Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold issued a statement today in support of the public option as a part of any health care reform package:
Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold
In Support of a Public Health Insurance Option“A public option is a fundamental part of ensuring health care reform brings about real change. Opposing the public plan is an endorsement of the status quo in this country that has left tens of millions of Americans uninsured or underinsured and put massive burdens on employers. I have heard too many horror stories from my constituents about how the so-called competitive marketplace has denied them coverage from the outset, offered a benefit plan that covers everything but what they need or failed them some other way. A strong public option would ensure competition in the industry to provide the best, most affordable insurance for Americans and bring down the skyrocketing health care costs that are the biggest contributor to our long-term budget deficits. I am not interested in passing health care reform in name only. Without a public option, I don’t see how we will bring real change to a system that has made good health care a privilege for those who can afford it.”
Senator thank you for standing up for American people, thank you for your courage. I think that if we don’t get healthcare reform that an emerging independent party will develope and eventually be predominant in our government. American people had so much faith in the Democratic Party and I believe that without a public option for those Americans that truly need a public option will turn the tide for independent party candidates in future elections.
I support the public option and I’d prefer it to be a single payer plan. I agree that change in name only is not worth the effort and is counterproductive in the long run.
But, the issue that seems to be ignored in this whole debate is that if we want to reduce costs, some people will have to make less money than they do now. There are vested interests in this issue. These corporations and individuals make LOTS of money under the status quo and this will have to change if we expect to reduce our spending from high teens % of GNP to mid single digits, as other first world countries now do.
There needs to be an agreement that health is not a profit industry. We cannot afford to let insurance companies eat up 20-25% of our health care costs in overhead, including large executive salaries. We cannot afford to pay doctors in specialized fields $600k or more per year to show up for 35 hours a week and actually work for 20. We cannot afford to spend 3x the price for prescription medications that the same products sell for elsewhere.
These vested interests know what’s at stake, and we should not be surprised when they fight to maintain the status quo. What we DO need to do is to make it clear that the current system has evolved to benefit those vested interests, while the system we want must benefit everyone.
Here’s what I’d like to see happen:
1) Create a single payer system. Yes, it will certainly increase taxes, BUT it will decrease everyone’s health care expenditures. Why not spend a nickel to save a dime?
2) Increase our number of annual Medical School graduates. This will increase the supply of doctors, allowing supply and demand to pull prices down. This works WITH the single payer plan to help reduce costs.
3) Work on health maintenance rather than critical care. Let’s fix our health problems while they are small, and prevent those that can be prevented via vaccinations, diet & drug awareness, exercise.
4) Beginning of life and end of life philosophys. We need to look closely at what it’s worth to extend a life. What does it benefit me or society if you keep me alive in a nursing home bed for an extra year? Human life may be sacred, but that doesn’t mean that it’s priceless.
5) Education: Nothing else works as well in controlling costs as having an educated public. Education brings awareness of consequences and options. Education has been shown to reduce the birth rate, which is the fundamental multiplier of environmental, social, and physiological stresses on each of us.
Sorry, waaay longer than it should have been. If you got this far, thanks for reading.
Jim,
Well said except for item number 4.
That’s exactly what the insurance companies are doing.
How do you value a human life?
Is a human life worth $5 or $10,000 or $1 million?
Is Warren Buffet’s life worth more than you?
If a human life is worth a certain amount, would you allow murderers to pay the amount and not be sent to jail?
What amount of money is your life worth?
I am in full agreement with Senator Feingold. He should have a face to face meeting with the President to present his view that is shared by so many Americans who have not participated in the town house meetings.
As a cancer patient fighting cancer when my Cobra ran out I had to go on guaranteed issue. Now my insurance payments to Blue Shield are $1,018 a year with a $1,500 deductable. I still have co-pays of 30% and that does not include perscriptions that have an additional $500 deductable. I cannot use any program that allows me to order a three month supply to receive any discount. I cannot change insurance companies. I am stuck with Blue Shield or nothing. People who think that they have good insurance will be in the same place if they can no longer work or leave there job for any reason. Without the public option insurance companies can and will continue to discriminate against people who they think will cost them money. It just makes sense. If corporations must answer to stockholders their money goes to them not into better healthcare to people who need it.
