DAVID SCHEINER, MD, SIDNEY WOLFE, MD, via Barbara Holzer
MARGARET FLOWERS, MD
Available for a limited number of interviews, Scheiner was President Obama’s doctor from 1987 until he entered the White House. Today Dr. Scheiner is publicly opposing Obama’s health plan and is calling for a single-payer system. See: http://i2.democracynow.org/2009/7/22/president_obamas_longtime_physician_opposes_white.

Wolfe is acting president of Public Citizen and director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group. Flowers is co-chair of the Maryland chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program. They will all be at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, the anniversary of Medicare’s enactment. A rally will follow. See here.

ISABEL MACDONALD
Macdonald is communications director with FAIR, the media watch group, which today, with a host of other groups, is delivering a petition signed by over 12,000 people demanding that the TV networks include single payer in their coverage of the national healthcare debate. The petition’s signatories include Obama’s longtime physician Dr. David Scheiner, filmmaker Michael Moore, former MSNBC host Phil Donahue, actors Mike Farrell, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, and doctors Quentin Young, Stephanie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein of Physicians for a National Health Program. The petition is being presented to the New York City office of ABC News, which disinvited Dr. Scheiner from its recent forum on healthcare reform, where he’d been planning to ask Obama a question about single payer. Macdonald just wrote the piece “Prescription for a Real Healthcare Debate: How Corporate Media Have Ruined the Health Care Debate“.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167