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Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! Report From the Afghan Front
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Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter!
Report From the Afghan Front
It's Obama's War and It's Going Very BadlyExclusively for CounterPunch subcribers, Patrick Cockburn files a special report from Kabul: the Taliban's tightening grip on most of the country; plumetting US popularity in a bankrupt country rotted by corruption. For fifty years, Seymour Melman waged intellectual war on Pentagon capitalism, making the case for peaceful conversion. David Price brings to light decades of FBI secret surveillance. Senator Jim Webb is launching the first determined bid in forty years to overhaul the US criminal justice system at whose call is the American gulag. Alexander Cockburn reports on the prospects for his success. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and gear make great presents.
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Today's Stories June 24, 2009 Andrew Cockburn June 23, 2009 David Price Patrick Cockburn James Ridgeway / Dave Lindorff Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero Gary Leupp Brian M. Downing Robert Bryce Nicholas Dearden Yousef Munayyer Website of the Day June 22, 2009 Michael Hudson Esam Al-Amin Chris Floyd Jack Z. Bratich Atash Yaghmaian Laura Carlsen Paul Craig Roberts Vijay Prashad Fred Gardner Andy Thayer David Macaray Website of the Day
June 19 - 21, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Patrick Cockburn Al Giordano Henry A. Giroux Anthony DiMaggio Paul Craig Roberts John Ross Gareth Porter Carl Ginsburg Tommi Avicolli Mecca Joe Bageant Serge Halimi P. Sainath Jim Goodman Dave Lindorff Rannie Amiri Robert Fantina Harvey Wasserman Walter Brasch David Ker Thomson Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Kim Nicolini Ben Sonnenberg Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend June 18, 2009 Uri Avnery Robert Sandels / Anthony DiMaggio Robert Weissman Joshua Frank Jonathan Cook Reza Fiyouzat Norman Solomon Ali Jawad James Ridgeway Website of the Day June 17, 2009 Carl Boggs Dr. Bryant Welch Winslow T. Wheeler Liaquat Ali Khan Jonathan Cook Binoy Kampmark Karim Makdisi Dave Lindorff David Swanson Gene Marx Website of the Day June 16, 2009 Patrick Cockburn John Ross Afshin Rattansi Marc Levy Paul Craig Roberts Behzad Yaghmaian Brian M. Downing Merle Lefkoff David Macaray Robert Jensen David Swanson Website of the Day June 15, 2009 Michael Hudson Reza Fiyouzat Patrick Cockburn James Ridgeway Marjorie Cohn Rannie Amiri Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Leonard Schwartz Martha Rosenberg Website of the Day June 12-14, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Gareth Porter Mike Whitney Mark Ames Esam Al-Amin Franklin Lamb Patrick Cockburn Andy Worthington Heather Gray Felice Pace Ron Jacobs George Wuerthner Jeffrey Buchanan / David Ker Thomson Renaud Lambert Kevin Zeese David Macaray Evelyn Pringle Chris Genovali David Michael Green Brian J. Foley Charles R. Larson Kim Nicolini David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
June 11, 2009 Kathy Kelly / James Bovard Tristan de Bourbon Dave Lindorff Kevin Zeese Ralph Nader Harvey Wasserman Nicole Colson Mark Weisbrot Dan Bacher Website of the Day June 10, 2009 Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Jennifer Van Bergen / Douglas Valentine Kathy Kelly Paul Craig Roberts Rev. William E. Alberts Peter Lee Carol Miller Emily Ratner Robert Weissman Dave Lindorff Website of the Day June 9, 2009 Winslow T. Wheeler Mike Whitney Stan Cox Sibel Edmonds Jonathan Cook David Macaray Robert Jensen Nadia Hijab Mark Weisbrot Website of the Day June 8, 2009 John Ross Paul Craig Roberts Franklin C. Spinney Franklin Lamb Uri Avnery Jonathan Cook Eric Toussaint Jim Goodman Norman Solomon Reza Fiyouzat Website of the Day June 5 -7, 200 Alexander Cockburn George Galloway Paul Craig Roberts Jennifer Loewenstein Franklin Lamb Mike Whitney Andy Worthington Missy Comley Beattie Farzana Versey Stanley Heller John V. Whitbeck Robert Weissman Lee Sustar Dave Lindorff William Blum Ernest Callenbach / Greg Moses Ron Jacobs David Yearsley Tim Stelloh Belén Fernández David Ker Thomson Karyn Strickler Christopher Brauchli Charles R. Larson Kim Nicolini Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
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June 24, 2009 The Simple Solution to the Health Care CrisisMedicare for AllBy DAVE LINDORFF When it comes to reforming America’s disastrous health care “system,” there are two issues that need to be considered: access and cost. The so-called reform proposals being offered by the Obama White House, the House and the Senate, are failing on both counts, and deserve to die. No progressives should allow themselves to be suckered into promoting one or the other. Here’s the problem. As long as the health insurance industry is permitted to be the primary paymaster, the cost of medical care will continue to soar, not least because the insurance industry is so concerned about minimizing its own outlays that it is forcing the system to devote nearly 30% of every health care dollar spent to administrative costs (compared to 3-4 percent for Medicare, and even less for single-payer systems like Canada’s), and because all the profit-motivated players in this game cheat and need to be monitored. That’s true whether there is a so-called “public option” government-run health insurance plan or not. Note that 30 percent of America’s $2.5-trillion health care bill per year is $750 billion a year, a sum which does absolutely nothing to make even one single person more healthy or less ill. Even if one were to assume that the lion’s share of those administrative expenses were only for the private-funded portion of America’s health care system, and for Medicare, the state-run but partly federally-funded portion that is famous for its paperwork mess, and the uninsured, who also consume a lot of paperwork when they do get treated at hospitals under mandated free-care provisions of at the expense of local governments, we’d be talking about 30% of $1.5 trillion, or about $450 billion going to administrative costs every year—still a staggering sum to be totally wasted in terms of patient care. Medicare, the health program for the elderly and the disabled, and Medicaid, the federally and state-funded program that funds medical care for the poor, together cost some $850 billion a year. Add to that the $150 billion that hospitals and local governments spend annually to cover the uninsured poor who don’t qualify for Medicaid, and the $50 billion the federal government spends for veterans’ care. That’s just over $1 trillion in government spending to cover the health care of roughly half the population of the United States. The rest of us—working people and our