[Dialogue] {Disarmed} Re: {Disarmed} Re: {Spam?} Spong the Poliical Wonk

[David Walters]

It is embarrassing to know that I live in the only industrial nation that does not provide each of its citizen’s full access to comprehensive health care. Even more embarrassing is listen to the current  campaign and listen as health care comes up. 

 

During the debate over the so-called Hillarycare Plan, I bought a copy of her plan. Every time someone came on TV and quoted a page number claiming something as in the plan I would reach for my copy. Each time I would read the entire page and even the pages before and after the page cited and each time I failed to find anything approaching what they had said was in the plan. One thing I could never find was a mention of criminal sanctions for anyone who might try to seek care outside of the proposed system 

I suppose it is easy for someone who invested his adult life to drink the AMA Kool-Aid of the physician -dominated-hospital-insurance company-controlled-health-care system oppose any attempt by Hillary or Ira Magaziner or John Edwards or anyone else to transform the health care system in our nation so that all of out citizens can participate. 
 
It is also interesting to read that words of some one who educated in and earned a comfortable living in our present system to posit such silly reductionistic statements in defense of a system to which he owes so much. But is also disheartening to hear such psycho-babbling from a colleague who should know better. It certainly does not become one who obviously knows what it means to act globally and live locally to offer rightwing republican spin to put down those who seek an alternative to our present system.
 

It is embarrassing to know that I live in the only industrial nation that does not provide each of its citizen’s full access to comprehensive health care. 
 

David Walters 
 

 



  Spong quote:
  Her health care failure in the first Clinton administration still draws fire, but the fact is that when one places each individual proposal of that health care plan before the public, it receives majority approval. It is only when these proposals are packaged together that people have problems. That probably means that she was right, but too early.


  This statement, I think, ignores portions of the Hillary/Ira Magaziner plan that proposed significant penalties  for anyone seeking care outside her proposed health care system, and for any health care provider (fines and jail) who treated patients outside the government prescribed schedules, and for seeking care from a physician of ones choice, rather than the one assigned to you by the government.  I am unaware of these provisions being endorsed by any public opinion polls.  Do you think she, or any of our congressional delegates would subject themselves to these restrictions?  Certainly the proposals of universal coverage, and care paid for with tax dollars (someone else's), fare well in public opinion polls.

  The fact is, in most countries that have government paid health care, a second level  exists, where people who do not want to wait, who want to see the doctor of their choice, who are willing to pay for private care, and want to go outside the government system, can do so, or, they can come to the US where they know they can get good, but expensive, care.

  I think our health care system is far too expensive and too many people recieve sub-standard care because of this expense.  I do not have a grand plan to solve the problem, but, I think Hillary's and Ira's plan would have been a disaster if implemented.

  Two factors that have added to health care costs, commercial managed care (Bill Frist's fortune), and litigation (John Edward's fortune) need reform to help control costs.

  See report on Hillary's current position.

  Don Elliott


  Then first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, holding a copy of the Clinton health-care plan, kicks off a three-state sales campaign during a visit to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in this Oct. 28, 1993 file photo. When it comes to health care reform, Clinton lives by the old adage, "burned once, twice shy." As first lady in the early 1990s, she tried to reshape the nation's health care system - an audacious effort that collapsed under its own complexity, Republican opposition, and the Clinton's unwillingness to seek compromise with lawmakers. (AP Photo/Joe Marquette, File)getElement('galleryimage_0').innerHTML = ' 
  Then first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, holding a copy of the Clinton health-care plan, kicks off a three-state sales campaign during a visit to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in this Oct. 28, 1993 file photo. When it comes to health care reform, Clinton lives by the old adage, "burned once, twice shy." As first lady in the early 1990s, she tried to reshape the nation's health care system - an audacious effort that collapsed under its own complexity, Republican opposition, and the Clinton's unwillingness to seek compromise with lawmakers. (AP Photo/Joe Marquette, File)'; 
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