WHO ARE YOU TRYING TO FOOL, NANCY?

Will the April 30 Hearing on Medicare For All Be Little More Than a Farce?

That may well be the case according to an April 26th article in the Huffington Post:

Single-Payer Advocates Worry 'Medicare For All' Hearing Could Be A Farce

PLEASE READ THIS. When you do, you'll see that not only did the Rules Committee reject as a witness Adam Gaffney,  the President of the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), but a dozen other suggested witnesses. According to the Post,  sources involved with the planning of the hearing say three criteria were applied to potential witnesses: (1) Is this person a leader of a single payer group? If so, that person could not testify -- meaning  Gaffney was out. (2) Is this person an activist? If so, they couldn't testify.  That meant that people like Dr. Sanjeev Sriram, who has repeatedly advocated for Medicare For All, were ruled out. And (3) Has this person said anything negative about the Affordable Care Act? Especially involved in this last requirement was Wendell Primus, Pelosi's top healthcare staffer.

Rules committee chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass) stoutly denied any such criteria, and insisted that the committee was "free" to choose anyone they wanted -- claims echoed by Henry Connelly, a Pelosi spokesman. But, according to the Post,  sources close to the process insist Primus was intimately involved. It goes on to say: Single-payer groups and activists are reflexively suspicious of Primus after The Intercept revealed that he had spoken to insurance executives and laid out his own objections to Medicare for All. Primus also did himself no favors in a March 25 meeting with staff from a number of congressional committees that have health care jurisdiction. He reportedly said the Medicare for All hearing was a “check the box and move on type of thing.”

At the time of the Huffington Post article, the only witness allowed who had in fact spoken positively about M4A was an emergency room doctor whose testimony was to be limited to "patient experience."

Subsequently, it was revealed that a patient dying of ALS would be allowed to testify in favor of Single-Payer. (Not being able even to speak, he was to be equipped with special technology tracking his eye movements.) Doubtless, it had been decided that not only would the "optics" of denying a person at death's door be very bad, but it could be spun that allowing him to testify would make the committee look "compassionate."

But the truth is that the committee is attempting to rig the hearing so that there will be nobody allowed to argue strongly in favor of M4A's superiority to other suggestions on the table. How is this "show trial" superior to the behavior of strong-arm regimes to which we are supposed to be superior?

Who is Pelosi trying to fool? My friends, if you are NOT fooled, you can contact Nancy Pelosi here: https://www.speaker.gov/contact/ Please consider doing it now.

And please forward this everyone you know who might be affected by this sham hearing -- which, in my opinion, is everyone interested in giving M4A a fair shot.

Dio

PS: If you'd like to leave a comment -- and I encourage you to do so -- simply click on the "number of comments" area, and share your thoughts in the "comment rectangle" that appears.

PPS: We know that there are plenty out there who have stories to tell -- stories of your trying to cope with our dysfunctional healthcare system. Trouble is, we don't know what these stories are! That's where you come in. If you have a story to tell, you can email me at indivisible12401@gmail.com. You can be as anonymous as you like. Thanks!

WHY, NANCY, WHY?!

is Pelosi a Master Tactician or Anti-Progressive?

On February 5th, 2019, The Intercept ran a piece by Ryan Grim entitled, TOP NANCY PELOSI AIDE PRIVATELY TELLS INSURANCE EXECUTIVES NOT TO WORRY ABOUT DEMOCRATS PUSHING “MEDICARE FOR ALL” 

Pelosi Aide Tells Insurance Execs Not To Worry

According to the Intercept,  the Aide -- Wendell Primus, well known as a staunch opponent of Big Pharma -- met with executives of Blue Cross/Blue Shield less than a month after the Democrats won the midterm elections, many of them campaigning on "Medicare for All." Primus, said Grim, told the executives that "the party leadership" had "strong reservations" about single-payer healthcare, and assured the Executives that the Democrats would be their allies in the fight against single-payer, because their chief focus was fighting against Big Pharma's high prices, and they wanted the insurance companies' assistance in that fight.

All this was conveyed in a presentation of slides which were obtained by The Intercept and "re-created" to protect their sources. One of them appears below:

Note that the 5 bullet points objecting to single-payer boil down to three:

1. It's too expensive.
2. It's controversial.
3. It would be hard to implement.

As for the first, national economics differs radically from kitchen-table economics. In the latter, you try not to spend what you don't have. But for the United States as a whole,  that kind of economics  went out when we went off the Gold Standard. The truth is that the government can fund whatever it wants to. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez points out, our government has no problem writing a check for trillions -- when it will benefit the super-rich. It's only when the money is for good, moral causes, like education, healthcare, or fighting global warming that our pockets are suddenly empty, and we become deficit hawks.

Unfortunately, Pelosi is herself a deficit hawk who seems really to believe that stuff. The Intercept notes:

When [Pete} Peterson, a billionaire who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to push Washington policymakers toward austerity, died in 2018, Pelosi delivered a floor speech that praised him and his vision effusively, speaking of the man as if he’d dedicated his life to eradicating child malnutrition or curing cancer, rather than as a Wall Street tycoon who spent millions pushing for major cuts to Social Security and Medicare. “Pete was a clarion voice for fiscal responsibility, and a strong moral conscience in Washington,” Pelosi said in her House floor eulogy of Peterson, who, by 2012, had already spent half a billion dollars targeting Social Security, Medicare, and other spending programs.

As for the second point. who are the "stakeholders against it" here? According to Grim's article, Primus (and his sponsor, Pelosi) seem to believe that the only stake holders are the insurance companies and Big Pharma.  But what about the American People, whose stake in this is their health, not to mention their money: Don't they have a stake in this, too?  And as for winners and losers, the THE WINNERS WOULD BE EVERYONE -- except Big Insurance and Big Insurance.  But if Big Pharma's profits were less grand, and if millionaire insurance CEOs went away, that wouldn't bother me. Some of the insurance employees would need help finding new jobs, but that is feasible. 

And as for the other implementation challenges -- sure there would be some. But in my experience, when a problem poses a dire threat, somehow the difficulties solving it seem well worth overcoming.

Now before we brand Pelosi as our enemy, let's give her the benefit of the doubt: She is a master tactician to be sure, and she may be feeling that instead of attacking healthcare's entire profit-making nexus at once, better to attack one at a time. And in attacking Big Pharma, she fixes on a problem not only for the American people at large, but also for the health insurance companies, who really don't benefit from high-priced pharmaceuticals.

Maybe Pelosi hopes to make the insurance companies into an ally -- albeit a temporary one.

Having said all that, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that, having been pressured by the progressives in her caucus to let single-payer be debated, she agreed to a debate -- but not in the Ways and Means Committee which has the power to frame legislation, but in the budget committee which has no such power.

So what is she -- master tactician, anti-progressive, or both?

You decide.

Dio

PS: If you'd like to leave a comment -- and I encourage you to do so -- simply click on the "number of comments" area, and share your thoughts in the "comment rectangle" that appears.


PPS: We know that there are plenty out there who have stories to tell -- stories of your trying to cope with our dysfunctional healthcare system. Trouble is, we don't know what these stories are! That's where you come in. If you have a story to tell, you can email me at indivisible12401@gmail.com. You can be as anonymous as you like. Thanks!