Running time = 24 minutes
The program featured several short speeches generally promoting national-level legislation for universal public health insurance that would be affordable for everyone and would actually pay the doctor bill (unlike the so-called insurance many people in this country have currently). There are notes of support for what roughly is the direction taken by President Obama to get Congress to include such a public plan in reform legislation now under consideration.
While "Medicare for everyone" is mentioned by one of them, speakers at this rally do not necessarily demand that the solution be single payer, just that it fixes what are seen to be extreme harms to the American people because insurance companies are cruelly organized with insistence for high financial return and callous disregard for health outcomes. The quality of the speakers and the compelling stories told along those lines make this event very worthwhile.
The speakers were
- Don Todd, activist from Etna, Maine
- Dr. Elizabeth Weiss, Bangor physician
- Leslie Mansfield, Bangor business owner
- Dr. Benjamin Schaefer, Bangor cardiologist
- Alice Knapp, Esq., Attorney in Richmond
WLBZ/WCSH television provided statewide coverage, story HERE. The Bangor Daily News also has a story up on the web, HERE.
Locally the Maine People's Alliance (MPA) and Food AND Medicine supported this event. The related national organizing effort is under the flag of Health Care for America Now, a broad coalition of labor, economic justice, and a huge spectrum of social change groups. The organization has "10 principles for reform that have been endorsed by President Obama and more than 190 members of Congress," easily found at their website.
My personal view is that the Obama-style reform will end up not being adequate to the task of eliminating the harms in the system described by our speakers and within the principles of Health Care for America Now. My view is that that only a mass transition to a single payer along the lines of the Canadian system (or better yet the French system) can really re-direct the resources needed to ensure people get their doctor bills paid while the costs are fairly born by society as a whole.
I would not abolish highly regulated private insurance as an extra option, but everybody has to be in the public system or it just is going to end up a failure. The Obama reform already is in big trouble before a bill in Congress even exists. Because it will not re-direct enough of the insurance company premiums people pay now into a robust public plan instead, the Obama reform looks too expensive. The figures that came last week out of the Congressional Budget Office are truly killer--more than $1 trillion on top of current obligations. A universal plan covering all people within the public system actually would be cheaper.
More importantly, the harms of the private, financialized system ought to be made to disappear immediately. That would be real reform. Obama falls short. What he wants to do will preserve all the cost (people)-chopping insurance bureaucrats and out-of-pocket co-paying that in this country stand between people and their doctors and thus prevents the system from improving health like it should.
These notions ought to be a major discussion in the activist community. There is quite a divergence between the MPA, labor-supported, Obama-style organizing efforts and we who favor single-payer. Discussion?
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