Thank you Senator Feingold. I wholeheartedly agree.
I fully support Senator Russ Feingold. Moreover, I hope that all truly progressive Democratic elected officials will vote against any bill that does not include a public option. If we lose this opportunity to legislate a good health care bill, that would be preferable to legislating a bad bill. Something is NOT better than nothing. I’d rather have no bill, as opposed to a bill that would allow the Right to say…”see you got your health care bill and costs still increased”. We need to draw a line in the sand right now: we get a public option or we vote against any bill that lacks it. Period.
WAY TO GO I support your position as someone in the Health Care field I know first hand how great the need is.
Go for it Russ! Between you and Howard Dean I have not lost faith.
My husband and I are both very much in favor of a public option! Thank you Senator Feingold for helping to keep the public option alive and well!
Thank you, Senator Russ: We strongly support
the public option for healthcare. Anything less
would not truly be reform.
Keep up the good work!!!
I am self employed and pay$1105 per month for my health care, I can no longer do it. Self employed people realy get hit hard, plus as a taxpayer I am paying higher costs for health care for all the teachers, police and govt. workers in town and all those not in a plan when they go to a Hosp. We need reformed health care now with a public option. Single payer would be the best thing to do. Without the public option insurance companies will never bring down the cost of health care, they cannot be trusted.
I am a U.S. citizen living in Canada, and I vote in Wisconsin. Thank you, Senator Feingold! The public option should be in the final bill. Any of the changes the Obama administration has proposed will help in some way, but the U.S. health insurance debate certainly looks scary from up here in Ottawa, ON. We watch with dismay. The Canadian “Single Payer” system works. Of course our health care system is not perfect, but it is so much better than the chaos in the U.S.
Deborah in Ottawa
The whole idea is to wear us down and stretch this out, so we will give up. We have to be committed. And, committed means “NEVER” giving up.
We are small business owners and have an individual health care plan. We are in our 50’s and in excellent health. We pay $9,000/year with a $10,000 deductible. And it goes up 25% per year!!! I despise the greedy private health insurers. Their interests are the exact opposite of their customers. A single payer system would be the best and would save the most money. In lieu of that we need a very strong public option. Thank you Senator Feingold!
Senator Feingold is the voice of the voiceless. I wish he had stayed in the race for President. One of the few with vision AND courage. Don’t back down! The reason we Democrats have not moved this country far enough in a more progressive direction is that we (translate that Congress and Senate) compromise half of every issue away to the Republicans before we even get to the bargaining table.
At 67, I still find it difficult to comprehend how this country of “ours” is the one modern nation that doesn’t “get it” that when it comes to the health of a nation’s citizens, it’s not a “free market economy” issue.
I have two “single-payer” plans–Medicare and the Veterans Administration (I was one of the lucky ones who didn’t get croaked fighting to keep Kennedy’s, MacNamara’s, Johnson’s, Nixon’s and, through it all, Kissinger’s dominoes standing tall in the Vietnamese grass.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t even Iraq have free health care for all until the US wiped out all of their hospitals, electric plants, water and sewage/sanitation plants in Shock & Awe #1 in 1991 (King George III suckered Saddam into Kuwait by getting Kuwait to mess with the Iraq war debt and oil fields and suckered the US into going to war with that little Hill & Knowlton-coached actress lying stunt about Iraq soldiers “ripping little defenseless –sob, sob-sob–premature babies sob, sob, sob, out of their incubators and – sob, sob, sob, letting them die on the cold, cold concrete floor. (sob, sob, sob.)
