IT'S TIME FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness.

Bush's Enemies List Sees Daylight
C. L. Cook

PEJ News
November 12, 2005

Beyond the botched break-in of the Democrat's election HQ by Nixon's so-called "plumbers," one of the most troubling facts to come out of the subsequent 'Watergate' investigations was the existence of an "official enemies list" compiled by the administration with the aid of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Now, the Beltway broadsheet, Capitol Hill Blue is reporting the Bush administration too has an enemies list, one dwarfing Tricky Dick's, and again the FBI is implicated.

According to the paper, Bush's list contains the names and incriminating details on more than 10,000 subjects deemed hostile to the administration, and even those believed critical of Bush during his tenure as governor of Texas. More worrisome than the existence of such a list is the misuse by Bush insiders of the so-called "Patriot Act" to investigate those disagreeing with administration policies.

The list includes information on members of Congress, local, state and federal officials and many media figures and ordinary citizens who have had the temerity to question Bush's reign. Some notables said to appear prominently on the list are filmmaker, Michael Moore, outspoken Senator, Barbara Boxer, and news bloggers behind the sites, Daily Kos and Wonkette.

Describing the methods behind the Bush team philosophy, an unnamed White House aide says: "If you want to know who?s sleeping with whom, who drinks too much or has a fondness for nose candy, this is the place to find it. Karl (Rove) operates under the rule that if you **** with us, we?ll f*ck you over."

Karl Rove, Bush's chief political operative, is said to have begun the list while working on George W. Bush's gubernatorial run in Texas and was dramatically expanded following the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001. Rove allegedly made use of the FBI's "national security letters" to garner private information on perceived foes. The letters allow the FBI to intercept phone, financial, and internet records without the subjects knowledge, or judicial oversight. The letters are routinely sent to employers, banks, and other sources deemed likely to possess personal data. Those contacted are forbidden, on pain of prosecution, from informing individuals targeted.

Commenting on the list, a White House staffer said: "We?re talking about Big Brother at its most extreme. We know things about people that their spouses don?t know and, if it becomes politically expedient, we will make sure the rest of the world knows."

The White House has so far refused comment on the list.

It is interesting, and has merit, that the White House is backing off of having a government health care option in favor of nonprofit co-ops.

I always thought that the thrust should be to extend Medicare to all, and have the single payer being a nongovernmental agency.

Commentary: How insurance firms drive debate

By Wendell Potter
Special to CNN

Editor's note: Wendell Potter has served since May 2009 as senior fellow on health care at the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit organization that says it seeks to expose "corporate spin and government propaganda." After a 20-year career as a corporate public relations executive, Potter left his job last year as head of communications for one of the nation's largest health insurers, CIGNA Corporation.

(CNN) -- Having grown up in one of the most conservative and Republican places in the country -- East Tennessee -- I understand why many of the people who are showing up at town hall meetings this month are reacting, sometimes violently, when members of Congress try to explain the need for an expanded government role in our health care system.

I also have a lot of conservative friends, including one former co-worker who was laid off by CIGNA several years ago but who nonetheless worries about a "government takeover" of health care.

The most vocal folks at the town hall meetings seem to share the same ideology as my kinfolks in East Tennessee and my former CIGNA buddy: the less government involvement in our lives, the better.

That point couldn't have been made clearer than by the man standing in line to get free care at Remote Area Medical's recent health care "expedition" at the Wise County, Virginia, fairgrounds, who told a reporter he was dead set against President Obama's reform proposal.

Even though he didn't have health insurance, and could see the desperation in the faces of thousands of others all around him who were in similar straits, he was more worried about the possibility of having to pay more taxes than he was eager to make sure he and his neighbors wouldn't have to wait in line to get care provided by volunteer doctors in animal stalls. VideoWatch Potter interview with Sanjay Gupta »

Friday morning my former CIGNA buddy sent me an e-mail challenging something he said his wife heard me say in a radio report about my press conference in the Capitol on Wednesday with Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-New York, chairwoman of the House Rules Committee.

