The Three Enemies of Health Care Reform: Big Pharm, Hate Groups and the GOP

[McCamy Taylor]

If we switched from private insurers to a single payer model like they have in Canada, we could afford health care for everyone. See this report derived from the New England Journal of Medicine in 2004.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/8800.php

The folks at UnitedHealth and other for profits have overheads as high as 30% compared to the much more modest overhead of Medicare. They squander this money on massive bonuses for their CEOs and on bribes for employees who deny sick people the benefits to which they are entitled. And even with the privates in the picture the Federal government still spends more per capita on health care than any country than Canada----because these corporate fat cats are not actually taking care of America’s medical needs, despite all the premiums they collect. Health care costs use up a whopping 15% of our GNP. We spend twice as much per person in this country as most western European nations that have universal health care. And yet our health indicators such as life expectancy and infant mortality place us at the bottom of industrialized nations, among the countries of eastern Europe. In other words, we pay twice as much, first in private dollars, then in matching public money to provide piss poor medical care that does not make Americans live longer or healthier lives.

But you will hear and see a bunch of ads this year from PhRMA---Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America telling us not to mess with the “best health care system in the world”. That is because Big Pharm is making out like a bandit charging Medicare patients whatever they want for their expensive, redundant, often worthless and sometimes toxic drugs--- 1/3 of which were developed with public money ---that are designed to ameliorate, not cure diseases that could be prevented if we had a decent public health system.

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2008/11/14/phrma-obama/

I hope you got that last part. In case you didn’t, I will spell it out in bold letters. Big Pharm makes money when we do not prevent disease the cheap, natural healthy way. The way that all nations inevitably begin to use to prevent disease once they enact a single payer public health care system. For instance, if the government pays for all heart surgery, the government begins to make healthy diet recommendations starting in childhood to prevent coronary artery disease. But that means that Big Pharm loses out on a chance to sell millions of dollars worth of drugs---cholesterol lowering agents, heart and blood pressure pills, portable oxygen---the list goes on and on.

Big Pharm is so scared of what is about to happen to their profits, that they are already hiring Republican and Democratic ex-politicians to tell you that Obama is going to deprive you of wonder drugs, without telling you that people like

Betsy McCaughey is former lieutenant governor of New York and is an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The opinions expressed are her own.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_mccaughey&sid=aLzfDxfbwhzs

Actually get their salaries from Big Pharm, via “think tanks” like the Hudson Institute that funnel corporate money to paid mouthpieces for members of the Medical Industrial Complex. The opinions Ms. McCaughey expresses are, of course, those of Ciba-Geigy (aka Novartis) , DuPont, Eli Lilly and Company, Lilly, Merck, PhRMA, Proctor& Gamble among other. They will not tell you that the “wonder drug” in question is actually the seventh or eighth product on the market that lowers cholesterol by one particular mechanism or maybe it is yet another sexual dysfunction pill for men. Forget about a cure for anything. There is no money in a cure, only in expensive pills that you have to take every day for the rest of your life.

You will also hear a bunch of people with a bigoted agenda tell us that our health care system is just fine the way it is. These are the people who know that currently, Blacks and Hispanics have less access to employer sponsored health insurance. They also receive disparate care.

http://www.kff.org/minorityhealth/h08_7830.cfm

Therefore, you will hear white supremacists, like these folks at Stormfront, demanding that we keep things the way that they are (even if they do not have health care), presumably because they do not want to see a system which discriminates against hated racial minorities changed for fear that their own privileged status in society will suffer.

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=531853

And, to take it another step further, who's to say that they won't implement some sort of "Medical Affirmative Action"? It's just not fair that most whites are generally in better health than minorities. You can bet your white ass that under National Health the healthcare needs of minority groups will come before those of whites. This will be a fantastic way for them to decrease the white population and make it easier for minorities to get ahead.

Yes, indeed. Making sure that fewer minority babies die at birth from lack of access to prenatal care is an excellent way to make sure that more of them get ahead. The members of Stormfront must be quaking in their combat boots.

These hate groups are the dupes of big business which depends upon a supply of oppressed, poorly educated, malnourished, unhealthy low wage minority and female workers who can be exploited to keep overall wages low. The nation’s employers will secretly feed this “no health care for minorities!” attitude, even as they clamor for the federal government to take over the burden of supplying health care to workers.

