The Complete Deconstructing the Right Wing Lies on the Health Insurance Bill

The right’s lies about the current health insurance proposals before Congress have rarely been compiled in such concise form before.

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Dear Congressman Altmire,

I write to urge your support for the Weiner Single-Payer Amendment to HR 3200, which will receive a floor vote in September.

The Weiner amendment would replace Division A of HR 3200 with the text of HR 676, the “U.S. National Health Care Act,” sponsored by Rep. John Conyers. This would effectively transform HR 3200 into single-payer legislation.

Single-payer is a superior reform to HR 3200 in many ways:

* Single payer would provide universal and comprehensive coverage for all medically necessary services. Unamended, HR 3200 would leave millions uninsured or with skimpy coverage.

* Single payer allows patients free choice of doctor and hospital. Under HR 3200, insurance companies would continue to deny care and restrict access to services.

* Single payer pays for itself by eliminating $400 billion in insurance company administrative waste and redirecting it to care. HR 3200 requires $1 trillion in new revenue in the next decade.

* Single payer establishes proven and effective cost-containing mechanisms to ensure that benefits are sustainable over the long run. HR 3200 lacks effective cost controls.

The Weiner amendment presents an historic opportunity for Members to register their support for single-payer national health insurance as the best way to solve the U.S. healthcare crisis. It additionally will provide a vote that Members can stand by when approached by constituents.

While we recognize the political imperative to pass healthcare reform, it is important to remember that the purpose of reform is to ease the burden for all Americans. Only single-payer healthcare meets that goal—both medically and economically. The Weiner Amendment deserves your vote.

Right-Wing Turncoat Gives the Inside Scoop on Why Conservatives Are Rampaging Town Halls
By Frank Schaeffer

    The Republican Old Guard are in the fix an atheist would be in if Jesus showed up and raised his mother from the dead: Their world view has just been shattered. Obama’s election has driven them over the edge.

Consider Former Congressman Dick Armey. Several far right foundations and the multitrillion dollar health-insurance industry have teamed up with him to organize the far right foot soldiers of the Republican Party to intimidate people speaking on behalf of health-care reform.

They are using my old shock troops – given many of these folks were first energized by the Evangelical pro-life movement that my late father and I started in the 1970s. What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.

Continue reading The Corporate Hand Behind anti-Healthcare Rioters →

The Town Hall Mob

By PAUL KRUGMAN

There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.

That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison.

Continue reading Town Hall Mobs Part of Southern Strategy →

August 3, 2009

Let’s get down to the meat of the issue: Single payer is the only way to go. Sorry, corrupt insurance industry, you’ll have to find another way to rip people off — not by manipulating those most in need.