Democracy For America: Healthcare for All

[one...two...tree 2,762]

The outpouring of support and excitement over my return to Democracy for America has been incredible. I am honored to work with you and the rest of the DFA community again.

Last night, I announced our biggest and perhaps most important campaign yet on an issue very close to my heart: Healthcare Reform.

We can guarantee healthcare for all if we give every American the freedom to choose between keeping their private insurance - if they have any - and a universally available public healthcare option like Medicare.

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President Obama campaigned on a healthcare plan that included a public option, but for-profit insurance companies and HMO's are already working hard to strip it from any upcoming healthcare bill. They don't want Americans to have a choice and they will stop at nothing to kill real reform.

Today, we draw a line in the sand.

A public option is the only way to guarantee healthcare for all Americans and its inclusion is non-negotiable. Any legislation without the choice of a public option is only insurance reform and not the healthcare reform America needs.

This is just the start. We need your help to generate broad based support for a public option. We will need to canvass our neighborhoods, call our elected leaders, and arrange meetings with members of Congress in the coming months.

We need 250,000 signatures by the time this bill is introduced in Congress. As a start, can you help me get to 10,000 by the end of the day today?

ADD YOUR NAME RIGHT NOW

After you add your name, you can sign-up to volunteer or make a contribution. You can also spread the word to your friends, family, and co-workers. Send a personal email and include a link to the website, update your Facebook status to tell people about the campaign, write a blog post at a local or national blog about why you support this campaign - we need all hands on deck to win this fight.

This will be the largest, most ambitious campaign DFA has ever launched. But I need your help to make it happen. The more people in our movement for change, the more effective we will be.

Working together, we will get healthcare for all Americans. Thank you for everything you do to make it happen.

-Howard

Gov. Howard Dean, M.D.

Founder, Democracy for America

[peejay 327]

DfA? Is that some sort of Left wing PAC that Lefties like ol' Howard are hawking? You want me to contribute my hard earned wages to hawk for folks that ain't got no job and ain't got no insurance. Ain't that double dipping? If they ain't got no job and no insurance, they sure as hell ain't contributing on both accounts (to DfA or insurance). So why do you want me to contribute to DfA? If I do...I'll end up getting hit up thrice. Once to Howard, once to mo' taxes to insure thems that ain't gots, and again to pay for my own insurance I'm paying for already. Do you think the average working class guy like me has the jack to do that? I sure as hell don't. So who is paying and who is signing up?

You want my siggie, but leave all the details out? Kind of like giving someone a blank check to your personal bank account and hope they "do the right thing"?

No thanks...my mama didn't raise no fool. If you want me to climb on board your "healthcare for all whether you gots the money or not" bandwagon, you better fork up some details. What's in it for me? Otherwise I ain't playing.

In the end me thinks there is a whole bunch for everyone 'cept me. I wonder how many will be adding their siggie and won't even be sh*tting any $$$ to DfA, much less in taxes to pay for it? Any guesses? I'll give 3 guesses and the first 2 don't count. Kind of like shooting ducks in a barrel.

[HAL 9000 96]

Sorry, Steven. Neocons and others prefer to pay more in health premiums to companies looking for ways to deny their claims to make a profit.

[peejay 327]

Sorry, Steven. Neocons and others prefer to pay more in health premiums to companies looking for ways to deny their claims to make a profit.

So who you callin' a neocon? And who prefers to pay more whether to greedy pricks gouging the public or to parasites?

[HAL 9000 96]

Sorry, Steven. Neocons and others prefer to pay more in health premiums to companies looking for ways to deny their claims to make a profit.

So who you callin' a neocon? And who prefers to pay more whether to greedy pricks gouging the public or to parasites?

New glasses for peejay.

But that was hilarious how you felt alluded to.

[mRx 16]

Do we really want free healthcare?

