President Obama addressed Obamacare today, claiming that he is open to “working with anyone” to make the law better. The following analysts are available for interviews:
RUSSELL MOKHIBER, russellmokhiber at gmail.com
Founder of Single Payer Action, Mokhiber said today: “Complexity is baked into Obamacare and is thus doomed to fail. When Medicare was rolled out in 1966, there were no computers. More than 20 million people were enrolled over six months. On index cards. Repeal Obamacare. Replace with single payer. Simple. Secure. Stable. No co-pays. No deductibles. Controls costs. No more deaths due to lack of health insurance. No more medical bankruptcies. Everybody in. Nobody out. Free choice of hospital and doctor.”
PHILIP CAPER, M.D., pcpcaper21 at gmail.com
Caper is a doctor in Portland, Maine and regular columnist at the Bangor Daily News. He recently wrote the piece “The High Costs of Complexity in Health Care Reform.” Caper said today: “The problem with the ACA is not that the federal government is involved, but that literally thousands of private insurers have their fingers in the cookie jar, resulting in a law that is much too complicated for what it needs to accomplish, and too complex for anybody to administer efficiently and effectively. … Together, Medicare and Social Security — both run by the federal government — have been successfully providing access to private health care and income security for millions of seniors and the disabled for almost 50 years. They have been a major factor in keeping seniors in our country out of poverty. … We need expanded and improved Medicare-for-All. And we need to vote any politician who won’t advance us toward that goal out of office.”
MARGARET FLOWERS, M.D., mdpnhp at gmail.com, @MFlowers8
Flowers recently wrote the piece “Beyond the Spin, Some Facts about the Affordable Care Act.” She said today: “In what is perhaps the greatest corporate scam ever, not only did the health insurance corporations write the federal health law, called the Affordable Care Act, to enhance their profits, but now they also have the government and non-profit groups doing the work of marketing their shoddy products. The foundation of the ACA, the mandate that uninsured individuals purchase private insurance if they do not qualify for public insurance, begins in 2014 and the state health insurance exchanges where people can purchase that insurance opened on October 1. A new non-profit organization called Enroll America was created to organize and train grassroots activists to seek out the uninsured (they even provide maps) and assist them in using the exchanges.
“Billions of public dollars and tremendous efforts are being spent to create new health insurance markets, advertise them, subsidize their products and actively solicit buyers for them. But the United States, as the only industrialized nation to use a market-based health care system, has already proved over the past 40 years, that this system doesn’t work. It is the most expensive, leaves the most out and leads to poor health outcomes. It means that people only receive the health care they can afford, not what they need.”
Flowers served as congressional fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program and is on the board of Healthcare-Now. She is co-director of It’s Our Economy and co-host of Clearing the FOG Radio Show.
