Simple. They wouldn’t be able to Steal nearly as much.
From Bill Moyers documenting the Right Wing Hate-mongers almost successful game plan to discredit the TRUTH exposed by the film “Sicko”… Just painting anybody who believed it as a “lefty loon” wouldn’t be enough… Although our Friendly Right Wing Spokespersons use that attack method.
Mainly because aside from sending out one-man Terrorist Hit Squads to shoot up churches and Museums they don’t have anything else.
But seriously, our Libertarian friends would have us believe that people with lots of money, gotten from a couple hundred years of blatant THEFT, wouldn’t spend any of that ill-gotten gain as a buffer to protect the rest of it.
And some of the blatant and boastful confession of Theft and Anti-American activity.
Yeah, doing things, either for ideology or for profit, that KILL Americans, like, for instance, promoting the massive denial of health care, that’s pretty much Anti-American.
9/11 only killed 3,000.
More Americans die from inadequate health care every week. So, Right Wing For-Profit Terrorists,
Yes, I DID just conflate you with Osama bin Laden.
Whatcha gonna do about it?
BILL MOYERS: So what did you think when you saw that film?
WENDELL POTTER: I thought that he hit the nail on the head with his movie. But the industry, from the moment that the industry learned that Michael Moore was taking on the health care industry, it was really concerned.
BILL MOYERS: What were they afraid of?
WENDELL POTTER: They were afraid that people would believe Michael Moore.
BILL MOYERS: We obtained a copy of the game plan that was adopted by the industry’s trade association, AHIP. And it spells out the industry strategies in gold letters. It says, “Highlight horror stories of government-run systems.” What was that about?
WENDELL POTTER: The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you’re heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern.
BILL MOYERS: And there was a political strategy. “Position Sicko as a threat to Democrats’ larger agenda.” What does that mean?
WENDELL POTTER: That means that part of the effort to discredit this film was to use lobbyists and their own staff to go onto Capitol Hill and say, “Look, you don’t want to believe this movie. You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to endorse it. And if you do, we can make things tough for you.”
BILL MOYERS: How?
WENDELL POTTER: By running ads, commercials in your home district when you’re running for reelection, not contributing to your campaigns again, or contributing to your competitor.
BILL MOYERS: This is fascinating. You know, “Build awareness among centrist Democratic policy organizations–”
WENDELL POTTER: Right.
BILL MOYERS: “–including the Democratic Leadership Council.”
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: Then it says, “Message to Democratic insiders. Embracing Moore is one-way ticket back to minority party status.”
WENDELL POTTER: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: Now, that’s exactly what they did, didn’t they? They–
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: –radicalized Moore, so that his message was discredited because the messenger was seen to be radical.
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely. In memos that would go back within the industry — he was never, by the way, mentioned by name in any memos, because we didn’t want to inadvertently write something that would wind up in his hands. So the memos would usually– the subject line would be– the emails would be, “Hollywood.” And as we would do the media training, we would always have someone refer to him as Hollywood entertainer or Hollywood moviemaker Michael Moore.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, just to– Hollywood, I think people think that’s entertainment, that’s movie-making. That’s not real documentary. They don’t want you to think that it was a documentary that had some truth. They would want you to see this as just some fantasy that a Hollywood filmmaker had come up with. That’s part of the strategy.
BILL MOYERS: So you would actually hear politicians mouth the talking points that had been circulated by the industry to discredit Michael Moore.
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: You’d hear ordinary people talking that. And politicians as well, right?
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: So your plan worked.
WENDELL POTTER: It worked beautifully.
BILL MOYERS: The film was blunted, right?
WENDELL POTTER: The film was blunted.
Either you believe a person has the right to keep the property he has earned, or you don’t. There is no middle ground. If you believe that a person has the right to keep that property, then you cannot believe that another person has the right to take (in the form of taxes) that property (in this case money) to pay for a service (in this case health care). People do not have a right to force others to labor (or risk their property) for no gain.
Universal health care is just another welfare program where the person who makes a good faith effort to follow the rules is punished for doing so. In welfare, if you work, you are punished by having the fruits of your labor stolen to support a person who (for whatever reason) does not labor. With universal health care, the healthier you are (you take care of yourself and decide not to get insurance, or to self-insure) you are punished (fined), or you wind up paying more in taxes than you would have paid in premiums because you are , in effect, paying the premiums of those who use the system, and don’t have to pay.