By Walter E. Williams

One of the campaign themes this election cycle is "affordable" health care. Shouldn't we ask ourselves whether we want the politicians who brought us the "affordable" housing, that created the current financial debacle, to now deliver us affordable health care? Shouldn't we also ask how things turned out in countries where there is socialized medicine?

The Vancouver, British Columbia-based Fraser Institute's annual publication, "Waiting Your Turn," reports that Canada's median waiting times from a patient's referral by a general practitioner to treatment by a specialist, depending on the procedure, averages from five to 40 weeks. The wait for diagnostics, such as MRI or CT, ranges between four and 28 weeks.

According to Michael Tanner's "The Grass Is Not Always Greener," in Cato Institute's Policy Analysis (March 18, 2008), the Mayo Clinic treats more than 7,000 foreign patients a year, the Cleveland Clinic 5,000, Johns Hopkins Hospital treats 6,000, and one out of three Canadian physicians send a patient to the U.S. for treatment each year. If socialized medicine is so great, why do Canadian physicians send patients to the U.S. and the Canadian government spends over $1 billion each year on health care in our country?

Britain's socialized system is no better. Currently, 750,000 Brits are awaiting hospital admission. Britain's National Health Services hopes to achieve an 18-week maximum wait from general practitioner to treatment, including all diagnostic tests, by the end of 2008. The delay in health care services is not only inconvenient, it's deadly. Both in Britain and Canada, many patients with diseases that are curable at the time of diagnosis become incurable by the time of treatment or patients become too weak for the surgical procedure. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown plans to introduce a "constitution" setting out the rights and responsibilities of its health care system. According to a report in the Telegraph (02/01/2008), "What this (Gordon Brown's plan) seems to amount to in practice are the Government's rights to refuse treatment, and the patient's responsibilities to live up to what the state decides are model standards." That means people who have unhealthy habits such as smoking, heart sufferers who are obese or those who fall ill because of failure to take regular exercise might be refused medical care, even though they pay taxes to support government health care.

Government health care can become ghoulish as reported in a Human Events (1/17/08) article "Gordon Brown Wants Your Organs" written by Susan Easton. As in the U.S., many Brits die while on the waiting list for organ donations. The prime minister has a solution called a "Presumed Consent Scheme." Mrs. Easton says, "If you don't specifically carry a card saying 'leave my corpse alone' -- known as the 'opt out option', or unless one's family is on hand to object, one's remains are considered fair game for an organ harvest festival." Supporters of the scheme argue that what is done with people's organs after their death should not be up to the next of kin. Such a vision differs little from one that holds that after one's death he becomes the property of the state.

Of course, if socialized medicine becomes a reality here, Americans can do as many Brits do. Mrs. Easton says, "more than 70,000 Britons -- known as 'health tourists' -- have gone as far as India, Malaysia and South Africa for major operations. This figure is expected to rise to almost 200,000 by the end of the decade."

We have health care problems in the U.S. but it's not because ours is a free market system of health care delivery. Well over 50 percent of all health care expenditures are made by government. Where government spends, government regulates. It's truly amazing that Americans who are dissatisfied with the current level of socialized medicine in the U.S. are asking for more of what created the problem in the first place. Anyone thinking that an American version of socialized health care will differ from that found in Canada, Britain, Sweden, France and elsewhere are whistling Dixie.

Born in Philadelphia in 1936, Walter E. Williams holds a bachelor's degree in economics from California State University (1965) and a master's degree (1967) and doctorate (1972) in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.

[HAL 9000 96]

If its free, we're not paying for it. That would mean no tax to pay for it. Which means its never going to happen.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

I like socialized medicine. I already have Kaiser. What's the difference? Just whom I send my premiums to each month, is all. Socialize dentistry, while you are at it. Those guys are really pissing me off!

[HAL 9000 96]

I like socialized medicine. I already have Kaiser. What's the difference? Just whom I send my premiums to each month, is all. Socialize dentistry, while you are at it. Those guys are really pissing me off!

