David Sirota has a new book coming out titled
Hostile Takeover, How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government - and How We Can Take It Back. I received an advance copy and it is a very good book. Sirota breaks down various corporate talking points into various subsections such as taxes, debt, wages and jobs. Next he highlights the talking points used to promote their agenda then thoroughly debunks the talking point. Below are the highlights from the books health care section.
Americans don't want government involved in health care because it would be bad.
According to a nationwide ABC/Washington Post poll in 2003, Americans by a 2-to-1 margin, 62 to 32 percent, prefer a universal health insurance programs "run by the government and financed with taxpayers' over the current healthcare system...the poll showed 4 in 5 Americans said it is more important to provide universal health care, even if it meant raising taxes, than to hold down taxes and leave some citizens with no coverage..
I have yet to see a poll about "what issue concerns you most" (or something to that effect) where health care is not in the top three issues if not highest. So why all of this supposed negatively about nationalized health care?
The health care industry pays a hell of a lot of money to Congress. Sirota mentions that Newt Gingrigh went to work at the Center for Health Transformation after be let Congress. The Center for Health Transformation is a "front group for the health insurance business." Mike Rogers (R) of Michigan received $270,000 over four years from the health insurance industry. There are some other great examples in the health care chapter following the money from the medical insurance industry to a members of Congress who are than against health care reform.
The bottom line with this issue is the health insurance industry owns very effective mouthpieces.
Limiting Jury Awards Will Automatically Bring Down Health Care Prices.
Here Sirota simply sites relevant history:
The state of California passed a seris of laws in 1975 that capped damages victims of medical malpractice could receive. 13 years later, insurance companies were charging doctors 450% more for malpractice coverage.
In Ohio, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported in 2004 that "more than a year after [the state's] malpractice cap took effect, doctors were paying more for coverage than ever.
In Texas, the nation's largest malpractice insurance company, GE Medical Protective, actually raised physician's premiums by 19% just six months after Texas enacted a cap on malpractice awards.
Boy, those caps on damage awards were
really effective.
Although not in the book, medical malpractice accounts for 2% of total medical spending. Capping 2% of any overall industry isn't going to so do much to overall total costs. The real issue with health care is administrative expenses. (Kash over at Angry Bear wrote about this earlier this year.)
Government involvement in health care will mean rationing, while private insurance doesn't
The whole point of health insurance companies is to ration health care, limiting the amount of coverage patients get in order to save cash. Even the Supreme Court admits that. In 2000, the justices issued a unanimous opinion noting that the existence of HMOs means "there must be rationing and inducement to ration care."
This is an argument I hear all the time and it is so completely bogus it makes me sick. This is the central issue of health insurance companies. In order to make money and increase their profits they must deny coverage for certain procedures because the cost of the procedure would have a negative impact on profits.
American can't afford universal health care coverage because it is too expensive.
the US wastes more on private health-care bureaucracy than it would cost to provide health insurance to all the uninsured. That's right - wastes. As the WHO noted in a separate report, 15 cents of every dollar Americans spend on heath insurance goes to administrative expenses.
It is also why a universal health would eliminate most of that bureaucracy and redundancy, save Americans a huge amount of money and still be able to extent high-coverage top everyone quality The universal health care proposal put forward by 8000 doctors in 2003 would save almost 200 billion a year.
The basic argument here is simple - one payer = far less bureaucracy. Less bureaucracy means more money to spend on patients rather then shuffling papers back and forth. That savings would allow the US to extend coverage to a huge number of uninsured Americans.
I chose to highlight the article on health care because Sirotta is very effective at finding the common arguments, dismantling them and finding great proposals the Dems could put forth. But the rest of the book is just as good and well worth the read.
I should also add I AM REALLY TIRED OF THE DEMS LYING ON THEIR ASSES ABOUT HEALTH CARE.
Update [2006-2-19 12:56:53 by bonddad]:: Mr. Sirota has asked if I could post the following link for more information on the book. So here it is: www.davidsirota.com.