Government Control Bugaboo

It's almost dizzying to hear the wingnuts threatening that government control will keep us health consumers from getting the care we need. Does anyone not yet get it - the insurance companies' insistence on profits is the largest impediment to health care for the U.S. public. Anyone who has had any contact at all with those 'providers' knows that you have to take what they will let you have when it comes to collecting on all those premiums you paid in for so long, at such strain on the budget.

Getting your money's worth from insurance has become an ever less believable myth as health costs soar out of control. Yet, the industry is sure that you can be scared into leaving your well-being in their control. I like racymind's answer to to my question in a conversastion at eschaton earlier;
ME: morning, racymind, how could healthcare survive without the insurance co's running it for profit, tho?

ANSWER: Like a patient without a tumor
racymind | Homepage | 05.09.09 - 6:42 am | #

Echidne looks at the scene up close and personal.

Frank Luntz is the man responsible for "ownership society", "death taxes" and "tax relief"; all terms which give debates a conservative frame. Now he has come out with the wingnut dictionary on how to talk health care. For example:

Luntz Tip No. 1: Scare people. Especially about their children. Luntz's memo includes a road map to how to most effectively scare the bejeezus out of the American public when it comes to health care. Results show the phrase health care rationing frightened the most people, so Republicans are urged to sprinkle it around describing Democratic reform plans. It's also better to warn that Democrats want to put politicians in charge of health care, rather than bureaucrats: "Bureaucrats are scary — but at least they are professionals."

The Republicans are always about scaring people. There's a terrorist under your bed and a politician will operate on your tonsils, unless you do exactly as Frank Luntz wants you to do!

The profits they don't earn have suffered the same blow as the rest of this economy; they've been decimated by the disasters of the last eight years of deregulation and law-defying economic institutions. Now you are being asked to guarantee those insurance companies that are preying on you don't suffer losses like you have.

Not a good health care plan, in any sense of the word.

Single payer health care is what the public needs, wants, and will have to fight for. That fight is being rigged by health insurance companies. Recently doctors opposing the insurance companies' capture of our health industry were imprisoned for trying to represent the public. We have to change this criminal conduct, toward the public and against it.