My apologies...

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

I like socialized medicine. I already have Kaiser. What's the difference? Just whom I send my premiums to each month, is all. Socialize dentistry, while you are at it. Those guys are really pissing me off!

My apologies...

It's good, and it's bad. At least I don't have doctors drooling over my wallet everytime I walk throught the door.

[HAL 9000 96]

I like socialized medicine. I already have Kaiser. What's the difference? Just whom I send my premiums to each month, is all. Socialize dentistry, while you are at it. Those guys are really pissing me off!

My apologies...

It's good, and it's bad. At least I don't have doctors drooling over my wallet everytime I walk throught the door.

Don't know about that. I'd rather have an MD asking for cash than an insurance giant looking for technicalities for denying a claim.

Gasp... just looked at Explanations of Benefits from a recent claim... United Health... f*cking nickel and dimers.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

I like socialized medicine. I already have Kaiser. What's the difference? Just whom I send my premiums to each month, is all. Socialize dentistry, while you are at it. Those guys are really pissing me off!

My apologies...

It's good, and it's bad. At least I don't have doctors drooling over my wallet everytime I walk throught the door.

Don't know about that. I'd rather have an MD asking for cash than an insurance giant looking for technicalities for denying a claim.

Gasp... just looked at Explanations of Benefits from a recent claim... United Health... f*cking nickel and dimers.

My wife is going through a workman's compensation thing for her thumb. All she needed was a cortisone shot. That was September. Between the insurance company dragging their feet, and the hospital padding the bill, I wonder how anybody makes any money. She finally got her shot last week, and the thumb is back to normal

Kaiser would have given her the shot first visit. Granted they would have probably stuck it in the tendon, but at least they would have treated her, and then fixed their screw up months ago!

[HAL 9000 96]

I like socialized medicine. I already have Kaiser. What's the difference? Just whom I send my premiums to each month, is all. Socialize dentistry, while you are at it. Those guys are really pissing me off!

My apologies...

It's good, and it's bad. At least I don't have doctors drooling over my wallet everytime I walk throught the door.

Don't know about that. I'd rather have an MD asking for cash than an insurance giant looking for technicalities for denying a claim.

Gasp... just looked at Explanations of Benefits from a recent claim... United Health... f*cking nickel and dimers.

My wife is going through a workman's compensation thing for her thumb. All she needed was a cortisone shot. That was September. Between the insurance company dragging their feet, and the hospital padding the bill, I wonder how anybody makes any money. She finally got her shot last week, and the thumb is back to normal

Kaiser would have given her the shot first visit. Granted they would have probably stuck it in the tendon, but at least they would have treated her, and then fixed their screw up months ago!

Had a dehydration-fed kidney stone followed by a rehydration infection that manifested itself on my thumb as well. Cultured my own blood from there. I identified it as a Staph bug. Not the MRSA type, thank goodness. Between the non-contrast CAT scans and the antibiotics for the infection, I got to see the hospital bill since the insurance company dragged its feet in taking the claim in.

So what would I like to see if healthcare isn't going national? A private system that is held accountable down to the T for its greed.

[mawilson 2,133]

Sorry, Steven. Neocons and others prefer to pay more in health premiums to companies looking for ways to deny their claims to make a profit.

Healthcare for all is a great idea, but here's a newsflash for you guys:

WE'RE BROKE!

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

We can guarantee healthcare for all if we give every American the freedom to choose between keeping their private insurance - if they have any - and a universally available public healthcare option like Medicare.

A public option is the only way to guarantee healthcare for all Americans and its inclusion is non-negotiable.

True and true. The private sector claims that only competition will ensure quality and efficiency but they fight against competition with the supposedly unable government like there's no tomorrow. If the government is so bad in providing an efficient service at a competitive price, then they should have no problem competing with it in an open market. According to their propaganda, it would a slam-dunk for the private enterprise. Of course, that's just the propaganda.

Sign me up!