Clinton’s sudden attack on Bernie Sanders’ single-payer health care plan and the millions this attack earns her

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/13/hillary-clinton-single-payer/

Hillary Clinton’s sudden attack on Bernie Sanders’ single-payer health care plan is a dramatic break with Democratic Party doctrine that the problem with single-payer is that it is politically implausible — not that it is a bad idea.

Single-payer, the Canadian-style system in which the government pays for universal health care, takes the health insurance industry out of the picture, saving huge amounts of money. But the health insurance industry has become so rich and powerful that it would never let it happen.

That was certainly Clinton’s position back in the early 1990s, when she was developing her doomed universal coverage proposal for her husband, Bill.

But in the ensuing years, both Clintons have taken millions of dollars in speaking fees from the health care industry. According to public disclosures, Hillary Clinton alone, from 2013 to 2015,  made $2,847,000 from 13 paid speeches to the industry.

This means that Clinton brought in almost as much in speech fees from the health care industry as she did from the banking industry. As a matter of perspective, recall that most Americans don’t earn $2.8 million over their lifetimes.

Hillary Clinton’s record on single-payer dates back to 1993, when she was tasked to help formulate White House policy. According to the notes of former Clinton confidante Diane Blair, Clinton told her husband during a dinner in February 1993 that “managed competition” — a private health insurance market — was “a crock, single payer necessary; maybe add to Medicare.”

She eventually came to believe that the health care industry was too powerful to allow this reform to happen, and the plan she ended up putting together was not single-payer. Also in 1993, two physician advocates for single-payer lobbied her during a meeting at the White House. They said she told them they made a “convincing case, but is there any force on the face of the earth that could counter the hundreds of millions of the dollars the insurance industry would spend fighting that?”

The next year, in response to a question at a financial conference, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton said that if there was not a health care overhaul “by the year 2000 we will have a single-payer system. I don’t think it’s — I don’t think it’s a close call politically. I think the momentum for a single-payer system will sweep the country.”

Behind the scenes, Clinton continued to show interest in a single-payer plan. David Brock wrote that Alain Enthoven, a Stanford professor who had been brought in to help advise on health care, pushed back on what Brock deemed “her bias toward the single-payer plan.”

In 2008, a young medical student named Lisa Goldman queried Clinton about health care during an event she held in New Haven, Connecticut. Goldman told the Boston Globe that Clinton said she believed the plan to be politically unfeasible at the time, however if a bill establishing it reached her desk, she would sign it into law.

Since then, she has shifted to assailing the policy on its merits.

“We don’t have one size fits all; our country is quite diverse. What works in New York City won’t work in Albuquerque,” she told an assorted audience of 20,000 employees of the electronic health records industry on February 26, 2014; the speech earned her $225,500.

These words were later cited by business lobbyists in New York state earlier this year to argue that if even Hillary Clinton opposed single-payer, why should New York adopt it?

Hillary Clinton’s paid speech circuit came to an end as her campaign revved up. But for her husband, with whom she shares a bank account, it hasn’t. This summer, he was the keynote speaker at America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the industry group that poured almost $100 million into trying to defeat health care reforms during the fight over the Affordable Care Act.

As part of her newly found opposition to single-payer on the merits, Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Sanders’ health care plan mischaracterize what he is proposing. For example, she has claimed that his plan, which relies on states to administer the single-payer plan, would turn “over your and my health insurance to governors.”

Warren Gunnels, the policy director of Sanders’ campaign, told The Week that actually this is not the case. If a governor chose not to participate, “citizens would receive coverage from the feds.” It’s actually the Clinton-backed status quo under the Affordable Care Act that is allowing governors to pick and choose who to cover.

by Zaid Jilani

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/13/hillary-clinton-single-payer/

 

'Medicare for All' System Is Good for Nation's Health

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/01/22/debating-medicare-all-system-good-nations-health-say-doctors

The idea of a single-payer healthcare system has entered the presidential debates—and that's a very good thing, a doctors group says, as it is "only equitable, financially responsible and humane cure for our healthcare ills."

In a statement released Friday by the non-partisan Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), its president, Dr. Robert Zarr, calls it "a welcome development," and also refutes a number of myths surrounding such a plan, sometimes referred to as a Medicare-for-all plan, including supposed high costs and lack of public support.

On cost, says Zarr, "Single-payer is the only health reform that pays for itself;" in contrast, "keeping the current private-insurance-based system intact is not [affordable.]"

Enacting a single-payer system would entail "[r]eplacing hundreds of insurers and thousands of different private health plans," and that, in turn, would mean "$400 billion in health spending would be freed up to guarantee coverage to all of the 30 million people who are currently uninsured and to upgrade the coverage of everyone else, including the tens of millions who are underinsured."

