The Big Lie About Universal Health Care

Set up: I'm only using Virginia Foxx's statements as an example of the talking points that so many Republicans and their brainless followers are regurgitating.

I want to highlight some "socialized" health care testimony from someone who would know---a Canadian.

But first...

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC): “There are no Americans who don’t have healthcare. Everybody in this country has access to healthcare,” she says. “We do have about 7.5 million Americans who want to purchase health insurance who can not afford it,”

More Foxx..: Some people think that the solution involves a Washington takeover of your relationship with your doctor where Washington tells you what treatment you can or cannot have. That may sound good until you get a letter from Washington informing you that you’ve been denied a procedure or medication because it’s not approved. Not approved by who? A bureaucrat, not your doctor.

Still more Foxx..: The Republican plan would "make sure we bring down the cost of health care for all Americans and that ensures affordable access for all Americans and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government."
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Oh how I long for the days of Clinton...


The following is from a thread at SoulForce called "The Big Lie About Universal Health Care."

It was started by a user named offog who is from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. I found it quite illuminating and asked if I could post it here, and hooray, offog said yes:

offog: I was watching The Daily Show on Wednesday night, and one item stuck with me. It showed several short clips of people saying that government-run health care would mean government bureaucrats standing between you and your doctor. That was pretty much the wording each speaker used. It seems to be a big talking point these days for opponents of universal health care. One guy even added, "like they do in Canada." Whaaat? I'm a 50-year-old Canadian gal, and I've never had to deal with government interference in my health care.

I'm appealing to the folks in blogland to help spread the word that this talking point is totally BOGUS! Why do I care? It's all about my favorite motto: "What we desire for ourselves, we wish for all." The quotation is from J.S. Woodsworth, one of those EEEVIL Canadian socialists who was a Member of Parliament during the 1930s.

I'd like to give a couple of examples of how things really work with Canadian Medicare. Back in 1992, I found a lump in my breast. I went to my G.P. for an exam, and he referred me to a specialist. The specialist examined me and scheduled me for a biopsy on the spot. Within a couple of weeks, I was in the hospital for the surgery. Shortly after that, I got the result. (Fortunately, the lump was benign.) All I had to do to get this treatment was show my health card.

One winter morning a few years ago, I was walking to the office when I slipped on a patch of ice, fell backwards, and hit the back of my head really good. I didn't feel any dizziness, so I though I was okay. Then late in the evening the next day, I came down with a severe headache and nausea. I was worried about a possible concussion, so I called the Health Line. That's a 24-7 hotline staffed by nurses. I explained my situation to a nurse and asked if I should go to the Emergency Room. She said I should. Fortunately, the nearest hospital ER is just a few blocks from my home.

When I got to the ER, I went to the reception desk, showed my health card, and explained the problem. The person at the desk filled in a short form. I had to wait only about half an hour or 45 minutes for someone to see me. They scanned my head, told me I was okay, and gave me a couple of pills for the headache and nausea. By then, it was after midnight and I was a little nervous about walking alone that late. A staff member got a nice security guard to give me a ride home.

At no point in either case did anybody have to contact any government office for permission for exams, tests or treatment. No big long forms to fill out in triplicate. No endless sitting on hold on the phone, waiting for some bean-counter to get to my case. No having to worry about coverage being denied. Ya hear that? No bureaucratic interference!

Last year I watched the Michael Moore movie, Sicko. I saw all kinds of bureaucratic interference from the insurance company bureaucrats. One poor woman was denied coverage for her breast cancer treatment because the insurance company decided that she was too young to have cancer. Stuff like that happens all the time in the U.S., and Americans are supposed to believe that "government bureaucrats" are going to be so much worse?!

First, I'll take my chances any day with a government bureaucrat over a private company bureaucrat. If a government bureaucrat screws me over, I can at least complain to my Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) or Member of Parliament (MP), and they have to answer to the voters. Governments have to answer to the voters too. Secondly, with Canada's universal health care, government bureaucrats don't interfere with everyday health care decisions. The decisions are between you and your doctor, honestly!

I've heard opponents of universal health care talk about how health care decisions should be left to doctors and patients. Well, you sure don't get that with private health insurance. Insurance company employees will deny people benefits for the lamest reasons, and get bonuses for doing so.

Americans are the savviest consumers in the world. They don't tolerate shoddy products and service from retail stores, car dealers, or auto repair shops. So what are you folks doing putting up with this crummy service from the private health insurance companies? Come on, everybody; you're in the land of Ralph Nader!

Don't let people scare you with the "government bureaucrat" boogeyman. Tell your families and neighbors the truth about universal health care. Tell them that Americans deserve better than they've been getting. Spread the word on your favorite blogs. And tell your Senators and House Representatives that you won't be fooled by the misinformation campaigns.
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Aaaaaand, one for the road:

Battle in Seattle: The Movie, and the effects of globalization.

(For the record, this is cross posted at Soulforce, and apparently you can watch the whole thing online.)

I rented this movie at Blockbuster the other day and I found it very inspirational and empowering, especially because it’s based on true events. The protesters accomplished so much, and I kept thinking about it in terms of Soulforce protests.

I remember when this was going on in 1999, there was a news clip of the protests one day, and I didn’t think much of it until they kept reporting on it day after day. It just kept escalating, but I still never really knew what it was all about. After watching this movie -- ten years later -- I now understand.