>>promoting the massive denial of health care
denying health care, and refusing to work for free are 2 different things.
Health care was not terribly expensive until the government put its nose in it with medicare. Then is when the prices started to skyrocket. So, logically, the solution to the high cost of health care would be to get government out. Then the market would set the price, instead of government. If enough people will not pay high prices, the providers will either lower prices, or go bankrupt. If one provider gives bad service, then he loses customers.
The medicare system has taken the voice of the patient out of the “payment loop” and has politicians and bureaucrats setting prices, instead of the ones providing, or using the service. With the present system there is no incentive to give good service, or to lower prices. The more customers you see, the more money you get. It doesn’t matter what kind of service you give those customers, because they are not the ones who pay you. You don’t have to lower prices, because even if the customers complain, they have no “pull” because they are not the ones who pay.
copycat
must be really hard for you to talk with that silver spoon in your mouth.
Most Americans aren’t that fortunate.
I’ll see your headaches with Medicaid and VA and raise you A Pair of Privatized Hospitals in Texas, Parkland in Dallas and JPS in Ft Worth, where AMERICANS die in the Emergency Room waiting for the Privatized-by-Republican-Choice health “care”.
P.S. your ChickenHawk Tea-Baggers look stupid in their “patriot” costumes.
Especially the ones who pretend to be Revolutionary Soldiers.
I guess it would be more effective if they weren’t so obviously staged, and if they were to get real soldiers or better yet Real Patriots to play the parts.
Anybody who blames Medicare for the mess that capitalist profit making has made in the US unhealth system is just plain totally lost in the Outer Space of the ideological blinders of his own arrogance and his own addiction to the stupidity of the ´Libertarian´religion. I´d rather talk to a Jehovah Witness about God than with people this sick.
Tony, I do not blame medicare for the increase in health costs, I blame it for blunting the only weapon the consumer has against rising costs, his money. When medicare began paying, the consumer was no longer able to say “do not raise your price, or we will go elsewhere”. Once that weapon can no longer be used against them, the providers will raise the price to the new “market value” , namely, “whatever the government will pay”. Since the government does not have to earn the money itself, (it steals it from workers in the form of taxes) it does not greatly care how much it pays. Therefore, that “market value” is very high. Yes, the medical industry has taken advantage of a very favorable (for them) situation. But GOVERNMENT created that situation. If you take government out of the equation, you give the weapon back to the patient. If you put more government into this situation, the problem will get worse.
looking forward to your comments
copycat
‘Why do the Right Wing Lunatic Fringe Hate Universal Health Care?’
A better question, Jonah, would be … Why do Obama and all the other pseudo liberal Democratic Party head hacks hate Universal Health Care?’ And they do.
It’s something that has to happen. Americans are already literally dying in the streets due to the Status Quo. And Privatization-gone-amok.
Since the Right Wing hasn’t anything besides “more Reaganite Bullshit” and “give the Private sector more Public Money” any policy which caters or compromises to that is going to be so insufficient that it would take nothing less than the most massive police state ever to hold the people down.
Privatized, of course.
copy cat, YOUR side has had almost thirty years of almost complete unfettered access to the public money without public oversight, aka “government regulation”.
Thieves like Cheney and Bush and Wolfowicz have done what, exactly? to benefit the economy.
Reagans Voodoo Economics has FAILED. Completely.
Yet we’re supposed to trust these bastards with more leeway, more money and less regulation? Fuck that.
It is Status Quo, but it is not “Privatization-gone-amok”. The government has its hands in it, in the form of medicare. That makes it “semi-nationalization-gone-amok”
To use an example from another thread:
In the “safeway” situation, the striking workers have a resource (their labor) that they are withholding from the store owners, in order to force a change in the valuation of that resource (the “market value”). If the government were to bring in labor (scab labor) from somewhere else, and charge less than what the striking workers were making in the first place, how effective would that strike be? Would the value of the workers’ labor go up (change)?
Now let’s substitute the players: The patients are the “workers”, The patients’ money is their “labor”, The cost of health care is the “market value” of the labor (basically, how much health care a dollar will buy) and medicare is the “scab labor”.