Finally, the Republican Party will fight universal health care every step of the way, under guise of (proudly)” protecting the best health care system in the world” and (whisper) “so we don’t have to pay for Blacks and Hispanics to have healthy babies”. In fact, they will be practicing the Bill Kristol strategy of obstructionism. For they fear that once the United States stops wasting 15% of our GNP paying for crappy health care and once we are on the road to better health for all, people will be grateful to the political party that fixed our health care crisis. Kristol has been dining out since the mid 1990s on the infamy he garnered for coming up with this strategy for helping the Republicans get ahead by keeping everyone else sick.

These are the enemies of our nation’s health. The members of the Medical Industrial Complex, especially Big Pharm. The nation’s bigots, people like Sarah Palin, the KKK and any other group that gets ahead by keeping other folks back. And the Republicans. They will fight to keep babies born premature and Dad’s coronary arteries clogged.

Notice who is not on the list? Health care providers. Doctors, nurses, almost everyone who actually provides the care to sick people has been ready for health care reform for the last ten years. Even without doctors, you can still pass necessary health care legislation---LBJ passed Medicare without them. But with them, it is a lot easier.

Now, I want people to consider. How popular are Republicans right now? How highly esteemed is Stormfront? Who do you think the average American trusts more? President Obama or some shill for Glaxo-Smith-Kline? With opponents like these, health care reform should be doable. If the Democrats can not manage it, especially with Senator Ted Kennedy willing to use up his I am dying from brain cancer and I want you to do this one last thing for me points on this piece of legislation, it means that the Democrats in Congress and the White House are not really trying.

Keep writing the letters, put Congress’s feet to fire, and do not put up with any Oh man, if we just had a filibuster proof Senate, we could definitely pass health care reform in the next legislative session bullshit from Reid and the others. This is not a political football. This is the nation’s health. Time will not stand still for those who need medical assistance now .

[MadHound]

1. As you've shown, bigotry does play a part,

However I think that the insurance companies themselves are much more responsible for our lack of UHC. Go to Open Secrets and check out just how much the insurance industry gives to candidates from both the 'Pugs and Dems.

[frogcycle]

2. You are correct

There is one group in opposition - big pharma


the republicans are their paid shills, and the knuckledraggers just oppose everything

[TZ]

12. Not all just some

My company (evil biopharmaceutical EEK!) is talking about health care reform and how we can benefit from it. OMG, a company that actually wants to roll with whats right?

I would say its more insurance companies that pharmaceuticals..Many Pharmas are actually based in Europe so deal with socialized/nationalized medicine on a daily basis.

[OHdem10]

3. That Betsey McCaughey has been on every Cable Channel doing

a "Paul Revere" explaining that the Stimulus Bill has some
scary things and the American People had best be aware of
changes that will take place. She tries to scare people
by saying their privacy (Medical Records) will be done away with.
The Right simply do not want any form of National Health Care.
It goes against their ideology. Big Government is the problem,
you know. sarcasm

I guess Big Pharma is very happy to have her out there already
beating the drums against Health Care Legislation. I am surprised
the Cable Networks permitted her on without identifying her agenda.

[keepCAblue]

22. Barricuda Betsy has been doing her propaganda thing in Cali, too

Daily Kos did a nice expose on this *itch and it seems she has sung this song before, in attacking Clinton's health care reform package back in the 90s. She was widely discredited then and exposed for nothing more than a bought-and-paid-for Republican attack dog.

------------------------------------

From Dkos (sorry, copied and pasted this several days ago for an email I sent to KGO radio (who had Betsy on as an "expert" guest...but I forgot to copy the link as well)

Betsy (Elizabeth?) McCaughey is back; Obama's health care "dangerous to your health."

Matt Drudge--in his usual breathless, bold-faced hyperbole (in red this time!)--had this headline on his website tonight:

'NATIONAL COORDINATOR OF HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY' SLIPPED IN TO STIMULUS...

Oh, horrors!
The link took me to a Bloomberg piece written by Betsy McCaughey. In it, she slams President Obama's health care provisions in the stimulus bill as "dangerous to your health."
Doesn't she fit right in with the rest of the GOP Confederacy?
I thought her name sounded vaguely familiar, so I did a little research. Betsy McCaughey is the conservative attack dog also (once? still?) known as Elizabeth McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York under Republican George Pataki.
More to the point, Betsy (Elizabeth?) was a harsh critic of the Clinton health care plan, and many of her claims were proven false. McCaughey wrote a widely discredited article for The New Republic eviscerating the Clinton plan. She was--and is--well known in Republican circles, where talk of any government investment for health care equals a new Red Scare.