families—rely on private insurance, some of it paid for by employers, some by us, either as our share of the cost of company plans (growing every year), or as the deductible and co-pay portions of our medical bills. That privately- funded medical care costs us about $1.5 trillion a year—50% more than the government spends on the medical care for a roughly equal number of people. If you do the math, it turns out that we who rely on the private sector are spending about $10,000 per person per year on health care, either directly out of our own pockets, in the form of money our employers are paying into insurance plans for us—money that could otherwise be coming to us in the form of higher wages or lower-priced goods, or in taxes to cover the cost of treating the poor or uninsured. What this means is that right off the bat, if the politicians in Washington were to simply thumb their noses at the insurance industry, and at the greedy docs and drug companies who are paying millions in legal bribes to protect their stake in the lucrative medical marketplace, and if they were to extended Medicare to all of us, we could immediately eliminate $500 billion from the nation’s collective medical bill, because that’s how much more cheaply Medicare, Medicaid and the VA are able to treat patients than the private sector. But the savings would be far more than that. The cost of treating the uninsured--$150 billion a year—would be dramatically reduced, because it is currently almost entirely paying for emergency care at hospitals, the most expensive possible way to deliver medical care. My guess is that at least $100 billion would be saved simply by switching all those people over to Medicare, so they could walk into a doctor’s office for treatment instead of into an ER. The VA, with its separate government-owned and hugely bureaucratic hospital system, would become largely redundant if all veterans were simply treatable under Medicare, which would probably save a considerable portion of that $50 billion-per-year expense. Furthermore, by switching private-pay patients over to Medicare, most of the at least $450 billion a year currently wasted on administrative costs would be eliminated—a savings of perhaps $3-400 billion a year. While some of that would reflect the cost differential between privately-financed and Medicare-financed care, most is not. The main reason Medicare’s per-patient cost for care is much lower than for private-pay patients (who, remember, are younger and healthier on average than Medicare patients, and so should be cheaper to treat, not more expensive), is that Medicare sets out payment schedules for doctors and hospitals, and negotiates payments for medicines—all at much lower levels than do private insurers, who often just set reimbursement rates, and let their insured patients cover the difference out-of-pocket...or out of home equity loan. Taking all these savings together, it’s a good guess, I would say, that by simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans without exception, the nation as a whole could save upwards of $900 billion on its current $2.5 trillion annual medical bill. Now that’s not to say such a change wouldn’t involve a tax increase. The current publicly-funded share of that $2.5 trillion bill is about $1 trillion, when you add together federal, state and local outlays, all funded by the taxpayer. An expanded Medicare that covered everyone would, by my reckoning, cost about $1.4 trillion, once all the costs were added, and the savings implemented, including lowered payments to doctors, hospitals and drug companies. So we’d have to cover an extra $400 billion a year through tax increases. But before you tax-rebels freak out, remember: there would be no more local revenues going to pay for uninsured care at local hospitals, no more state taxes going to pay for Medicaid for medical care for the poor, no more out-of-pocket payments by families for co-pays and deductibles and non-covered out-of-pocket charges, or for the every-growing employee share of insurance premiums. And companies would no longer be paying anything for employee health insurance. The net gain to the average person, and to the employer, would be enormous. That’s the point that the medical industry lobby conveniently ignores. It’s a point also conveniently ignored by the politicians that those lobbiests have bought in Washington and the White House, who only talk about the increased taxes that a single-payer government takeover of health care finance would entail, not about the savings. And, to get back to the beginning of this article, there would no longer be the shameful situation of Americans going without access to medical care. Everyone would be on Medicare. And not one of the costly “reform” proposals being pushed through Congress today can boast that. Every proposed “reform” plan leaves tens of millions uninsured (which of course means they're on the public dime when they finally get sick enough to be hospitalized). Note too that, under basic Medicare (as long as you don’t get suckered into one of those HMO privatization rip-offs like Humana and other insurance firms advertise), everyone gets to choose his or her own doctor and hospital. There is no gatekeeper system—another fake bugaboo raised by the health industry lobbyists. With a universalization of Medicare, at one fell swoop, America would have a single-payer system—one that its elderly citizens already have, and by all accounts are very satisfied with—and one that would be substantially cheaper than what we have now. For everyone (and I would say that every member of Congress should, as in Sweden's or Norway's parliament, have to get by on that same Medicare program, which would help assure its adequate funding and level of service into the future!). Socialized medicine? Maybe, but it’s a socialism we already know. Call it “socialism with American characteristics,” if you like. Or to crib from a comment President Obama made to the fat cat docs at the American Medical Assn. convention recently, it’s a socialism that is “part of the American tradition.” So, want to have some fun? Tell your congressional delegation to demand that the Congressional Budget Office, which just came up with an estimate that the Senate’s health “reform” bill would add $1.6 trillion in costs over 10 years, do a study of what expanding Medicare to all would cost, after netting out the savings to individuals and employers of having their insurance payments and out-of-pocket health expenses eliminated. And then tell them to support Michigan Congressman Rep. John Conyers' single-payer bill, HR 676, which would extend Medicare to one and all. DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. Author of “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains” (Bantam Books, 1992), his latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net |
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