Health Care Reform

for industry see Insurance/HMO

see new node Health care 2 aca

see Obamacare and ACA 4

Tea party AFT town hall fuckery

this capt 318 bak

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guk

...While working for big tobacco to stop Bill Clinton’s healthcare reform, Ailes also began producing a syndicated TV show for the radio “shock-jock” Rush Limbaugh, which became a hit. He took over the failing CNBC business channel, tripled its profits and made stars of the combative host Chris Matthews and stunning business reporter Maria Bartiromo, setting a formula he followed at Fox: men apparently chosen for bombast and women for looks. But when a second channel he started for NBC, called America Talks, was taken from him and turned into MSNBC, Ailes left the network in 1996 and teamed up with Rupert Murdoch to launch Fox News.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republican-frat-boy/

FOX MURDOCH BROKE AMERICA? DEMOC?

common dr 421

...Oh, for a simpler, saner time – and I don't mean that white American idyll that never was, a rightwing fever dream in which all is falsely remembered as sunshine, jellybeans and petroleum products burnt without a care. Rather, as columnist Frida Ghitis notes, "It wasn't very long ago that the country had two reality-based, generally centrist parties. Democrats and Republicans, with different philosophies, debated the merits of their ideas, in search of a workable compromise.

But then, bit by bit, the GOP started veering in a different direction. By the time Trump became president, the maximalist, nativist, conspiracy-driven, scandal-manufacturing, hate-stoking wing was already ascendant, propelled by the engines of Fox News and other far-right provocateurs. Trump's victory was the coup that toppled the old GOP and turned it into the extremist MAGA machine.

And now, what's left? A handful of old-fashioned, conservative Republicans in Congress and their supporters who apparently still believe in some semblance of democracy and the republic that gave their party its name. But they're overwhelmed by a crowd of fanatics and sycophants: men and women, in Frida Ghitis' words, busily "promoting the delegitimization of America's duly elected president, people who are endorsing or refusing to rectify dangerous lies."

You know who they are: Cruz, Hawley, Graham, Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, et al. They include, of course, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, "rewarded by recklessness," to use campaign strategist Rick Wilson's phrase, and as of this moment still standing, despite more and more evidence of his misogyny and possible abusive behavior, sexual and otherwise.

Like so many among these ranks, Trump fanboy Gaetz is one of the smarmy, privileged, attenuated frat boys who refuse to believe that rules and norms apply to them – much like the man who was their president and would be forever more if the rest of us become indifferent and lower our guard. Gaetz cares about his job title only as far as it gets him booked on talk shows and the lecture circuit – so far, he has failed to sponsor a single piece of significant legislation.

In his new memoir, former Republican House Speaker John Boehner describes these types of Republican rabblerousers as "the chaos caucus," not caring about the country but only about their power base and appearances on Fox News and right wing talk radio: "They didn't really want legislative victories," Boehner writes. "They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades."

Not that Boehner is blameless. He and so many Republican colleagues let themselves be bullied, then acquiesced to our current dilemma, yielding to those pledged to lunacy and a lemming-like fealty to a president as bereft of thought and feeling as they are. You see the results: a shattered party not of ideas and programs, but only insults and bogus intrigues. No wonder the Biden infrastructure proposals infuriate them; they have nothing to offer in return.(Remember Trump's Infrastructure Week, always imminent but never occurring over the whole four years of his presidency?)

They fear any and all success during Biden's first term. Think back to 1993, when now anti-Trumpist conservative Bill Kristol advised Republicans to shun any healthcare plan from Bill and Hillary Clinton. In a memo—Kristol was then head of the Project for the Republican Future—he warned his colleagues, "It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."...

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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/bismarck-tried-end-socialisms-grip-offering-government-healthcare-180964064/

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Speaks_Out_Against_Socialized_Medicine

Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine is a 1961 LP featuring Ronald Reagan. In this more than ten-minute recording, Reagan "criticized Social Security for supplanting private savings and warned that subsidized medicine would curtail Americans' freedom" and that "pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him."^[1] Roger Lowenstein called the LP part of a "stealth program" conducted by the American Medical Association (see Operation Coffee Cup).^[1]

1Summary

Summary

Reagan opens by saying that in 1927 socialist Norman Thomas said that the American people would never vote for socialism, but "under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program." Snopes.com calls this attribution probably false, arguing that "no one has ever been able to turn up a source".^[2]

Reagan says that "Government has invaded the free precincts of private citizens," stating that the U.S. government owns "1/5 of the total industrial capacity of the United States." Reagan says "One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it." Reagan cites the failure of president Harry Truman's national health insurance proposal as evidence of the American people's rejection of socialized medicine.

Reagan describes Representative Aime Forand as having introduced a bill which would institute "compulsory health insurance" for all people of social security age. Forand is quoted as having said, “If we can only break through and get our foot inside the door, then we can extend the program after that." Forand is likened to labor union leader Walter Reuther, who is quoted as having said, "It’s no secret that the United Automobile Workers is officially on record of backing a program of national health insurance." The Forand bill is described as being praised by socialists: "They say once the Forand bill is passed this nation will be provided with a mechanism for socialized medicine capable of indefinite expansion in every direction until it includes the entire population. Now we can’t say we haven’t been warned."