From that era, here's James Fallows in The Atlantic, January 1995.

"Much of the problem for the plan seemed, at least in Washington, to come not even from mandatory alliances but from an article by Elizabeth McCaughey, then of the Manhattan Institute, published in The New Republic last February. The article's working premise was that McCaughey, with no ax to grind and no preconceptions about health care, sat down for a careful reading of the whole Clinton bill. Appalled at the hidden provisions she found, she felt it her duty to warn people about what the bill might mean. The title of her article was "No Exit," and the message was that Bill and Hillary Clinton had proposed a system that would lock people in to government-run care. "The law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better," McCaughey wrote in the first paragraph. "The doctor can be paid only by the plan, not by you."

"George Will immediately picked up this warning, writing in Newsweek that "it would be illegal for doctors to accept money directly from patients, and there would be 15-year jail terms for people driven to bribery for care they feel they need but the government does not deem 'necessary.'" The "doctors in jail" concept soon turned up on talk shows and was echoed for the rest of the year."

"These claims, McCaughey's and Will's, were simply false. McCaughey's pose of impartiality was undermined by her campaign as the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of New York soon after her article was published. I was less impressed with her scholarly precision after I compared her article with the text of the Clinton bill. Her shocked claim that coverage would be available only for "necessary" and "appropriate" treatment suggested that she had not looked at any of today's insurance policies. In claiming that the bill would make it impossible to go outside the health plan or pay doctors on one's own, she had apparently skipped past practically the first provision of the bill (Sec. 1003), which said,"Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services."

"It didn't matter. The White House issued a point-by-point rebuttal, which The New Republic did not run. Instead it published a long piece by McCaughey attacking the White House statement. The idea of health policemen stuck."

From Andrew Sullivan, that era's editor of The New Republic, who acknowledges that much of McCaughey's article was B.S.:

"My sin was to publish a major article by Elizabeth McCaughey called "No Exit" that posited that Hillarycare 2.0 would inevitably lead to the extinction of much private medicine."

"I don't think it's fair to expose the internal editing of a piece but there was a struggle and it's fair to say I didn't win every skirmish. I was aware of the piece's flaws but nonetheless was comfortable running it as a provocation to debate. It sure was. The magazine fully aired subsequent criticism of the piece."

So, to recap, Betsy (Elizabeth?) is back. Her latest health care hit piece in Bloomberg is linked on brother-in-arms Matt Drudge's site, a right-wing favorite. Drudge, of course, is a GOP tool, and he has Monica Lewinsky to forever thank for making him a household name.

Matt Drudge is hopeless. But back to Betsy (Elizabeth?): it's been 15 years since she butchered that article in The New Republic. Do you think she's learned how to finally get her facts straight yet?

[Pooka Fey]

4. K&R

[JCMach1]

5. You forgot Doctors, Hospital and Care corporations

[McCamy Taylor]

10. If you ignore the AMA (which is being ambivalent) physicians support health care reform.

And I always ignore the AMA, which does not speak for any physician I know. Check out the policy statements of the American Academy of Family Practice which does not have a financial interest in keeping people unhealthy so that more knee replacements, heart surgeries and other expensive hospital procedures can be done on them at Medicare's expense.

http://www.aafp.org/online/en/home/media/releases/2008/covertheuninsured.html

This nation requires two health reforms:
-- Universal access to health care coverage, whether that be through employer-based insurance, the individual market or some combination of public and private coverage, and
-- A restructured system that focuses on meeting each patient’s need for a personal physician who provides comprehensive primary care in an accessible, efficient practice and that recognizes the value of preventive and chronic care management and pays appropriately for those services.

Combined, these health policies will expand access to health care by providing health care coverage for all and by rebuilding our primary care physician workforce. Fully implemented, these policies will improve each individual’s health and the community’s health. They will help end today’s extremely expensive, fragmented and duplicative system. And they will help rein in the cost of insurance coverage and ultimately, help save money for businesses, the government, and individual families.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. My brother has an interesting take on this

He's a physician in private practice, because he couldn't stand the ways in which HMOs and group practices are focused on money.

In his days in a group, he observed that tight scheduling of appointments (10-15 minutes per patient) encourages one-size-fits-all medicine, including quick fixes of the symptoms with pills and unnecessary surgery, instead of trying to understand the patient as a whole person and trying more cost effective methods first.

