Scary conversations and What is Possible
Here is one of the nurses from the health care tour that came last Sunday. I don’t have her name handy (I’m sure it is in a press packet that is not with me at the moment) regardless, she makes a few points.
Patients are put in difficult positions because of the existing health care system, the “political expedience” argument is not valid because we can move to a single payer system if we wanted to do it. We need candidates that are willing to look. Finally, Massa is on board with a single payer health care system. He gets it.
About 0.50 sec mark listen for this ‘I don’t know what to do, I don’t want to bankrupt my family‘. Sick patients are put in a position where they are forced to decide or, at a minimum, feel guilty about placing a financial burden on their families. There are life and death decisions made because of this perceived burden. A burden that doesn’t have to be there.
This nurse envisions a health care system where chooses are rooted in Clinical not Financial discussions. See, this nurse is telling the audience that nurses in countries with universal health care don’t have that conversation with their patients. That conversation/concept is completely foreign to them. Completely foreign.
‘Then she discusses how the debate is shifting from no health care reform to what kind of reform.
At the 2:00 mark, she discusses where the national candidates stand. McCain wants to “unbuild the current system and not replace it with anything”. Obama wants to increase coverage and access but seems to be centered on insurance companies not a single payer system. This, of course, is a false choice.
At the 3:00 mark she makes the argument that we are deciding in advance what to do not out of what is right but what is expedient - politically expedient or the choice between easy wrong or hard right.
At the 4:00 mark she argues it is naive to believe that if it were up to the Insurance companies or Big Pharma, we would move away from an insurance company model. A for profit model where Insurance companies reward shareholders by denying health care. Or I’ll puit it another way - the fox watching the hen house.
A good listen to be sure.
Oh why wouldnt’ we want a Health Care system like this?
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H.R. 676 all the way