Reagan describes Representative Cecil R. King of California as the successor to Congressman Forand in his support for a bill that would provide senior citizens with medical care. (The 1962 King-Anderson bill is often described as a precursor to the Social Security Act of 1965, which established Medicare.) Reagan cites the expansion of private health insurance and the passage of the 1960 Kerr-Mills Act, which provided federal funds to states to cover the "medically needy," as evidence that King's legislation is unnecessary. Reagan concludes that the new bill is "simply an excuse to bring about what they wanted all the time: socialized medicine." Reagan warns against the danger of encroaching on the relationship between patients and doctors, and of an attack on doctors' freedoms.

Reagan encourages his listeners to join a letter-writing campaign to Congress with the message, "We do not want socialized medicine." Reagan quotes Representative Charles A. Halleck of Indiana as having said, "When the American people wants something from Congress, regardless of its political complexion, if they make their wants known, Congress does what the people want." Reagan warns that if his listeners do not stop the proposed medical program, "behind it will come other government programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as Norman Thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism." Under this scenario, Reagan says, "We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."

Criticism

In 1966 Governor Pat Brown, campaigning for re-election against Reagan, said of Reagan's speech about socialized medicine, that Reagan was "an enemy of social progress," who had "hired" out to the American Medical Association.^[3] In response, Reagan accused him of "pure demagoguery" in suggesting that California's elderly had reason to fear a Reagan victory in the race for governor.^[4]

In 1980 President Jimmy Carter, campaigning for re-election against Reagan, told crowds that: "As a traveling salesman for the American Medical Association campaign against Medicare, [Reagan] sowed the fear that Medicare would mean socialism and that it would lead to the destruction of our freedom." When the subject arose in a televised debate in late October, Reagan responded: "When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought it would be better for the senior citizens. ... I was not opposing the principle of providing care for them..." Carter's campaign accused Reagan of "rewriting history", saying that there was no such alternative legislation.^[5]

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BM:

BM: Destroying Health Care

One of NAFTA's most nefarious consequences will be the dismantlement of Canada's government-run health care system. Since it places very strict limits on what domestic or foreign corporations can do, its more progressive features--such as compulsory licensing in order to control drug costs-- will eventually be challenged as barriers to trade. Once the Canadian system is gutted by NAFTA's notoriously secretive and undemocratic dispute resolution mechanisms, Canadian citizens will have no choice but to turn to the 'free market' for medical services and insurance.

However, American and Canadian pharmaceutical and insurance companies that want to crack open the Canadian market are frustrated by the fact that Canadians are very happy with their health care system. Worse yet, more and more Americans, especially in Vermont, are now calling for the introduction of single-payer health insurance in their country--a step in the direction of a Canadian-style system. This presents a grave problem for neoliberal demagogues, since it exposes the basic conflict between capitalism and democracy.

Enter Burson-Marsteller's health care unit, whose staff includes "a medical doctor/physician; former FDA (Food and Drug Administration) commissioner; former hospital administrator; former pharmaceutical communications executives; former non-profit communications chiefs; grassroots specialists, and former reporters" according to the senior editor of O'Dwyer's newsletter, which monitors the PR business.

B-M has plenty of experience in matters of public health. On behalf of client Philip Morris, B-M created the National Smokers' Alliance (NSA) to fight against smoking restrictions. According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, the NSA "is a state-of-the-art campaign that uses full- page newspaper ads, direct telemarketing, paid canvassers, (toll free) numbers and newsletters to bring thousands of smokers into its ranks each week. By 1995 NSA claimed a membership of 3 million smokers". The NSA is headed by B-M vice-president Thomas Humber and its members include B-M executives Pierre Salinger and Kennetz Rietz, as well as Peter Kelly, senior partner of B-M subsidiary Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly (see sidebar). In addition to this, B-M was hired by the A.H. Robbins company when its Dalkon Shield IUD contraceptive injured thousands of women who used it, and it is now currently promoting the 'virtues' of Eli Lilly's anti-depressant wonder drug Prozac.

The winners of the health care debate in the US were beyond any doubt the pharmeceutical transnational corporations (eleven of which are B-M clients) and the major insurance companies (which include B-M clients Met Life, Equitable Life, Aetna, State Farm and Mutal of Omaha). Now both businesses are vertically integrating themselves into superconglomerates known as health maintenance organizations (HMO's). According to Joyce Nelson, "During 1994 both the pharmaceutical industry and the private insurance industry consolidated into even bigger players on the health care scene, with B-M playing a major role in arranging the mergers among its clients". HMO's are not required to cover all illnesses or people, but can instead discriminate against elderly citizens and/or people with health problems in order to reduce operating costs.

http://home.intekom.com/tm_info/ge_bm.htm

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/31/1227946/-Montana-Experiment-Brings-NHS-Style-Health-Care-to-USA-Saves-State-Millions-Patients-Delighted

kos:

Maybe, finally, the Republicans have jumped the shark in their fight against Obamcare. Maybe it was the 39th repeal vote in the House. Maybe it's the Senate nihilists call to shut the whole government down in order to defund the law. Whatever did it, they've lost American Enterprise Institute thinker Norm Ornstein, and when you've lost the AEI ...

For three years, Republicans in the Senate refused to confirm anybody to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the post that McClellan had held in 2003-04—in order to damage the possibility of a smooth rollout of the health reform plan. Guerrilla efforts to cut off funding, dozens of votes to repeal, abusive comments by leaders, attempts to discourage states from participating in Medicaid expansion or crafting exchanges, threatening letters to associations that might publicize the availability of insurance on exchanges, and now a new set of threats—to have a government shutdown, or to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, unless the president agrees to stop all funding for implementation of the plan. [...]

