Stop Obama's Cave; Demand Single-payer Now

Everybody who loves your private health insurance coverage, stand on your head.

That's what I thought. Everybody NOT standing on your head, click here right now to send emails to your congress critters demanding single-payer health insurance.

Because President Obama and the cowardly weasels in Congress who call themselves Democrats are just about to surrender any chance of genuine health care reform to the murdering bastards of the insurance industry.

Robert Reich explains:

"Don't make the perfect the enemy of the better" is a favorite slogan in Washington because compromise is necessary to get anything done. But the way things are going with health care, a better admonition would be: "Don't give away the store."

Many experts have long agreed that a so-called "single-payer" plan is the ideal, because competition among private insurers who pay health-care bills inevitably causes them to spend big bucks trying to find and market policies to healthy and younger people at relatively low risk of health problems while avoiding sicker and older people with higher risks (and rejecting those with pre-existing conditions altogether), and also contesting and litigating many claims. A single payer saves all this money and focuses on caring for sick people and preventing the healthy from becoming sick. The other advantage of a single payer is it can use its vast bargaining power to negotiate lower prices from pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and suppliers.

Not surprisingly, insurance and drug companies have been dead-set against a single payer for years. And they've so frightened the public into thinking that "single payer" means loss of choice of doctor (that's wrong -- many single payer plans in other nations allow choices of medical deliverers) that politicians no longer even mention it.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama pushed a compromise -- a universal health plan that would include a "public insurance option" resembling Medicare, which individual members of the public and their families could choose if they wished. This Medicare-like option would at least be able to negotiate low rates and impose some discipline on private insurers.

But now the Medicare-like option is being taken off the table. Insurance and drug companies have thrown their weight around the Senate. And, sadly, the White House -- eager to get a bill enacted in 2009 rather than risk it during the mid-term election year of 2010 -- is signaling it's open to other approaches.

SNIP

It's still possible that the House could come up with a real Medicare-like public option and that Senate Dems could pass it under a reconciliation bill needing just 51 votes. But it won't happen without a great deal of pressure from the White House and the public. Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and the rest of Big Med are pushing hard in the opposite direction. And Democrats are now giving away the store. As things are now going, we'll end up with a universal health-care bill this year that politicians, including our President, will claim as a big step forward when it's really a step sideways.

If you're just tuning in, "single-payer health insurance" already covers tens of millions of Americans. They are everyone 65 years and older (Medicare) and every military veteran (VA), and if you're lucky enough to be one of them, you currently suffer the horrific "socialized medicine" President Obama wants to offer the rest of us.

Stop the lies. Stop the corruption. Stop the insurance companies from profiting off third-world coverage.

Again, click here right now to send emails to your congress critters demanding single-payer health insurance. Just type in your zip code and one click gets you the phone number and email link for both senators and your representative.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....