For example, a patient's ailment may be due to poor posture, poor nutrition, hormonal imbalances, or emotional tension and can be cured without resorting to drugs or surgery. He thinks that most doctors over-prescribe drugs and under-prescribe physical therapy, exercise, nutrition, hormone supplementation, and alleviation of psychological stress. He's had patients who come in having been prescribed multiple types of pills, with many of them designed to counteract the side effects of the first couple of pills.

He believes that the compensation rules under the current insurance system, including Medicare, actually encourage drugs and surgery at the expense of less invasive or more natural cures and encourages doctors to dismiss as "hypochondriac" anyone whose symptoms don't match the standard diagnostic criteria or respond to standard therapies.

He's given talks on this at health care conferences and finds that he gets a much better reception from nurses, who actually care for patients on a constant basis, than from doctors, who seem to get stuck on whatever they learned in medical school.

(I saw an example of this in my own life. When I gave up sugar for Lent a couple of years ago, I not only lost weight but found that my osteoarthritis-like symptoms disappeared. An acquaintance who's a doctor complimented me on my weight loss. She had no trouble with the idea of a sugar-free diet leading to weight loss, but she had trouble processing the idea that eliminating sugar could cure my joint pain. "Maybe it's just that you're carrying less weight," she guessed. "That might explain the improvement in my knees and ankles," I said, "but not the improvement in my hands." She clearly had a "that does not compute" look on her face.)

Anyway, my brother would actually like to see doctors put on salary to remove the incentive to prescribe expensive treatments and to have medical school curricula give more emphasis to holistic approaches.

[JCMach1]

17. I agree with your analysis... my info. comes from my sister-in-law

Surgical nurse... But the more highly paid the doctor the less likely they are to be for reform. Most high-end surgeons are against it while you would find many GP's who would more likely be for it.

[EFerrari]

6. The GOP has been reduced to corporate thieves and hate groups.

That's who they are.

[byeya]

7. Medicare operates on less than 3% overhead.

Private insurance,which provides poorer service, works on an 18% to near 30% overhead. This difference is enough to pay for universal health care in the USA a la Canada and have the ancillary benefit of putting the leeches out of work.
The workers have been attacked since the late Carter administration; it's time to push back.

[buzzycrumbhunger]

8. I think the FDA is as culpable as Big Pharma

They are obviously partners. Their latest plan is apparently systematically outlawing vitamins and supplements so they can be branded and sold at huge profits. I don't see that anyone's supervising the FDA, so it's a fox-henhouse deal, and the patient is not benefitting from it in any way. Unsafe, untested meds approved to replace perfectly good ones that work better, but have moved into generic territory; supplements (like vitamin D, which has been proven to cure/prevent things like MS and breast cancer) outlawed or ignored; not to mention all the diseases that probably could have a cure by now if their various charities weren't such lucrative causes for administrators and researchers. . . Disgusting.

[TZ]

13. Total bullshit

You think supplements which don't have to have what they claim in them are safe? Do you know how much toxic chemicals are found in herbal supplements from China et al? The FDA has its hands full with the TOTALLY unreg herbs and sup BILLION DOLLAR industry. A lot of people die from supplements because there are no regs or controls of them.
OH and PLEASE SUPPLY A GODDAMNED LINK THAT SHOWS VITAMIN D CAN CURE MS AND BREAST CANCER. Actually vitamin D in large doses is TOXIC and people have been known to die from it.
But what the fuck do I know. I'm just a research biologist busy finding ways to hide the cure for cancer I discovered last year.

[D-Lee]

20. Vitamin D link

http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/

Please explore the above website for information on Vitamin D -- it has limitations but can help a number of conditions, notwithstanding that you are correct about toxicity and certainly about contamination (including by prescription drugs). Careful choosing of a reputable source is really important here.

[The Wizard]

9. According to the unwitting dupes

that are easy prey for Republican propaganda and jingoism.
...."protecting the best health care system in the world” and (whisper) “so we don’t have to pay for Blacks and Hispanics to have healthy babies”.
Their underlying message since the 60s, has been: We are bigots and will keep minorities in their place. They're the Klan in business suits.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

11. Appeals to bigotry are part of the PR campaign against universal health care

My local paper's online comments are full of diatribes against "illegal immigrants getting free health care" and "Somalis having a dozen kids" and comments like, "Our welfare benefits are already too generous and attract the scum from Chicago, Gary, and Detroit." (Three guesses as to what color they see the "scum" as.) Since the wingnuts all seem to come up with the same types of comments on the same day, you have to assume that talk radio is feeding these ideas into their tiny little brains.