"She heard you say that these protestors are funded by the insurance companies. Frankly, nothing would surprise me, but certainly not each and every person," he wrote. "If there was a meeting near me, I certainly would tell my local representative how I feel about this entire subject (and it wouldn't be pretty), and I certainly am not funded by anyone. So I am ultimately wondering what proof there is that seemingly ordinary Americans are finally protesting what is going in Washington and there are all of these suggestions of a greater conspiracy."

If the radio report had carried more of my remarks, he might have a better understanding of how the health insurance and its army of PR people are influencing his opinions and actions without his even knowing it.

Until I quit my job last year, I was one of the leaders of that army. I had a very successful career and was my company's voice to the media and the public for several years.

It was my job to "promote and defend" the company's reputation and to try to persuade reporters to write positive stories about the industry's ideas on reform. During the last couple of years of my career, however, I became increasingly worried that the high-deductible plans insurers were beginning to push Americans into would force more and more of us into bankruptcy.

The higher I rose in the company, the more I learned about the tactics insurers use to dump policyholders when they get sick, in order to increase profits and to reward their Wall Street investors. I could not in good conscience continue serving as an industry mouthpiece. And I did not want to be part of yet another industry effort to kill meaningful reform.

I explained during the press conference with Rep. Slaughter how the industry funnels millions of its policyholders' premiums to big public relations firms that provide talking points to conservative talk show hosts, business groups and politicians. I also described how the PR firms set up front groups, again using your premium dollars and mine, to scare people away from reform.

What I'm trying to do as I write and speak out against the insurance industry I was a part of for nearly two decades is to inform Americans that when they hear isolated stories of long waiting times to see doctors in Canada and allegations that care in other systems is rationed by "government bureaucrats," someone associated with the insurance industry wrote the original script.

The industry has been engaging in these kinds of tactics for many years, going back to its successful behind-the-scenes campaign to kill the Clinton reform plan.

A story in Friday's New York Times about the origin of the absurdly false rumor that President Obama's health care proposal would create government-sponsored "death panels" bears out what I have been saying.

The story notes that the rumor emanated "from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating Bill Clinton's health care proposal 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, the lieutenant governor of New York)."

The big PR firms that work for the industry have close connections with those media outlets and stars in the conservative movement. One of their PR firms, which created and staffed a front group in the late '90s to kill the proposed "Patients' Bill of Rights," launched a PR and advertising campaign in conservative media outlets to drum up opposition to the bill.

The message: President Clinton "owed a debt to the liberal base of the Democrat Party and would try to pay back that debt by advancing the type of big government agenda on health care that he failed to get in 1994."

The industry goes to great lengths to keep its involvement in these campaigns hidden from public view. I know from having served on numerous trade group committees and industry-funded front groups, however, that industry leaders are always full partners in developing strategies to derail any reform that might interfere with insurers' ability to increase profits.

So the next time you hear someone warning against a "government takeover" of our health care system, or that the creation of a public health insurance option would send us down the "slippery slope toward socialism," know that someone like I used to be wrote those terms, knowing it might turn many of the very people who would benefit most from meaningful reform into unwitting spokespeople for the industry.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Wendell Potter.

How could a legally mandated "single payer" be anything but the government ???

The pitch for change at the conference is to start with a presentation from Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA, who has said there's a critical need to make Canada's health-care system patient-centred. He will present details from his fact-finding trip to Europe in January, where he met with health groups in England, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and France.

georgeob1 wrote:

How could a legally mandated "single payer" be anything but the government ???

Take for instance the NHS in the UK: there, the public owns the health systems and facilities, not the government.
NB: the term "single payer" just and only describes the funding mechanism - as opposed to e.g. our multiple multiple payers system [actually a mixture with some 'single payer' elements].

On Rush Limbaugh today, a very nice woman called in and reported on a Belgrade, Montana town hall with Obama. Attendees, many not political activists, many first time various citizens turning out to ask questions or hold up signs saying I don't want Obama care, etc., they were inflitrated by in your face Obama minions, probably ACORN. And Pelosi has the gall, the nerve, to call honest hard working Americans at town halls Nazis. Baloney, and that is why Americans are mad and getting madder at Obama and his leftist operatives.

Not by ACORN, that has received tax dollars. Support your own activists, you losers. I don't want your little brown shirts running around running interference for OBAMA. People can speak for themselves, thank you.