Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) had done an excellent job of explaining the public option is a very matter of fact way. This interview may help the undecided about public health care.I don't think the progressives are going take a another bitch slap form the Blue Dogs. There are 100 Democrats who support the public option and only 50 Blue Dogs who support the half-baked co-ops that the health care corporations have run over in the past.
The Nation -- Something rather remarkable happened on Tuesday's Morning Joe. Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York pointed out that the health insurance industry has no clothes, and Joe Scarborough, after first trying to spin some gossamer threads, broke down and said, By God, you're right, this emperor is a naked money-making machine!
Joe did seem to finally get that America has granted insurance companies the right to create bottlenecks in the financing of healthcare in order to extract profits out of the suffering of ordinary people--without providing healthcare services.
"Why are we paying profits for insurance companies?" Weiner asked Scarborough. "Why are we paying overhead for insurance companies? Why," he asked, bringing it all home, "are we paying for their TV commercials?"
Weiner, who recently warned that President Obama could lose as many as 100 votes on a health bill if a public option is not included, really wants single payer--Medicare for all Americans is his goal. What a crazy, way-out, reckless notion, Joe went into their encounter believing. But Weiner asked some simple, direct questions that no politician has managed to pose:
What is an insurance company? They don't do a single check-up. They don't do a single exam, they don't perform an operation. Medicare has a 4 percent overhead rate. The real question is why do we have a private plan?
"It sounds like you're saying you think there is no need for us to have private insurance in healthcare," Joe asked at one point.
Weiner replied: "I've asked you three times. What is their value? What are they bringing to the deal?"
Scraping the bottom of a seemingly bottomless pit of spin, Joe is repeatedly left speechless, "stunned" and "astounded," he said, by the questions themselves.
Indeed, when confronted with unfettered capitalism's massive failures, the right usually has nothing to say. The "free market" is supposed to eternally grow, not crash under its own greed.
But unlike, say, Lou Dobbs, who began dobbering when confronted with similarly direct argument for single-payer, Joe was able to take a deep breath and return from a break with his eyes opened.
He even repeated Weiner's points clearly: The goverment would take over only the "paying mechanism" of healthcare, not the doctors or their medical decisions themselves.
His ears perked up every time Weiner mentioned that the nonprofit Medicare spends 4 percent on overhead, while private insurers spend 20 to 30 percent.
And Joe, who has been criticizing mob rule at town halls, seemed to appreciate the way Weiner counters the fear mongering over Medicare.
After decades of railing against the program's wasteful, "runaway" spending, Republicans have done a 180 and are now trying to scare seniors that the Democrats' proposed Medicare cuts will come directly from their medical care and not, as is actually proposed, from wasteful, stupid practices in the system.
Weiner has described how people have been put into a $700-a-night hospital bed when all they really need, and often prefer, is a visit by a homecare attendant.
Maybe the real turning point came when Weiner asked, "How does Wal-mart offer $4 prescriptions?" Joe and co-host Mika Brzezinski looked as if they'd been thwacked by a hardback copy of Atlas Shrugged, and sat back to let the congressman explain it all to them:
They go to the pharmaceutical companies and say, "Listen, we have a giant buying pool here. You're going to give us a great deal."
Who's bigger than Wal-Mart? We are, the taxpayers. Do we do that? No. Because we have outsourced this to insurance companies who don't have necessarily as much incentive to keep those costs down because, frankly, they are getting a piece of the action.
source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20090820/cm_thenation/15464837 Get 30 days of free traffic analysis simply by going to Web-Stat: http://www.web-stat.com/?id=2955
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