More…
(You think Americans would wise up after all the lying “casus belli” we’ve been subjected to over the years–one big one for every war (I think I see a pattern developing here. How about you? 1898 or so, “Remember the Maine”, WWI, the sinking of the Lusitania; WWII, Pearl Harbor (which FDR etc. both provoked–cutting of Japan’s oil supply, etc., etc.) and knew about from about April of 1941–about the time the US cracked the Japanese codes); the Gulf of Tonkin “attacks,” I forget what the trumped up excuse was for Korea; “tortured” medical students in Grenada; Naughty Noriega stopped obeying the CIA; and of course, the latest mother of all, the so-called “attack on America” on 9/11/2001. What with special nano-thermite explosives made by the US weapons labs (and ditto the “weaponized anthrax” later from Fort Detrick, MD), we’d have to be blooming idiots to accept the official conspiracy theory.
But as to health care, the ONLY legislation we should accept is SINGLE-PAYER; that is, expand Medicare and the VA medical system (agreed by all to be not half shabby, and a heck of a lot better than no health insurance and no sickness care at all, and faaaar better than a sharp stick in the eye!).
And we have got to force the FCC to make a half-dozen broadcast channels available for political advertising–for FREE, on THE PUBLIC’S AIRWAVES. We MUST get the money out of this election system, and the biggest chunk of it goes for political advertising–or, more accurately, political propaganda ads.
If Obama caves in on this one, heaven help us all.
We should put every single one of the for-profit health insurance companies out of business. All of their workers can be retrained to audit the Pentagon budget, to try tracking down the $2.6 TRILLION that Rumsfeld announced on Sept. 10, 2001, had gone missing. The nation forgot about that with the next day’s events. But $2.6 trillion here, and $5.7 trillion there for bailouts of the banks, and another $5.8 trillion added to the debt, and pretty soon, you’re talking some serious money. We could give all the health insurance workers who discover waste, fraud and abuse (in, say, Halliburton’s billing, or other war profiteers) a percentage of the recovered funds as a bonus.
That’s a bonus I don’t think ANYONE of us We the People would object to. As for the rest that went to Wall Street, we need to “claw back” all those bonuses paid with our money.
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final…
And most of the salaries, too. Somehow, it just rankles that the people who’ve robbed us of our money and our economic stability (what there was of it after “globalization” and “free=market economy” for the poor and “socialism for the rich” (actually, just welfare for the rich), manage to get even more of our money to “make them whole” after some of their own money (very little, though) got plundered by their buddies on the street.
So, go gettem, Russ Feingold. ANY PLAN THAT IS NOT A COMPLETE, NATIONAL, SINGLE-PAYER SYSTEM, WITH NO PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE REQUIRED, IS A COMPROMISE.
A ‘HEALTH CARE’ OR SICKNESS CARE, OR ‘HEALTH INSURANCE’ REFORM PACKAGE THAT DOES NOT CONTAIN A MAJOR SINGLE-PAYER PUBLIC HEALTH CARE/INSURANCE SYSTEM IS, IMHO, A NON-STARTER. And a cave-in to the political contributor corporate classes.
And it actually turns out that We the People, with our taxes, are actually the ones who “pay the piper.” So it’s US who must call the tune. All of the “contributor class” are trying to extract more billions from the American taxpayer (and all of our creditors abroad) in return for their relative pennies of campaign contributions. They may contribute a few million dollars here and there, and it sounds like a lot of money.
But when you compare the contributions with the financial benefits received–which are in the Billions and Billions of dollars, they’re paying hundredths of a penny on the dollar, and getting obscene returns in the 12,000% range. Not 100%, or 200% or 1,000%. Figure it out yourself from what’s available on the web and from public interest groups. Our 537 elected officials, the Congressional 535 & the White House 2, are selling out our country for a pittance. Not even three magic beans to grow a beanstalk we could climb into the reaches of the stratosphere where the 0.01% of our population, our very own evil giants, live in the castles they built with what they’ve plundered from the rest of us–that 99.99% of the population that has less and less time, money, freedom. Grimm tales indeed.
Heath care reform without a public or non for profit option is like Abbott without Costello.
We should not stop at health care reform–insurance as a whole–homeowners and auto are also in need of reform–there needs to be a not for profit option to keep the scoundrels in line!
Particularly when considering health care–profit should not be part of the equation, period.
A public option is totally necessary! Keep up the good work, Russ!