What is going on now to sabotage Obamacare is not treasonous—just sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials with the fiduciary responsibility of governing. [...] [T]o do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one's breath away.

Warren won, but he didn’t like the way he had won. Just before the election, after Whitaker and Baxter issued a press release without his approval, he fired them. They never forgave him.

In the fall of 1944, Warren got a serious kidney infection. This set him thinking about the rising costs of medical care, and the catastrophic effects that sudden illness could have on a family less well provided for than his own. “I came to the conclusion that the only way to remedy this situation was to spread the cost through insurance,” he wrote in his memoirs. He asked his staff to develop a proposal. “We concluded that health insurance should be collected through the Social Security System. After some studies, it was determined that the employers and employees in that system should each contribute one and one half per cent of wages paid by or to them.” After conferring with the California Medical Association, he anticipated no objections from doctors. And so, in January of 1945, during his State of the State address, he announced his proposal for comprehensive, compulsory health insurance for the state of California.

Earl Warren began his political career as a conservative and ended it as one of the most hated liberals in American history. What happened to him? One answer is: Whitaker and Baxter.

Retained by the California Medical Association for an annual fee of twenty-five thousand dollars to campaign against the Governor’s plan, Whitaker and Baxter took a piece of legislation that most people liked and taught them to hate it. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” they liked to say. They launched a drive for Californians to buy their own insurance, privately. Voluntary Health Insurance Week, driven by forty thousand inches of advertising in more than four hundred newspapers, was observed in fifty-three of the state’s fifty-eight counties. Whitaker and Baxter sent more than nine thousand doctors out with prepared speeches. They coined a slogan: “Political medicine is bad medicine.”

They lobbied newspaper editors. Whitaker boasted that “our people have personally called at more than 500 newspaper offices,” to persuade editors to change their positions. Many of these newspapers did a vast amount of advertising business with Campaigns, Inc., and received hundreds of words of free copy, each week, from the California Feature Service. “In three years,” Whitaker reported, “the number of newspapers supporting socialized medicine has dwindled from fifty to about twenty. The number of papers opposing compulsory health insurance has jumped from about 100 to 432.”

They invented an enemy. They sent out twenty-seven thousand copies of a pamphlet called “The Health Question,” which featured a picture of a man, a woman, and a child in the woods—“a forest of fear”—menaced by skeletons who have in their mouths, instead of teeth, the word “BILL.” Whitaker and Baxter sent out two and a half million copies of another pamphlet, called “Politically-Controlled Medicine.” They printed postcards, for voters to stick in the mail:

Dear Senator:

Please vote against all Compulsory Health Insurance Bills pending before the Legislature. We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we don’t want to be forced to go to “A State doctor,” or to pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not. That system was born in Germany—and is part and parcel of what our boys are fighting overseas. Let’s not adopt it here

In 1945, Warren’s bill failed to pass by just one vote. As Warren’s biographer G. Edward White remarked, “The scuttling of his health insurance plan was a confirmation for Warren of the nature of the political process, in which advocates of programs based on humanity and common sense were pitted against selfish, vindictive special interests.” Warren reintroduced the bill. And again Whitaker and Baxter defeated it. “They stormed the Legislature with their invective,” Warren later wrote, “and my bill was not even accorded a decent burial.” It was the greatest legislative victory at the hands of admen the country had ever seen. It was not, of course, the last.

In 1945, months after Earl Warren proposed compulsory health insurance in California, Harry Truman proposed a national program. “The health of American children, like their education, should be recognized as a definite public responsibility,” the President said. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1946, Truman’s proposed federal health-insurance program, which, like Warren’s, was funded by a payroll tax, stalled. In his State of the Union address in 1948, an election year, Truman urged passage of his plan, which enjoyed widespread popular support. In November, Truman won the election. Days afterward, the American Medical Association called up the San Francisco offices of Campaigns, Inc. The A.M.A. retained Whitaker and Baxter at a fee of a hundred thousand dollars a year, and with an annual budget of more than a million dollars, to thwart Truman’s plan. The A.M.A. raised the money by assessing twenty-five dollars a year from every one of its members.

At the beginning of 1949, Whitaker and Baxter, the directors of the A.M.A.’s National Education Campaign, entered national politics, setting up headquarters in Chicago, with a staff of thirty-seven. “This must be a campaign to arouse and alert the American people in every walk of life, until itgenerates a great public crusade and a fundamental fight for freedom,” their Plan of Campaign began. “Any other plan of action, in view of the drift toward socialization and despotism all over the world, would invite disaster.” But when Whitaker told the Washington press corps, at a luncheon, thatthe F.B.I. was terrorizing the A.M.A., the Washington Post offered that maybe the A.M.A., at the hands of Whitaker and Baxter, ought to stop “whipping itself into a neurosis and attempting to terrorize the whole American public every time the Administration proposes a Welfare Department or a health program.”

Whitaker and Baxter went to Washington and persuaded a hundred congressmen to let them read their constituent mail. At the start of the campaign, Whitaker reported, mail from voters “was running four and half to one in favor” of Truman’s plan. Whitaker and Baxter went to work. “Nine months later it was running four to one against.”

By then, Campaigns, Inc., had come to seem, at least to a handful of critics, nefarious and mysterious. “There isn’t any mystery about it,” Whitaker insisted. In a brilliant maneuver, Whitaker had “A Simplified Blueprint of the Campaign Against Compulsory Health Insurance” distributed, by the hundreds of thousands, to reporters and editors, among others, and to every member of Congress.

