The single-payer challenge
Eight activists stood up in a May 5 Senate hearing chaired by Democratic Sen. Max Baucus to demand to know why Congress won't consider proposals for a single-payer health care system that eliminates the role of private insurance companies and covers everyone under a government program similar to Medicare.
Baucus' Finance Committee was preparing for the second of three "roundtables" on plans for health care reform, with witnesses lined up from the health care industry to promote their pet proposals. But the Obama administration and Democratic leaders have said that single-payer is off the table, so its supporters weren't even given a chance to speak.
The activists, representing several groups, including Physicians for a National Health Program, Healthcare-Now, Labor Campaign for Single Payer and Single Payer Action--each stood and asked for single-payer to be part of the discussion. Baucus ordered capitol police to arrest the demonstrators.
, who was featured in Michael Moore's health care documentary Sicko and the founder of American Patients United, described what took place.
IT HAS finally happened right here in the United States. Citizens who believe health care is a human right have been arrested and are being processed like criminals through the Southeast District of Columbia police station. Their crime? Asking for single-payer health care reform--publicly funded, privately delivered health care--to be discussed during the congressional hearings on reform.
Doctors and other single-payer activists were handcuffed and went to jail today, speaking up for single-payer to be at the table in the Senate Finance Committee's roundtable discussion on health care access and coverage. In stark contrast, Karen Ignagni, head of the industry lobby group American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), was escorted into the room like royalty by staff members of the Senate committee. Clearly, the position of the U.S. Senate is not with the majority of Americans who support a national, public insurance system.
It made me physically ill to see Maryland pediatrician Margaret Flowers cuffed like a criminal and pushed out the door as the senators waited to begin their staged roundtable discussion. It made me want to scream. It made me proud of them for being bold, but ashamed that not one senator spoke up for their own citizen-protesters, and asked that they at least be allowed to speak. But the insistence that the citizens rising in protest be arrested continued from the chair with each incident.
Simply asking to have single-payer be included and fully vetted is a crime. Profiting, as the for-profit health insurance companies do at the expense of 22,000 American lives every year, however, gets you a run of the table in this health care reform discussion. Just ask the senators who are drafting what this nation's health system will look like--and watch their behavior today--if you want evidence of how your voice will be heard in the process.
The protesters were stoic and respectful, but direct. One by one, they stood. One by one, they asked why single-payer reform was not "at the table" of 15 witnesses Sen. Max Baucus and his Finance Committee gathered to map out what sort of coverage Americans might expect in the Senate reform bill now being crafted.
Sen. Baucus eventually spoke and indicated that he was respectful of those who believe in single-payer--as he acknowledged many of his constituents in Montana do--but he made no attempt to explain why no single-payer voice has been included in any Senate discussion to date. He urged any others in the audience who might have any designs on speaking up like the protesters did to not do so, and then he moved on to his roundtable discussion.
The press seated comfortably at the press table first looked amused and then puzzled by the procession of protest in the chamber. The C-SPAN cameras fixed on both the committee's table at the front of the room and the witness table directly across from them could have easily picked up the protests, but the network chose to keep their cameras fixed only on Chairman Baucus--though the protesters' words could be heard in the audience. Only two reporters of the 20 or so assembled were curious enough or industrious enough to rise and exit the room to see the arrests being carried out in the hallway.
While neither the Finance Committee nor the press allowed their proceedings to be disrupted for very long, the air in the room and the atmosphere had changed--the giddy and gleeful assembly of industry lobbyists who had been chattering in rapt anticipation of the coming of their carefully chosen witnesses could not deny that some brave and patriotic fellow citizens had just been hauled out for nothing more than demanding that a point of view held by a majority of patients, nurses, physicians and other health care providers be included in the national discussion.
While this Congress may pass something very different than single-payer reform, it will not do so without hearing the cries of the people left so openly exposed to personal health and financial ruin by the corrupt system that celebrates only profit. The citizens who stood for the thousands and thousands of dead today will not let this democracy give itself completely over to the big money interests in health care. Not without a fight. Not on their lives, or yours or mine.
