Category: Physicians for a National Health Plan

PNHP : Good links in letter for members

Dear PNHP Colleagues,

This Friday evening (May 22) the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS at 9 p.m. EDT will feature a discussion with Dr. David Himmelstein, co-founder of PNHP, and other single-payer advocates, asking the question “why isn’t a single-payer plan on the table in Washington?”

This important media event is emblematic of a recent surge in media interest in the single-payer alternative (see below) – a surge in large part fueled by the bold and courageous acts of civil disobedience undertaken by PNHP members and others before the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month.

Yesterday the conservative editorial board of the Times-Union in Albany, N.Y., made an impassioned appeal to Congress to put single payer on the table.

Dr. Margaret Flowers, one of the first persons arrested by the committee for speaking up for single payer, explains why she did so in this op-ed in the Baltimore Sun. She has given radio and newspaper interviews almost every day since her arrest.

Others who took part in the D.C. actions have been profiled in the media, too: see, for example, these portraits of Dr. Judy Dasovich and Dr. Carol Paris.

Dr. Paul DeMarco, writing in the Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald Journal, explains why, as a conservative, he supports single payer and the principle of mutual aid. (His op-ed ran directly alongside an opposing view by Sen. James DeMint, R-S.C.).

In their May 16 letter to The New York Times, Drs. Arnold Relman and Marcia Angell, past editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, explain how “We don’t need more money; we need a new system.” In another recent NYT letters column, Dr. Laura Boylan writes, “As long as the logic of our system is set by a huge for-profit multi-payer bureaucracy, we will continue to get low value on the health care dollar.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg. For example, Dr. Himmelstein was on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show Monday, along with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and others.
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I thought this was worthwhile to pass along…

UPDATE: Fixed the links! Sorry about that!

Dr. Oliver Fein reports on the White House health summit – PNHP’s official Blog

Dr. Oliver Fein reports on the White House health summit – PNHP’s official Blog

An excerpt:

What was my role in all of this? Despite my best efforts, I was unable to make a public statement at the meeting, although thanks to the PNHP staff in Chicago we were able distribute my prepared remarks to the media while the summit was under way. Our staff member in Washington, Danielle Alexander, also handed out hard copies to summit participants as they left the White House.

I took the opportunity to talk one-on-one with six senators and seven representatives and suggested that if their committees held hearings on health
reform, at least one or two single-payer advocates should be included on the
hearing panel. I also said that single-payer bills like H.R. 676 should be
compared with all other proposals for health care reform by the Congressional
Budget Office. There was considerable receptivity to these ideas among some of
the Congress members. We will pursue these leads.

The media took great interest in the successful battle by Rep. Conyers and myself to get into the summit, with stories in the Congressional Quarterly, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among other places. We have also been able get the single-payer message out on radio, with myself and Drs. Walter Tsou, Steffie
Woolhandler, David Himmelstein and Quentin Young, among others, being invited to
appear on the air, often on programs with national reach. This was a plus.

In sum, I came out of the White House Health Care Summit with conviction that
single payer – that is, publicly funded, privately delivered health care, which
removes the wasteful for-profit, private health insurance companies as middlemen, remains the only solution that can guarantee access to comprehensive, quality health care with choice of doctor and hospital, and reduce overall cost. Single-payer, an improved and expanded Medicare-for-All, is the gold standard against which all other proposals for health care reform should be measured.