As far as the myth of lack of support, Zarr cites various surveys showing a single payer system is backed by a majority of Americans, and points to one survey finding as much as two-thirds of Americans support it, not to mention being backed by numerous medical, political, faith-based, and community organizations.

His statement also points to a study published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health by PNHP members Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, who write that in our current privately financed healthcare system, in fact, taxpayers are footing the bill for about 64 percent of U.S. health spending.

The statement comes days after presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders released the details of his healthcare proposal, saying it is "time for our country to join every other major industrialized nation on Earth and guarantee health care to all citizens as a right, not a privilege."

The plan was welcomed by the 185,000-member National Nurses United, with executive director RoseAnn DeMoro writing, "Instead of being held hostage to a corporate system based on profits and price gouging, with Sanders' Medicare for all plan we can finally have a system based on patient need, with a single standard of quality care for all, regardless of ability to pay, race, gender, age, or where you live. That’s a beautiful thing."

Hillary Clinton, however, said during Sunday's Democratic debate that his proposal would threaten the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and would allow Republicans "an opening to come in and tear down everything we have achieved."

"To tear it up and start over again, pushing our country back into that kind of a contentious debate," she said, "I think is the wrong direction."

Clinton, for her part, proposes "defend[ing] the ACA against Republican efforts to repeal it."

According to CIGNA executive-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter, however, "neither Clinton's nor Sanders' [plan] has much of a chance of being successful unless there are significant changes in the makeup of the Congress that would put Democrats in charge of both chambers again."

And the week before the last debate, as Clinton also took aim at Sanders' healthcare proposal, The Intercept reported that the former secretary of state, "from 2013 to 2015, made $2,847,000 from 13 paid speeches to the [healthcare] industry."

"This means," Zaid Jilani wrote, "that Clinton brought in almost as much in speech fees from the health care industry as she did from the banking industry. As a matter of perspective, recall that most Americans don’t earn $2.8 million over their lifetimes."

Potter said that's a fact that "should concern voters."

Citizens United Anniversary: How Anthony Kennedy Turned American Democracy Into an ‘Open Sewer’

By Joe Conason

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/citizens_united_anniversary_how_anthony_kennedy_american_democracy_20160122

This week marked the anniversary of the Citizens United decision, which exposed American democracy to increasing domination by the country’s very richest and most reactionary figures—modern heirs to those “malefactors of great wealth” condemned by the great Republican Theodore Roosevelt—so it is worth recalling the false promise made by the justice who wrote the majority opinion in that case.

Justice Anthony Kennedy masterminded the Supreme Court’s Jan. 21, 2010 decision to undo a century of public-interest regulation of campaign expenditures in the name of “free speech.” He had every reason to know how damaging to democratic values and public integrity that decision would prove to be.

Once billed as a “moderate conservative,” Kennedy is a libertarian former corporate attorney from Sacramento, who toiled in his father’s scandal-ridden lobbying law firm, “influencing” California legislators, before he ascended to the bench with the help of his friend Ronald Reagan.

While guiding Citizens United through the court on behalf of the Republican Party’s billionaire overseers, it was Kennedy who came up with a decorative fig leaf of justification:

With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions. This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.

As Jane Mayer’s superb new book “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” reveals in excruciating but fascinating detail, Kennedy’s assertion about the Internet insuring disclosure and accountability was nothing but a little heap of happy horse-product. “Independent” expenditures from super-rich right-wing donors have overwhelmed the opponents of their chosen candidates, promoting a durable Republican takeover of Congress—often through the deployment of false advertising and false-flag organizations.

Late last year, Kennedy confessed that his vaunted “transparency” is “not working the way it should,” a feeble excuse since he had every reason to know from the beginning that his professed expectation of “prompt disclosure” of all political donations was absurdly unrealistic.

The Citizens United debacle led directly to the Republican takeover of the Senate as well as the House. Last week, the Brennan Center for Justice released a new study showing that “dark money”—that is, donations whose origin remains secret from news organizations and voters—has more than doubled in Senate races during the past six years, from $105 million to $226 million in 2014.

During the past three election cycles, outside groups spent about $1 billion total on Senate races, of which $485 million came from undisclosed sources. In the 11 most competitive Senate races in 2014, almost 60 percent of the spending by “independent” groups came from those murky places, and the winners of those races benefited from $171 million of such spending.

In elections gone by, when anonymous smear leaflets would appear in local races—funded by nobody knew whom—political operatives would shake their heads and mutter about “sewer money.”

Today we can thank Justice Kennedy, who was either poorly informed or willfully ignorant, for turning American democracy into a stinking open sewer.

What a legacy.