Do you Hate Obama?

While the President said every idea must be considered, the idea of creating a single-payer national health insurance program has already been rejected. White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said Thursday, “The President doesn’t believe that’s the best way to achieve the goal of cutting costs and increasing access.”

Initially, no supporters of single payer were invited to the summit. After protests were called, the White House invited Democratic Congressman John Conyers and the president of the Physicians for a National Health Program.

Major newspaper, broadcast and cable stories mentioning healthcare reform in the week leading up to President Barack Obama’s March 5 healthcare summit rarely mentioned the idea of a single-payer national health insurance program, according to a new FAIR study. And advocates of such a system–two of whom participated in yesterday’s summit–were almost entirely shut out, FAIR found.

Single-payer–a model in which healthcare delivery would remain largely private, but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much like Medicare provides for seniors, and comparable to Canada’s current system)–polls well with the public, who preferred it two-to-one over a privatized system in a recent survey (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09). But a media consumer in the week leading up to the summit was more likely to read about single-payer from the hostile perspective of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer than see an op-ed by a single-payer advocate in a major U.S. newspaper.

Over the past week, hundreds of stories in major newspapers and on NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer mentioned healthcare reform, according to a search of the Nexis database (2/25/09-3/4/09). Yet all but 18 of these stories made no mention of “single-payer” (or synonyms commonly used by its proponents, such as “Medicare for all,” or the proposed single-payer bill, H.R. 676), and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer–none of which appeared on television.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/6/as_obama_hosts_summit_on_health

http://www.pollingreport.com/health.htm

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/07-6

ULTRA…I’d rather pay more in Taxes and have full coverage than the way it has been: I Pay Premiums, Co-Pays, Deductables and Co-Insuranceand the Insurance Company can still Deny Coverage so they will earn more Profits.
Anthem Blue Cross has paid Millions in fines for for rescinding Insurance Coverage & dropping members after patients filed Claims.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/11/BUDT15SHDS.DTL

Boss…sorry there’s a difference between giving funding for patients to “buy Insurance” and fully covering all citizens as is done in Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United Kingdom…
“Why America Won’t Get the Healthcare System It Needs”

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/0082380