Meanwhile, inside Campaigns, Inc., a much more detailed Plan of Campaign circulated, in typescript, marked “CONFIDENTIAL:— NOT FOR PUBLICATION.” (It can be found with the firm’s papers, which are housed at the California State Archives, in Sacramento.) It reads, in part:

The immediate objective is the defeat of the compulsory health insurance program pending in Congress. 2. The long-termobjective is to put a permanent stop to the agitation for socialized medicine in this country by (a) awakening the people to the danger of a politically-controlled, government-regulated health system; (b) convincing the people, through a Nation wide campaign of education, of the superior advantages of private medicine, as practiced in America, over the State-dominated medical systems of other countries; (c) stimulating the growth of voluntary health insurance systems to take the economic shock out of illness and increase the availability of medical care to the American people.

As Whitaker and Baxter put it, in an earlier version of the plan, “Basically, the issue is whether we are to remain a free Nation, in which the individual can work out his own destiny, or whether we are to take one of the final steps toward becoming a Socialist or Communist State. We have to paint the picture, in vivid verbiage that no one can misunderstand, of Germany, Russia—and finally, England.” They settled on a slogan: “KEEP POLITICS OUT OF MEDICINE.” And they settled on a smear, one that they had used against Warren’s plan: they called Truman’s plan “socialized medicine.”

In an attempt to educate every doctor, nurse, and druggist in the United States about the dangers of socialized medicine, they went on the road. Whitaker, speaking to two hundred doctors at a meeting of the Council of the New England Medical Societies, said:

Hitler and Stalin and the socialist government of Great Britain all have used the opiate of socialized medicine to deaden the pain of lost liberty and lull the people into non-resistance. Old World contagion of compulsory health insurance, if allowed to spread to our New World, will mark the beginning of the end of free institutions in America. It will only be a question of time until the railroads, the steel mills, the power industry, the banks and the farming industry are nationalized.

Political advertising, he said, was the last best hope of democracy: “We’re going to put the foes of American medicine on trial before the bar of public opinion, and let the people decide.”

To that end, the National Education Campaign sent out millions of pieces of mail. It wasn’t always well met. “RECEIVED YOUR SCARE LETTER. AND HOW PITYFUL,” an angry pharmacist wrote from Stamford, New York. “I DO HOPE PRESIDENT TRUMAN HAS HIS WAY. GOOD LUCK TO HIM.”

Whitaker and Baxter liked to talk about their work as “grass roots” campaigning. The fight against socialized medicine was a case in point: “The A.M.A. in its campaign is carrying its case to the people of America in a grass roots crusade which we hope, with your help, and the help of tens of thousands of others, will reach every corner of this country.” Not everyone was convinced that a lavishly paid advertising agency distributing 7.5 million copies of a pamphlet called “The Voluntary Way Is the American Way” to doctors’ offices constituted a “grass roots” movement. “Dear Sirs,” one doctor wrote them. “Is it 2 ½ or 3 ½ million dollars you have allotted for your ‘grass roots lobby’?”

Whitaker and Baxter’s campaign against Harry Truman’s national-health-insurance proposal cost the A.M.A. nearly five million dollars, and it took more than three years. But they turned the President’s sensible, popular, and urgently needed legislative reform into a bogeyman so scary that, even today, millions of Americans are still scared.

Truman was furious. As to what in his plan could possibly be construed as “socialized medicine,” he told the press in 1952, he didn’t know what in the Sam Hill that could be. He had one more thing to say: there was “nothing in this bill that came any closer to socialism than the payments the American Medical Association makes to the advertising firm of Whitaker and Baxter to misrepresent my health program.”

Carey McWilliams had kept an eye on Whitaker and Baxter since Uppie and Downey, since Ham and Eggs, since Earl Warren and the C.M.A. He pitched to The Nation a story about Whitaker and Baxter. His editor, Harold Field, wanted it straightaway, but McWilliams put him off. He said that he needed to go to San Francisco and “dig out the facts.”

He wrote Whitaker and Baxter, requesting an interview. “The questions are serious and they are neither barbed nor loaded,” he promised. “I really am not captious: I’m simply curious.” He met them. He liked them. He just happened to disagree with their political agenda, and, more, he thought that their business was bad for democracy. He wrote the piece and, in May of 1950, sent Whitaker and Baxter a draft. They read it and sent changes, correcting a few small matters of fact. But they were disappointed by a revised draft.

“We are not quite the diabolical characters you have portrayed,” Whitaker wrote McWilliams. “I am disappointed that you were disappointed,” McWilliams replied. “Don’t you agree that about the best we can hope for or expect on this score is the maximum good will, factual accuracy, and the observance of some fundamentals of fair play?”

“Government by Whitaker and Baxter” appeared in The Nation in three parts, in April and May of 1951. Whitaker and Baxter wrote McWilliams, “It seems to both of us that while you have not spared the spurs where you feel they will do the most good, you certainly have not done anything to injure Whitaker and Baxter personally. Everything considered, that may have been quite a strain. We are deeply grateful, Carey.”

McWilliams, as Whitaker and Baxter must have very well understood, had played by different rules from theirs. He hadn’t been simple. He hadn’t attacked them. He had taken time to explain. He hadn’t invented an enemy. He hadn’t taken remarks out of context. He hadn’t made anything up. He hadn’t lied.

