| Single payer is not included nor is it being discussed in regard to the health care reform bill so far. A public option, which 72-85% of Americans want is on the table, but this does not mean a single payer provider will implemented that will knock out all private insurers.
John Cornyn is doing what all Republicans do when they want to kill something. They go to their constituents to lie and scare the living daylights out of us. Single payer! Socialized medicine! Oh henny penny, the sky is falling in! We're all going to drop dead today because of government run health care!!! Oh no! The government is going to tax the bejesus out of us for horrific socialized medicine!
Republicans can just shove it all up the darkest place in their human anatomy.
Cornyn is out there doing what pimped out politicians do. He's working for his sugar daddies in heath care who donated $742,163 to him between 2005 and 2010. To see who else owns a piece of our junior Senator check out opensecrets.org.
I'd like to know when the private insurers have been a "fair competitor?" It is precisely because of the lack of competition among private insurers that allow health care companies to gouge doctors and deny care to the insured. Insurance companies have been merged and combined to the point they exert almost an iron clad monopoly.
According to the Houston doctors that attended the meeting with the three U.S. Senators:
Prominent Houston health officials did give senators an earful about all that they felt was wrong with the current system, from the financial impact of illegal immigrant patients to insurance company greed to a doctor's limits if the individual doesn't take responsibility for his or her health.
As the doctors said above, it is the insurance companies' greed that is the real evil doer. The federal government is not.
Indeed, Dr. Mattox, chief of staff at Ben Taub Hospital (Houston's general hospital) said the status quo is not an option.
Mattox said the health care industry is the most regulated in the world, with "hassle, paperwork, overhead and malpractice insurance" amounting to 50 percent of the cost of health care. Instead of "picking on us in research, education and patient care," he said government could reduce health care costs from 15 percent to 7 percent if it got rid of such regulation.
The regulation that Dr. Mattox refers to is likely that imposed by Medicaid and Medicare. As a federally funded public hospital, Ben Taub receives a large number of patients with Medicaid and no insurance at all.
And federal grant funding does require accountability in the form of annual reports. One year when I attended a NSF Meeting in Washington (I am a grant administrator) one of the agency's representatives told us, after the faculty and administrators alike bellyached about the reports, "when we hand out the people's money we have to be able to tell the people what we're doing with it."
Indeed. These federal grants are, after all, your and my tax payer dollars.
To fully appreciate the dire straits so many Americans find themselves with regard to their health care needs I think our fearless elected leaders ought to be stripped of their health care benefits for a solid one year. Let them pay for their own out of their well-lined pockets. I bet all obstructionists would change their tune within one month.
Perhaps that is what it would take for some of these clueless jackasses to get it. Campaign finance reform would help too, especially here in Texas where the sky is the limit in that area. This is precisely how we get stuck with such pathetically poor representation in both Austin and Washington.
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