is to offer an option. Let the American people choose. That’s all the Democrats are asking: let the American people choose. [...]
I understand why the insurance companies are against this, because they would have to clean up their act. But I don’t understand why the Republicans are against it. I thought the Republicans were interested in giving *more* choices to the American people, but apparently they’re not, and that is wrong, and if we have to pass this thing with 51 votes we should do it…
They may be on the sidelines, relatively speaking, but if worthwhile health care reform happens it will also be thanks to Howard Dean, and to all the activists and organizers like Robin who’ve been working so hard and so long towards this goal.
UPDATE: It occurs to me to mention a Prosperity Agenda item by Kevin Zeese that I posted on Facebook a few days ago, via which I found Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study (.PDF), an article by David Himmelstein, Deborath Thorne, Elizabeth Warren, and Steffie Woolhandler in the American Journal of Medicine. From the results section of the abstract (emphases added):
Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%. In logistic regression analysis controlling for demographic factors, the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001.
As I wrote at the time,* the outlines of this outrage were already apparent to these authors back in 2005. But despite their research and outreach at the time, a Dickensian bankruptcy bill (sponsored by Joe Biden) was passed that made no allowance for these kinds of undeserved financial disasters. Clearly the health care and financial security of average Americans generally take a back seat to the care and feeding of financial CEOs. I hope this time will be different; perhaps the bankruptcy bill was all part of Joe Biden’s elaborate ten-dimensional chess strategy to achieve single payer health care.
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* The titles, “Bankruptcy Bill Hackery” and “Bankruptcy Bill Hackery: The Sequel,” refer to a critic of the study, not to Himmelstein et al.
Category: Post. Tags: bankruptcy, health care.
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