The medicare system (scab labor), at present, prevents any “strike” by the patients (taking their money elsewhere), from being effective in changing the price (“market value”) of the health care.
The only thing that makes a strike effective is the threat of losing money on the part of the employer. As long as the medical providers are getting that money from the government (in the form of medicare, or universal health care) they are not going to lose enough money to force them to lower prices. If you remove that stream of “public money” from going into the pockets of the medical providers, the only source of money left is the patients. The patients’ money supply will be a relatively fixed resource that different providers will have to compete for. This competition will drive down prices.
I agree there, that is why I suggest letting the “private sector” A.K.A. “the individual” keep the money he earns, and not funneling it (in the form of taxes) through the government which will care little where it goes, because government did not earn it. The government didn’t load the truck, or stock the shelves, or machine the lower gear casing, to earn that money. They just stole it from the workers who did all those things.
“my side” has had little or no control over policy since the Keynesians took over in 1913. I am a “Von Mises, Rothbard, Friedman”, kind of guy, not a Reaganite.
Worse than nothing, and the current policies will be even worse.
I suggest trusting the government with as little money as possible. I suggest making the consumer the only source of income for businesses.
copycat
The Denver Post has a surprisingly good commentary, ‘PERSPECTIVE
Debunking Canadian health care myths’ by Rhonda Hackett. You might check it out if you have not already read it…
http://www.denverpost.com/popular/ci_12523427?source=pop_hourly
I am reading these posts by copy cat with dismay, when I finally come across an intriguing statement:
The second half of the statement is typical of capitalism – nothing really wrong with that, I understand. The first half of the statement is interesting. Let me pose a question: what would happen if we were to privatize EVERYTHING? I mean our police, fire, utilities, administration, schools, retirement, military, etc. What would happen if we left everything up to the whims of the market? The result would be feudalism – the world tried that and it didn’t work. The people revolted in country after country.
Private health care has failed us. The idea that Americans can “vote with their dollars” in this industry is ridiculous. If we could, we would have forced prices down long ago. The government is not to blame for rising health care costs – Medicare pays more than 100% for the actual cost of services and equipment. I’ve seen Medicare claims – A wheelchair really is billed at $1100 per month for a year – Medicare has to pay that amount less 20%. That same wheelchair would cost $400-$600 on the open market!
And for the love of god, stop saying that government workers are getting compensated with stolen labor. The government provides services to us like the bunch I listed above – I want those services and I don’t want to pay private companies to do them.
I would argue that any further privatization of government programs IS nationalization by a fascist regime. Once corporations control everything (and they almost do), they are in fact and name the rulers of our society.
Koyunbaba
Not sure I follow you. Medicare, on behalf of its patients, already pays a lower price than “market value” of health care. It is able to do this through its huge bargaining power – something one patient threatening to “take his money elsewhere” would never be able to accomplish.
Sounds like a nice theory in abstract, but the facts on the ground don’t back it up. First of all, you’re lumping all patients under one category, which is certainly something the private industry doesn’t do.
In the case of Medicare, most patients are the elderly or disabled. This is a demographic the private market doesn’t even want, and in fact, the only way they would take them would be to charge yearly premiums at a minimum of $20K.
Even that wouldn’t be enough for insurers to keep their shareholders happy. They’d almost surely raise the rates on all of us to make up for the colossal number of new claims they would be paying out for all the millions of baby boomer policy holders.
We see something similar now in employer-paid private insurance coverage, where employers pay the exact same (and high premium) for all of it’s employers. To make up for the fact that some employees have poorer health than others, insurers charge our employers a flat high rate for all employees.
That’s absolutely not true. Health care has always been expensive, by the very nature of what it provides. Thus, the business model of health insurance was born, to make health *care* more accessible to your average Joe.
Of course today, this business model has essentially morphed into pre-paid health care, not insurance. And we’re right back at square one: fewer and fewer people can afford to buy in.
“Medicare” did not cause this, as Medicare serves a completely different demographic of patients. I really think it’s a matter of explosive population growth, a limitless array of new technologies and advancements in medical care that everyone naturally wants access to, and of course, the increased shareholder pressure on publicly traded insurance companies to deliver profits at any cost.