“In labor and liberal circles in California people hiss when Whitaker and Baxter are mentioned,” he reported in The Nation, “but it must be acknowledged that they know how to reach the people. True, they have had lots of money to spend; but their opponents have not always been broke, either.” He talked about how much money unions had, for instance. McWilliams did, however, believe that Whitaker and Baxter had too much power. For the A.M.A., they had written, he said, “a political script in which doctors, originally cast as special-interest heavies, emerge as crusaders for the people’s health.” It was incredible. And it was dangerous. “This is expert political management; this is government by Whitaker and Baxter.” This is how we live now.

The piece was not without effect. By 1952, a number of doctors had resigned from the A.M.A. James H. Means, Jackson professor of Medicine at Harvard and the chief of medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital, explained that he was no longer willing to pay dues that had been used to support an activity that he considered “contrary to public welfare and unworthy of a learned profession.”

That fall, the A.M.A. let Whitaker and Baxter go, explaining that it had decided that keeping the agency on retainer would compromise its nonpartisan status. Whitaker and Baxter were untroubled. They went to work for Eisenhower-Nixon.

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Private-Equity Firms Target the US Health-Care Industry

Private equity (PE) firms are targeting the US health-care providers. Growing PE interest in low profit or non-profit sectors like hospitals is expanding. PE investors are betting on new profit opportunities from the growing needs of the baby-boomer generation and from the Affordable Care Act, which will dramatically expand health-insurance coverage.

lie of the year http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/dec/16/lie-year-government-takeover-health-care/

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alec oklahoma may? 2013:

Jane Carter, an economist at AFSCME, identified the problems with the ALEC privatization agenda, particularly the Public-Private Fair Competition Act, a "forced privatization" [11] bill that requires public services be turned over to corporate control if private industry claims they can do the service; this bill was recently introduced in Michigan. Phillip Martin of Progress Texas described how ALEC's healthcare agenda -- particularly its adoption of the Health Care Compact, which asserts state control over health care -- could be used to thwart federal healthcare reform.

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in these times;

As a testament to ALEC’s efficacy as a pipeline for corporate-backed legislation, since the passage of the federal healthcare overhaul package in late March 2010, legislators in at least 38 states have introduced the ALEC-crafted Freedom of Choice Health Care Act (Health Care Act), which, according to an ALEC press release, was modeled after an Arizona proposal defeated on the ballot in 2008. Ironically, given the fetish Pearce and other ALEC lawmakers have for adherence to federal immigration laws, the Health Care Act is marketed as an assertion of states’ sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment.

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/displayArticle.aspx?articleid=22734&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

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griftopia:

ch 6

Liz Fowler works at Wellpoint, then for max baucus [most conserv?] loved b/c she wrote bills that gave away $"

1300 ins co's that all have diff forms; so hosp spend 1/2 of admin on claims 178

we pay 2x OECD and get much less 179 admin 31% of costs; 2x of cda

1/2 bankrupt at rx, and 3/4 of those have insurance 179

Horiz BC siad no to IV drug b/c woman was nurse 20 yrs ago and cd have done at home 180

ER patents called and told to go to partner hosp; pull out IV 181

Sherman anti-trust broke up Pullman, but insur co exempt b/c not commerce

whenever stock mkt goes down, suddenly need for more tort reform 187

co's said not wind but flood b/c gov't covers flood; Lott got stiffed by State farm but 1980 amend to Fed Trade Act forbids investogation about insure or even study 189 so can fix proces and deny contract so in 2005 even after katrina record profits 48.8b$ vs 40.5 yr before 189

2007 defazio and jindal tried to repeal McCarran-Ferguson. ins spent 46m$ to beat (Cornyn got 287K$) lots of laws ~ procefixing, but FTC law makes them immune 192

Leahy anti-trust amendment stripped out as part of deal to ram thru: sen ben nelson (ex-rx) and big midicare subsidy for Neb;

Tauzin visted WH often 11x

vampire congress originally delay 78 of 191 bills after 8 pm, 21 as late as 7 am 205 w/ david dreier)

The health care reform by the Obama administration is described as a "grotesque give-away" to the health insurance industry and a betrayal of the public trust. Taibbi argues that the insurance industry unfairly continues to be exempted from anti-trust legislation.

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Health Care

The Supreme Health Care Soviet has also done a number on the kind of health care we get, how we get it, where we get it, and who we can get it from. Again: there was a time not so long ago when health care was in the hands of a doctor, who was usually in independent practice (often in a partnership with a couple of other doctors, but that's it), and who had wide leeway to dictate patient care without being second-guessed. The doctor got sound, reliable information on new treatments from respected peer-reviewed journals, and insurance companies generally paid for most of what he or she ordered without further ado. This extreme level of autonomy notoriously led to doctors who overestimated their capacities; but it also meant that whatever happened in an examination room was -- to an extraordinary degree -- left in the hands of the doctor and the patient, and nobody else was entitled to interfere. The result was that, in the struggle between science and the doctor's profit motive, science stood at least a fighting chance of prevailing.

Now, the profit Politburo has had its way with almost every aspect of this interaction. Two-thirds of primary care doctors don't own their own practices anymore -- in no small part because the administrative cost of dealing with Soviet bureaucrats insurance company overseers is so overwhelming. Now, they're salaried employees of some large corporate entity, where they're subject to constant pressure to shorten visits, rack up billable hours, stick to narrow protocols of accepted treatment and churn patients through.

