Tuesday, September 22, 2009

No more subsidizing insurance companies

insurance companies

The health care decision-making process in Washington is horribly tainted by the campaign contributions of insurance and pharmaceutical interests. Under the pay-to-play system health care becomes insurance care, the public option shrinks to irrelevance, and the choice we are left with is: What kind of private, for-profit insurance do you want?

This is not acceptable. We must respond now, and not settle for a plan that subsidizes insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and sets the stage for the privatization of Medicare.

We want health care for all Americans, Medicare for all, which is exactly what Congressmen John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich accomplish in H.R. 676. And the only way we will achieve it is to organize and take action in our communities to effect real change at a state and national level now. For more information, please see Physicians for a National Health Program at http://www.pnhp.org.

Every other industrialized and civilized nation offers its citizens a national and universal health program. It's good for society and it's good for business. And while we're at it, let's end over eight years of costly wars of choice, and bailouts for the casinos on Wall Street, too. It's the moral thing to do.