Originally published February 21 2009
Sweeping New Health Insurance System Proposed for U.S. Residents
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) The Commonwealth Fund, a health policy research group that represents the interests of health insurance companies, has proposed a sweeping new program that -- surprise! -- would require all Americans to buy health insurance.
The new program would mandate that Americans buy health insurance, even if they don't need it. Those who don't buy it would be penalized by the government for failing to participate in the new program.
The new program does nothing to end the censorship of free speech about nutritional supplements or teach Americans about disease prevention through nutrition or herbal remedies. As such, it joins the cacophony of all the ignorant health "experts" who claim to be solving our nation's health care crisis by simply forcing everyone to pay for more "sick care" coverage.
Leave it to Big Government punish people who take care of their own health and opt not to participate in a pill-pushing, scientifically corrupted Big Pharma health care system that only enriches insurance companies and drug companies while ignoring the real causes of disease.
Authors' Quotes on Health Insurance and Reform
Below, you'll find selected quotes from noted authors on the subject of Health Insurance and Reform. Feel free to quote these in your own work provided you give proper credit to both the original author quoted here and this NaturalNews page.
For better or worse, the "free" market will remain our nation's choice for funding health insurance and delivering medical care. Our only hope of fixing the health care system's biggest problems is to enact simple legislative reforms designed with one purpose: to allow the market to provide health insurance more efficiently and affordably. This is a significant and somewhat painful conclusion for the same author who wrote a book as recently as 1998 arguing that managed care would compel the market to reform itself.
- Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System by J.D. Kleinke
- Available on Amazon.com
In the absence of a sufficiently independent and militant working-class movement, national health insurance continued to be defeated in the decades that followed. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s the AMA carried on its vehement opposition to any federal intervention into the financing of medical care. Liberal reformers tried to get national health insurance included in the Social Security Act as part of the New Deal response to the Great Depression and the militant organizing among the unemployed and industrial workers.
- Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America by E. Richard Brown
- Available on Amazon.com
The traditional opponents of comprehensive change such as national health insurance have been the AMA, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and certain other business interests. After the reform debacle of 1994, politicians looked at comprehensive change with the deference owed a third rail. Popular wisdom dictated that the only politically safe route to take in efforts at health care reform was the path of "incremental" change. What have the incremental efforts of the past decade brought us? We've seen an increase of about five million in the number of uninsured.
- Health Care Meltdown: Confronting The Myths and Fixing Our Failing System by Bob LeBow, M.D., M.P.H.
- Available on Amazon.com
After the war commercial insurance companies, following the Blue Cross lead, pushed energetically into the health insurance market they had previously all but ignored. Blue Cross and commercial health insurance companies developed this new commodity into a major industry -- totaling $39 billion in premium income in 1977-and strengthened hospitals' finances and their position in the medical delivery system. The groups that had coalesced around the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care pressed on with their campaign to reform medical care.
- Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America by E. Richard Brown
- Available on Amazon.com
With a standardized plan design and the consumer mobility created by tax parity, health insurance customers like Mary are free to choose whatever insurer they want: the one with the best customer service, the one with the fewest utilization review hurdles, the one with the most heartwarming TV ads. Mary's money, her medical care, her choice. The consumer behavior consequences of this tax code reform would mirror one of the goals of the AMA's reform plan, with its own proposal of tax parity.
- Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System by J.D. Kleinke
- Available on Amazon.com
The burgeoning debate about health care reform and possible nationalization of health insurance coverage are bringing these underlying issues to light. Key questions will be forced to the surface: Why are we so sick? Why does medical care cost so much? Are there cheaper, more effective alternatives? One of this book's intentions is to provide a therapeutic and philosophical rationale for the optimistic "yes" to these questions.
- Physician: Medicine and the Unsuspected Battle for Human Freedom by Richard Leviton
- Available on Amazon.com
Yet there is a very strong ethic, expressed mostly by conservative, but also some mainstream, religious elements in America, which clearly is in direct opposition to the concepts of universal coverage and national health insurance. This ethic colors how many Americans look at the issue of health care reform. It arises largely out of the oft-repeated mantra for "personal responsibility," the same mantra that keeps alive the demand for deductibles and/or co-pays.
- Health Care Meltdown: Confronting The Myths and Fixing Our Failing System by Bob LeBow, M.D., M.P.H.
- Available on Amazon.com
Sources for this story:
• Coalition Boosts State Health Care Plan - Omaha- msnbc.com
- MSNBC
• The Associated Press: Obama wants to overhaul health care; can he do it?
- Associated Press
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