Health care advocacy with, um, gusto

A regular commenter sent me a message saying "Now this is a universal healthcare lobbying group that has some real ‘cajones‘…"

Assuming that he meant "cojones" (a "cajón" is a chest or locker or box of some sort), I have to agree. This is from the group’s ad in USA Today Monday. Below a newspaper clipping with the headline, "Cheney Treated in Hospital for an Irregular Heartbeat," the ad said:

If he were anyone else,
he’d probably be dead
by now.

The patient’s history and
prognosis were grim: four
heart attacks, quadruple
bypass surgery, angioplasty,
an implanted defibrillator and
now an emergency procedure to
treat an irregular heartbeat.
For millions of Americans, this
might be a death sentence. For the
vice president, it was just another
medical treatment. And it cost him
very little.
Unlike the average American, the president, vice
president and members of Congress all enjoy
government-financed health care with few
restrictions or prohibitive fees. They are never
turned away for pre-existing conditions or denied
care for what an insurance company labels
“experimental treatments.”
The rest of us deserve no less.
We call on the presidential candidates to support
HR 676, the National Health Insurance Act—
an expanded and improved
Medicare for all that:
• provides complete medical,
dental, vision and long-term care
• eliminates deductibles, co-pays,
hidden fees
• allows you to choose your doctor, lab,
hospital, health care facility
• is completely portable and not tied to
employment
• is free from interference or second-guessing by
insurance companies.
Let’s talk about real solutions. Forcing people to
buy insurance doesn’t provide better or more universal
care. It just pads the pockets of the insurance
companies. Medicare for all puts health care
decision-making power back where it belongs—
in your hands.
Traditional Medicare for all—the single best
cure for what ails us.

This was brought to us courtesy of the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee. The Web address of their effort is http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org/.

10 thoughts on “Health care advocacy with, um, gusto

  1. Lee Muller

    An ordinary citizen with Dick Cheney’s heart problems would probably be dead if he were unlucky enough to be in Canada, the UK, France, Spain, Russia, or the Netherlands, given their high rates of cardiac deaths due to long waits for diagnosis and treatment.
    The only way for inefficient socialist medical systems to save money is to degrade and deny care to the patients.

  2. bud

    No matter how many times this nonsense is debunked the true believers will still continue to be the deluded with the notion that we have free-market health care in the U.S. But I’ll try again. Here are the life expectancies of the countries listed by Mr. Muller. Except for Russia they are all greater than in the U.S. And S.C. is well below the national average:
    Canada – 80.22
    U.K. – 78.54
    France – 79.73
    Spain – 79.65
    Russia – 67.08
    Netherlands – 78.96
    U.S. – 77.85
    South Carolina – 74.9
    That’s right Lee, you actually live 5.32 years less in South Carolina with our laisez-fare, free enterprise health care system here in South Carolina than you would in Canada with it’s backwards, socialist system. Given the horrible experience I’ve had to deal with over the past few years I’m surprised it’s not more.

  3. Richard L. Wolfe

    SLICES IN T.I.M.E.
    1847 – American Medical Association (AMA) organized across United States
    1848 – Rockerfeller intrests establish as prime goal control of U.S. medical ststem
    1848 – William A. Rockerfeller bills himself as a ” cancer specialist ” and sells petroleum based products as elixirs
    2008 – Americans screaming about soaring health care costs cannot make connection between Big Oil and Big Pharma
    2008 – Democratic candidates fight amongst themselves over who has best snake oil plan

  4. bud

    The health care issue is actually very straight-forward. The current mess of a system is failing to give Americans the longevity enjoyed by other countries. Since this is indeed broken it needs fixing. As demonstrated by western Europe and Japan the best approach is single-payer. End of story.

  5. Richard L. Wolfe

    Bud, Do think we are simply cast a vote and overthrow some of the largest and most powerful coporations in the world? Their lawyers alone could hold up legislation for years. When it comes to large entitlement programs haste makes waste.
    European countries don’t maintain a large military liability like the U.S. Their labor laws are quite different from ours. There unemploment numbers are larger than ours.
    To fix the Health Care Industry in this country will be the largest domestic undertaking in this nation’s history.

  6. Lee Muller

    Anyone who knows basic statistics knows how meaningless it is to compare the life expectancies of countries with vastly different racial and economic mixes of people. If you want a proper statistical comparison to those white European countries, compare them to the white Americans of European ancestry. Remove from the sample those 30,000,000 illegal aliens and non-whites with their high rates of teen pregnancy and infant mortality which skew the figures for America.
    Besides, the life expectancies in those socialist countries mean nothing to the millions of patients there who are denied care and die early because the state was glad to get them off the pension rolls. Those costs in human carnage are recorded by the UN each year, so I will post them next.
    America doesn’t have a free market medical care system. The remaining free market part is what works. Its only problem is the socialist meddlers who want to mess the whole thing up so they can seize control of something which gives them yet more control over the lives of their subjects.

  7. weldon VII

    Bud,
    Is health care the only variable relevant to life expectancy in Canada, Britain, France, Spain, Russia, the Netherlands, the United States and South Carolina?
    Do the health care systems in the United States and South Carolina differ?
    Does my Aunt Annabelle nearing the age of 96 in North Carolina mean anything in this discussion?
    What? That’s no, no and probably not?
    Pardon me for putting words in your mouth, but the life-expectancy differences you pointed out, Russia and South Carolina excepted, have no statistical significance.
    The variance from least to most is 2.37 years compared to an average of about 79.
    In fact, from looking at those figures, I think speaking English is hazardous to one’s health.
    The puFurhermorewe

  8. Lee Muller

    Comparing treatment of breast cancer and outcomes:
    Canada – 50% of breast cancer patients die
    Russia – 50% of breast cancer patients die
    Netherlands – 50% of breast cancer patients die
    UK – 43% of breast cancer patients die
    50% of cancer patients are denied the latest drugs
    Spain – 35% of breast cancer patients die
    (This is actually not bad, considering that Hispanic women are far more genetically disposed to have breast cancer.)
    Germany – 34% of breast cancer patients die
    France – 33% of breast cancer patients die
    Sweden – 24% of breast cancer patients die
    U.S. – 20% of breast cancer patients die- – 25% higher cancer survival rate than any other country
    – rate of access to cancer drugs is 10 times that of Europeans

  9. Kathleen Duffy

    Actually, Lee, 100% of breast cancer patients die in every country in the world.
    Could you please cite your statistics? I’m a health care reform advocate by trade and a breast cancer survivor (not) by choice, and I’ve never heard anything that even comes close to the numbers you’ve just put up there.

  10. Kathleen Duffy

    Actually, Lee, 100% of breast cancer patients die in every country in the world.
    Could you please cite your statistics? I’m a health care reform advocate by trade and a breast cancer survivor (not) by choice, and I’ve never heard anything that even comes close to the numbers you’ve just put up there.

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