Insurance bean-counters second-guess every order, requiring doctors to put in extra shifts each week writing letters and making phone calls to fight for their patients' right to care. Every channel they rely on for information on new drugs and treatments -- from the peer-reviewed journals to the medical conferences to the drug information inserts -- has been co-opted by the pharmaceutical companies to ensure that doctors won't ever get important information that might reflect badly on profitable drugs; and this, in turn, undermines evidence-based medicine in favor of a kind of corporate-driven Lysenkoism.

Increasingly, states are also inviting themselves into the exam room, passing laws telling doctors what they can and can't tell you about your own condition (and, in some cases, demanding that they out-and-out lie to you, for reasons that are entirely political and seldom supported by science). And as a patient, your access to this co-opted, compromised care is entirely dependent on what the Politburo apparatchiks at your own employer's corporate HQ have decided you deserve to have.

Again: what we've got here isn't anything like a free or independent system, one in which patients and doctors are at liberty to make appropriate decisions without layers of centralized interference (much of it from people who aren't even MDs). And most of this interference isn't from government; it's from various corporate interests that have subjugated both doctors and patients to a centralization regime in order to extract profits from them. During the Cold War, this is what we were told Soviet medicine was like. Now, we don't have to go to Russia: we can get the same regimented, over-managed treatment from our own free-market health system -- and we'll pay more for it than anybody else in the world. alternet

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US CoC:

http://www.fixtheuschamber.org/news/news/inside-chambers-million-dollar-shell-game}:

In the late summer of 2009, with the health care reform debate heating up, ads began appearing all over the country attacking the legislation. Months later, the National Journalrevealed that major insurers including Aetna, Cigna, Humana, UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint had funneled between $10 million and $20 million to the U.S. Chamber to fund the campaign. Meanwhile, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade association, continued to public voice support for reform.The duplicitous campaign is typical of the role the U.S. Chamber plays in corporate lobbying since CEO Tom Donohue took over the organization in 1996. He’s quadrupled its budget to $200 million annually (as of October 2009) and built the most powerful anti-reform lobbying force in Washington. And he’s done it by soliciting large donations from a small group of CEOS of very large corporations who want to keep their lobbying agendas secret.

Last year, nearly 40 percent of the U.S. Chamber’s contributions came from just 25 contributors. While it claims 3 million members, the U.S. Chamber’s three biggest (and anonymous) donors accounted for nearly one in every five dollars raised by the lobbying firm, which operates as a non-profit trade association.

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One operative tried to enlist trade groups in Maine to oppose government-run health coverage. Another helped a member of a Las Vegas conservative group appear on local talk radio to criticize the proposal. A third persuaded a Louisiana activist to post an opinion piece on a conservative blog.

These below-the-radar activities were the handiwork of a law firm in Charlotte, N.C., that operates a secretive group called Americans for Quality and Affordable Healthcare. The organization's sponsors remain a mystery — its Web site offers no clues, and the law firm won't say.

In a year that has seen hundreds of millions of dollars spent on health care lobbying and TV ads, the advocacy group's impact is hard to gauge since the full scope of its operations is unclear. But its activities illustrate how some are furtively trying to shape public and congressional opinion through front groups — seemingly independent organizations that pursue their founders' goals while masking their identity.

One clue to the mystery group may lie in its goals: to oppose any government-run insurance option, the approach favored by President Barack Obama and most Democrats, and to support requiring all Americans to buy insurance.

Those aims match two of the health insurance industry's top priorities. Several industry officials disavowed any knowledge of the group and said they're not behind it, including the trade group America's Health Insurance Plans, Blue Cross-Blue Shield of North Carolina, and other large national and North Carolina insurers.

‘They want to stay in the background’

Presented evidence that the activities in Maine, Nevada and Louisiana involved employees of Moore & Van Allen, one of North Carolina's larger law firms, the firm's spokesman Matthew French acknowledged the connection and said the firm runs the health care group for clients. He declined to name them, but he referred to "member companies of AQAH," the group's acronym.

"They want to stay in the background and off the front page," said French. "They want the message to be the important thing."

Moore & Van Allen has more than 300 attorneys and numbers financial, manufacturing, technology and health companies among its clients, although it won't name them. It says they include "some of America's foremost hospitals, multi-institutional health care systems, physician groups, specialty providers, lenders and insurers."

French would not discuss the health group's financing or provide much detail about its activities, saying it gives materials to like-minded organizations to distribute to their members.

The three states where the group's activities have been noticed are focal points of the health care fight. Nevada is home to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat who is putting together the Senate's health overhaul bill. Louisiana and Maine are represented by two senators viewed as swing votes: Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

French acknowledged the group is hoping its activities will build pressure on lawmakers.

"Obviously we want to educate to an end purpose. Otherwise we're just kind of preaching to trees," he said.

No clues to sponsorship

The group's Web site says publicly run insurance would "drive all the major players out of the healthcare market," and it includes a page that lets people easily e-mail members of Congress to express those views.

The site does not reveal its sponsorship or provide an address or phone number, unusual for an Internet site trying to arouse public action. Even the owner of the site's Internet domain name is hidden, officially registered to Domains By Proxy Inc., a Scottsdale, Ariz., company that shields the real owner's identity.

French said the three employees of the law firm whose activities for the group were discovered work for the firm's government affairs division, which the practice's Web site says helps clients "shape public opinion, defeat adverse legislation." None of the three is listed as an attorney.