The thing about this movie and its accompanying website, is that it provides an easily understood focus, untangled by political mumbo jumbo.

One more note, protests like this are going on all over the world. In the fight for human rights, we are not alone.

Official Battle in Seattle Movie Trailer:

For background’s sake, here’s another video I found with actual footage from 1999. It’s about 5 minutes long. If you don’t feel like watching it, below the video are the words that were overlaid at various points.

This is what Democracy Looks Like? 1:

The World Trade Organization is the latest in a series of transitional bodies and agreements designed to regulate the global economy. It can use sanctions and fines to override the labor, safety, and environmental standards of individual nations.

In November, 1999, the WTO was scheduled to hold its last meeting of the millennium, behind the closed doors of a convention center in downtown Seattle. Activist prepared to blockade the streets to prevent the meetings from taking place. On Tuesday, over 30,000 protesters converged on downtown Seattle.

“I think in 10 years from now, the thing that’s going to be written about Seattle, is not what tear gas bomb went off on what street corner, but that the WTO in 1999 was the birth of a global citizen’s movement for a democratic global economy.”

Back to the Battle in Seattle website.

The trailer is on that first page (same as the first video above). Once you enter the official site, there are options to find out more about the movie. Toward the bottom of that page, there is a link that says “Who controls the world,” which leads to a WEALTH of information.

This is so relevant for me because I often bring up in political discourse (LGBT or otherwise) the 40,000 people who starve to death and die of easily preventable diseases - EVERY DAY. Not to mention the guilt I feel when I spend money on things I don’t actually need.

Here are a couple examples from the links on that 'who controls the world' page:

Note to WTO, IMF, World Bank: Africa is Not Your Buffet Table:

“At the time of decolonization in the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter, its exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70,” Walden Bello reports in his guerrillanews.com article, “Destroying African Agriculture.

“Today, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the last three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central Africa.”

The Case for Accessible Medicine:

There are four companies that together form an oligopoly, or act as a collective ‘monopoly,’ dominating the pharmaceutical industry – Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly. Called the “Big Four,” these corporations wield tremendous power over international politics and trade. Previously, over 50 countries had exempted essential medicines from being patented. This would allow, poorer countries to make inexpensive “generic” formulas to help with disease control. But with heavy lobbying efforts on the part of the Big Four, a new Trade Related intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) deal went through, making it difficult to provide these lower-cost medicines. Their argument – patent protection is vital if companies are to put large sums of money into R & D [Research and Development]. The truth – only 10% of R & D (which is a small fraction of marketing expenditures) goes into the drugs that account for 90% of global disease. Brazil has rejected TRIPS, and manufactures its own HIV medications enabling the treatment of 4 times the number of patients otherwise possible. The US backed proceedings at the WTO to force Brazil to amend this patent law, but in 2001 an agreement was won to make it easier for developing countries to access life-saving medicines.

I remember when congress was debating The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and I didn’t know whether to be for it or against it. “Free trade” sounded beneficial, but there was strong opposition to it. It seems that these “free trade” agreements are mostly a free-for-all for corporations.

The North American Free Trade Agreement took effect on January 1, 1994:

NAFTA opponents - including labor, environmental, consumer and religious groups - argued that NAFTA would launch a race-to-the-bottom in wages, destroy hundreds of thousands of good U.S. jobs, undermine democratic control of domestic policy-making and threaten health, environmental and food safety standards.
[…]
NAFTA requires limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food.

I’m not sure what our trade agreements are with China, but the whole WTO/NAFTA thing reminds me of the working conditions there. They pay them pennies an hour and work them to death - figuratively, under deplorable conditions, and sometimes using chemicals that are know toxins that cause illness and death. And virtually everything we buy these days is made in China, and there’s no getting around it. It’s literally cheaper for companies to make the stuff there and then ship it all the way over here. It makes me sick every time I see “made in China” on a tag or label, because I know what it means.

I caught a good documentary on HBO awhile back, called “Mardi Gras: Made In China.” I highly recommend it if you want to get a sense of the working conditions they endure.

From one review:

With the tagline: “Beads, Breasts, and Business: A Story of Globalization Gone Wild,” it’s obvious that Mardi Gras: Made in China isn’t going to be a dull, dry documentary about international trade. Instead, this film produced by Carnivalesque Films describes (in Mandarin and English) how impoverished young girls in China toil over threading cheap plastic beads into necklaces that drunken young revelers at Mardi Gras in New Orleans will do almost anything to receive.

This trailer's a bit racy, like a Girls Gone Wild ad, and the movie focuses much more on the China end of it than the trailer implies.

Mardi Gras: Made In China:

I’ll close with the words of Soulforce co-founder Mel White, from his book Religion Gone Bad:

The person who benefits most from demanding justice is the person who demands it. The main reason for insisting that the fundamentalist leaders meet with us is not to change them, but to change us. Win or lose, we take it to the streets because just being there enriches and empowers our lives. When we help those who suffer, we are the ones who benefit most. When we volunteer to help cut off the suffering at its source, our lives are given new meaning and new power. Our Creator is not in church or synagogue, temple or mosque. Our Creator is on the front lines where people are suffering injustice, and when we join her there we discover what it means to be a son or daughter of God, what it means to be truly human.