[AllyCat]

14. Thank you! I have added this to my growing list of good arguments

for universal, single-payer. I love spouting off at work (I work in a large, city hospital) when people start spouting the talking points they hear about that "horrible socialized medicine". I have actually managed to change some minds on this and like having well-done articles like yours that I can show people who are sitting on the fence, unsure, or uninformed.

Most of the doctors (OBs) are on board with this idea. There are a few who still like the current system. They are also sleeve-bearing GOP brand wearers.

[Blue_Tires]

16. k+r

[nxylas]

18. Just wrote my congressman, Jim Clyburn

Clyburn was a co-sponsor of HR 676 in the 110th Congress, but has backtracked on his support in the 111th saying that it is too soon to implement a single-payer healthcare system :wtf: I thought it was important to put the pressure on in my own small way.

[D-Lee]

19. YES! Adding some links and urging TRANSPARENCY here

The attack on looking at efficacy does come from Big Pharma according to some commentators. Look at these links:
general commentary: http://www.theseminal.com/2009/02/11/the-conservative-lobbyist-shell-game/
Olbermann on this subject: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677#29170167
Betsy McCaughey's background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_McCaughey_Ross

Here's today's New York Times addressing the subject today:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/health/policy/16health.html?th&emc=th

My concern is that I hope the "medical efficiency" ideas which are going to be explored are posted for public comment before funding is decided.

There are a couple of really awful ideas which float around medical circles (and, if you look under the rock below which they reside, you will find pharma funding). On the other hand, the current FDA review processes have pretty much disregarded comparative efficacy comparisons, giving us expensive new drugs with no track significant record when older and cheaper ones with a long safety record for the same condition fall into disuse.

As to the idea of putting everyone on statins to lower cholesterol, stains can have horrible side effects, including an increased risk of diabetes after two years of use. There are also increased risks of dementia, risk of muscles dissolving, decreased sexual function in men (see www.spacedoc.net) -- all for a drug group for which it is well documented that doctors are particularly prone to dismiss patient inquiries about a problem being a side effect. And, of course, there is evidence that statins do little for women: http://www.whp-apsf.ca/pdf/statinsEvidenceCaution.pdf

Then there is the often disregarded research that diet can achieve the benefits of statins without the above problems: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/459022

Another example is one which does occur in both the UK and Canadian system -- limitation of diabetes testing strips for economic reasons, even for Type 1 diabetics. This ignores that diabetics who limit carbohydrate ingestion and monitor blood glucose to keep it within normal limits can totally avoid diabetic complications, which are costly to treat. Instead, the supporting research for the limitation is based on patients who have no training or exposure to carbohydrate limitation -- and consequently, little idea of how to use blood glucose test scores to manage their diabetes.

So, I would encourage all DUers to do whatever they can to assure that the efficiency ideas floated for funding are posted for comment before decisions are made -- and so they can add their own suggestions.

[uppityperson]

21. I'd add in insurance companies also. Legalized gambling and, in some cases, forced extortion.

Insurance companies exist to Make Money. They do this by collecting raising premiums and not paying out to providers.

Changes are needed.

[keepCAblue]

23. Just watched Michael Moore's "Sicko" last night...

It appears that there are both Repubs and Dems in Congress who are in the pocket of Big Pharma. Sadly and ironically, Hillary Clinton is one of them.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

26. That's why they talk about "increasing access to health INSURANCE" instead of

health CARE. Most mainstream proposals are really corporate welfare for the insurance companies.

[NYC_SKP]

24. Dear Stormfront membership, Your health's & physical condition's is teh awsum.

[nxylas]

25. Well, they are the master race

Such glowing examples of Aryan supremacy.

[hay rick]

27. The invisible elephant in the room.

"Health care costs use up a whopping 15% of our GNP. We spend twice as much per person in this country as most western European nations that have universal health care. And yet our health indicators such as life expectancy and infant mortality place us at the bottom of industrialized nations, among the countries of eastern Europe."

If the media were doing their job, this would be the starting point of any serious discussion about our health care system. Any discussion which ignored these fundamental facts would be ignored or ridiculed. What a pity.

[wroberts189]

28. And do not forget BIG MEDIA nt