The operatives' activities have included:

Several weeks ago, Lindsay Schroeder, a legislative aide at the law firm, approached the Maine Hospital Association in Augusta to see if it would participate in panel discussions about the health care overhaul, said association spokeswoman Mary Mayhew. "I assume she was trying to get some media coverage. I'm sure a part of it was to generate grass-roots activity," Mayhew said. Officials of at least three other Maine trade groups described similar visits around the same time, but they could not recall the woman's name or affiliation. All said they declined involvement.
A deputy director of the firm's government affairs team, Andrew Smith, helped a representative of the conservative Nevada Policy Research Council appear on a Las Vegas talk radio show to discuss health care, said council spokesman Andy Matthews.
Reid McMillan, another deputy director of government affairs, e-mailed an opinion column the health care group distributes to Ellen Carmichael, a conservative activist in Baton Rouge, La., who got it posted on a conservative blog called Healthcare Horserace.

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Industry-Backed Anti-Health Care Reform Group: Yeah, We're Packing And Disrupting The Health Care Town Halls

By Brian Beutler - August 4, 2009,

Yesterday, I reported that the anti-health care reform group Conservatives for Patients Rights was enlisting tea party protesters to attend and disrupt health care town halls hosted by members of Congress in their regions.

Today, CPR--which is headed by disgraced hospital executive Rick Scott, and has enlisted the message men behind the Swift Boat campaign--has acknowledged their behind-the-scenes role in the outbursts.

Spokesman Brian Burgess tells Greg Sargent that CPR is distributing "town hall alert" flyers to people on its mailing lists and is reaching out to third party groups via online list serv.

Perhaps the most significant of these discussion groups is the called Tea Party Patriots, which is managed by Tom Gaitens, a field organizer for the industry-funded lobbying organization FreedomWorks. Members of this list serve were not only supplied with list of town hall forums, but with a strategy document outlining the same disruptive techniques we're seeing play out at health care public forums around the country.

The disclosure makes official what much of the reporting about the disruptions seemed to indicate: that industry funded groups--who stand to benefit if health reform legislation fails--are playing a significant role in organizing, and perhaps ginning up, the outbursts we're seeing at health care public forums around the country.

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koch tea partydisrupt town hall:

In August 2009, ThinkProgress obtained an exclusive memo from a Tea Party group supported by Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. The memo outlined various ways for Tea Party activists to intimidate Democratic lawmakers and disrupt their town hall meetings on health reform.ThinkProgress published half a dozen articles exposing the role of Koch-funded groups like “Patients United” in encouraging opposition to health reform. For instance, in Virginia, a Koch-funded operative Ben Marchi assisted a birther who followed Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) around, yelling at him at town hall meetings.

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This morning, Politico reported that Democratic members of Congress are increasingly being harassed by “angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior” at local town halls. For example, in one incident, right-wing protesters surrounded Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) and forced police officers to have to escort him to his car for safety.

This growing phenomenon is often marked by violence and absurdity. Recently, right-wing demonstrators hung Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-MD) in effigy outside of his office. Missing from the reporting of these stories is the fact that much of these protests are coordinated by public relations firms and lobbyists who have a stake in opposing President Obama’s reforms.

The lobbyist-run groups Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which orchestrated the anti-Obama tea parties earlier this year, are now pursuing an aggressive strategy to create an image of mass public opposition to health care and clean energy reform. A leaked memo from Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer with the FreedomWorks website Tea Party Patriots, details how members should be infiltrating town halls and harassing Democratic members of Congress:

– Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”

– Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”

– Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”

The memo above also resembles the talking points being distributed by FreedomWorks for pushing an anti-health reform assault all summer. Patients United, a front group maintained by Americans for Prosperity, is currently busing people all over the country for more protests against Democratic members. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the NRCC, has endorsed the strategy, telling the Politico the days of civil town halls are now “over.”

Meanwhile, AHIP, the trade group and lobbying juggernaut representing the health insurance industry is sending staffers to monitor town halls and other right-wing front groups are stepping up their ad campaign to smear reform efforts. The strategy for defeating reform — recently outlined by an influential lobbyist to the Hill newspaper as “delay” then “kill” — is becoming apparent. By delaying a vote until after the August recess, lobbyists are now seizing upon recess town halls as opportunities to ambush lawmakers and fool them into believing there is wide opposition to reform.

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fox news lie of year:

http://mediamatters.org/research/201012170024

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Abramoff's Favorite Think Tank Schools Tea Partiers on Health Care

— By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Mar. 16, 2010

On Tuesday, tea partiers and other activists who came to Capitol Hill to protest the health care bill were armed with the usual array of signs demanding that Congress "Kill the Bill," comparing Obamacare to socialism and the usual rhetoric. But many of them were also toting a slick, hefty tome called, "Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care" that was being distributed at the rallies by the National Center for Public Policy Research. The report features an introduction by talk show host Mark Levin, the author of Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, and is essentially a compilation of media health care horror stories--everywhere but in the U.S., which, of course, could provide tomes worth of material about the failures of the private health care system.

The "Shattered Lives" stories come from Great Britain, Japan, Russia and South Africa, and read together, they do offer up some pretty horrible details about national health care. There's the British six-year-old whose brain tumor went undiagnosed for years because the National Health Service insisted in giving him painkillers for his headaches but not a brain scan. There's one about the guy who ended up pulling his own tooth with a rusty pair of plyers because he couldn't find a dentist.

It's a gripping read, and the production values suggest that someone put up a big chunk of money to produce and distribute it to tea party activists far and wide. (Rally participants on Tuesday got free bound copies that cost $14.95 on Amazon.) There's reason to be suspicious. After all, NCPPR isn't just any public policy group. You might recall that not only has it done stealth research for tobacco companies, but it was also one of the nonprofit groups accused of helping the disgraced uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff pimp his clients in exchange for big donations. The report doesn't say who paid for the work, but it has all the hallmarks of the usual corporate suspects.

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Potter's "Deadly Spin" Exposes Damaging Insurance Industry PR Activities

Source: Huffington Post, November 9, 2010

Wendell PotterIn his new book, former insurance industry insider Wendell Potter says insurance companies spend a huge portion of Americans' health insurance premiums on relentless propaganda and lobbying efforts that are focused on one thing: profits. He describes how the insurance industry's PR onslaught drastically weakened the new health reform law, and how it plays an insidious but often invisible role in politics any time corporate profits are threatened, on subjects ranging from climate change to defense policy. Wendell says he has been getting particular grief from former colleagues over a chapter in the book about a meticulously-planned, deception-based campaign to discredit filmmaker Michael Moore and his 2007 movie, Sicko. After discovering the movie blamed most of the problems with America's health care system on insurance companies, the industry ran a secret, behind-the-scenes campaign to demonize Moore and assure that Americans would stay misinformed about Canadian and European health care systems, which provide high quality health care for all their citizens at much lower costs than in the U.S. Few Americans are aware, Wendell says, of the central role the health insurance industry played in creating the fear-mongering and anger-mongering campaign against the Democrats' original version of the health reform bill, which included a public option that would have competed against private insurers and that President Obama originally said was necessary to "keep insurers honest."

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2000

Citizens for Better Medicare:

The Citizens for Better Medicare Action Fund is a Medicare reform advocacy organization bankrolled almost entirely by the pharmaceutical industry. The group formed as a Section 527 organization in July 1999. CBM said in news media reports that it would spend up to $40 million in the 2000 election cycle, focusing its effort on attacking Democratic prescription-drug plans. Broadcast data obtained by the Center showed that the group spent more than $20 million on television advertisements alone.

Executive director Tim Ryan is a former marketing director for the drug industry’s lobbying arm, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA. Ryan acknowledged that the group gets most of its funds from drug manufacturers, but was unwilling to disclose specific amounts. The CBM Web site lists some of its donors, including pharmaceutical corporations, health-care awareness and senior citizen advocacy groups, and university medical and research centers.

Citizens for Better Medicare was deeply involved in the national discussion on campaign-finance reform in the 2000 election cycle — mentioned by Senator John McCain and President Clinton alike as a prime example of a misleading issue-advocacy campaign that had escaped disclosure. Public Citizen, a public health and safety watchdog founded by Ralph Nader, released a report on the Citizens for Better Medicare in June 2000 calling it a front group for the pharmaceutical industry.

According to broadcast records obtained by the Center, the group ran television advertisements throughout the election cycle in 30 states on bipartisan House and Senate bills expanding drug benefits for senior citizens. Some ads attacked Democratic members of Congress who escorted groups of senior citizens into Canada to purchase less expensive prescription drugs and supported drug price controls for the elderly. CBM spent an average of $400,000 per market on more than 30,000 advertisements run in the 2000 election cycle.

Deputy Director Laura Dove declined comment on the organizations specific campaign efforts this cycle.

According to The Washington Post, Citizens for Better Medicare is abandoning its 527 tax status in part to avoid the recent disclosure law enacted last summer. Its re-organizing itself as a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization. CBM reported no contributions to the IRS for the third quarter, but did report spending $8.5 million during this period, with almost the entire amount going to National Media, a Republican broadcast media production firm in Alexandria, Virginia. Alex Castellanos, a strong-arm in the political advertising world, heads National Media. Castellanos’ previous clients include the Republican Party, Senator Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and George Bush’s 1992 presidential campaign.

Contact information:

Citizens for Better Medicare

1615 L Street, N.W., Suite 900

Washington, DC 20036

202-872-8627 phone

202-466-6002 fax

www.bettermedicare.org

Campaign Finance Information:

Period	Contribution	Expenditure
3^rd Quarter	$ 0	$8,457,769
Pre-election	$ 0	$ 113,040
Post-Election	$ 0	$ 0
Total	$ 0	$8,570,809

(Data according to IRS Form 8872 Political Report of Contributions and Expenditures.)

Enter Burson-Marsteller's health care unit, whose staff includes "a medical doctor/physician; former FDA (Food and Drug Administration) commissioner; former hospital administrator; former pharmaceutical communications executives; former non-profit communications chiefs; grassroots specialists, and former reporters" according to the senior editor of O'Dwyer's newsletter, which monitors the PR business.

B-M has plenty of experience in matters of public health. On behalf of client Philip Morris, B-M created the National Smokers' Alliance (NSA) to fight against smoking restrictions. According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, the NSA "is a state-of-the-art campaign that uses full- page newspaper ads, direct telemarketing, paid canvassers, (toll free) numbers and newsletters to bring thousands of smokers into its ranks each week. By 1995 NSA claimed a membership of 3 million smokers".The NSA is headed by B-M vice-president Thomas Humber and its members include B-M executives Pierre Salinger and Kennetz Rietz, as well as Peter Kelly, senior partner of B-M subsidiary Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly(see sidebar). In addition to this, B-M was hired by the A.H. Robbins company when its Dalkon Shield IUD contraceptive injured thousands of women who used it, and it is now currently promoting the 'virtues' of Eli Lilly's anti-depressant wonder drug Prozac.

What can we do?