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News Release Archive | Margaret Flowers | Accuracy.Org

Roberts Upholds “Obamacare”: Corporatists United?

June 28, 2012

CLARK NEWHALL, clark.newhall at health-justice.org, @cnewhall
Executive director of Health Justice, Newhall is a doctor and a lawyer. He said today: “Interestingly, it was Roberts who voted to save Obamacare from going down in flames. … The divide is not between liberal and conservative so much as it is between corporatists and everyone else. The current system is in effect a subsidy to the heath insurance industry. We should instead move to get rid of that industry, it is simply not sustainable. The individual mandate has been ruled constitutional as a tax. What that means essentially is that Obama and Congress could require every American to buy a lousy product at an inflated price.”

STEFFIE WOODHANDLER, swoolhandler at challiance.org
DAVID HIMMELSTEIN, M.D., david_himmelstein at hms.harvard.edu
also, via Mark Almberg, mark at pnhp.org
Woolhandler and Himmelstein are professors of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program. The group released a statement today: “Although the Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act, the unfortunate reality is that the law, despite its modest benefits, is not a remedy to our health care crisis: (1) it will not achieve universal coverage, as it leaves at least 26 million uninsured, (2) it will not make health care affordable to Americans with insurance, because of high co-pays and gaps in coverage that leave patients vulnerable to financial ruin in the event of serious illness, and (3) it will not control costs. …”

GWENDOLYN MINK, wendymink at gmail.com,
Available for a limited number of interviews, Mink is co-editor of the two-volume Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics and Policy and author of Welfare’s End. She said today: “The Court’s cramped view of Medicaid expansion means that low income people will bear the individual mandate ‘tax’ disproportionately. Upholding the requirement that individuals buy private insurance while allowing states to opt out of Medicaid expansion is the worst possible outcome. Achieving universal coverage by compelling low income Americans to purchase private insurance may beef up health industry profits but at the expense of people most in need of health care for all.”

MARGARET FLOWERS, M.D., mdpnhp at gmail.com
Flowers is congressional fellow with Physicians for a National Health Program. She said today meaningful reform would be to expand Medicare to everyone in the U.S., in effect dropping two words, “over 65.” She added that much of discussion around Obamacare has been political posturing, that Romney and Obama agreed on basically the same system, mandating people to buy private insurance rather than provide public healthcare.

RUSSELL MOKHIBER, russellmokhiber at gmail.com
Mokhiber is founder of Single Payer Action and editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter. Mokhiber and 50 doctors filed a brief with the Supreme Court asking them “to strike down the individual mandate that forces people to buy lousy private health insurance. We reject Obamacare and Romneycare.”

NANCY ALTMAN, njalt at aol.com
Altman is co-chair of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign. She recently co-wrote a piece about implications for the mandate ruling by the Supreme Court. Wrote Altman: “The individual mandate, the focus of the right-wing attack … was originally proposed by the very conservative Heritage Foundation in 1989; it was introduced into Congress by the late Republican Senator John Chafee (R-RI) in 1993, with such conservative co-sponsors as Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA). …

“If the individual mandate is declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, then so are the radical right’s plots to undermine Medicare and replace it with Voucher-Care.

“Or, consider the radical right’s ambition for Social Security. They want to privatize it, i.e., have the payroll tax contributions that currently go to the Trust Funds, instead flow into private, individual accounts, earning interest from private banks and/or invested in private stocks and bonds that, the proponents concede, must be limited to minimize capital risk. Again, as with Voucher-Care, this would have to be mandated so the money is unavailable to the owner until age 65, and then paid out in monthly amounts. How is this not an individual mandate?

“Thus, both the Ryan plan for Voucher-Care, and the radical right’s ambition to privatize Social Security depend on individual mandates.”

Tagged With: Clark Newhall, Gwendolyn Mink, health care, Margaret Flowers, Nancy Altman, Russell Mokhiber, Steffie Woodhandler, Supreme Court,

G8: Preventing a More Just World?

May 18, 2012

The Guardian is providing coverage of G8 summit at Camp David and NATO protests in Chicago.

DONNA SMITH, donnas at calnurses.org
CHARLES IDELSON, cidelson at calnurses.org,
Smith and Idelson are with National Nurses United, the largest union and professional association of nurses in the U.S. They are holding a rally Friday in Chicago with other groups and musicians including Tom Morello. In a statement, they derided “the AWOL G8 world leaders, who decided to run off and hide in the woods of rural Maryland [at Camp David] rather than face a disgruntled public in Chicago as originally announced, to determine what they are doing to help average families, not just the banks and Wall Street high rollers, in the midst of a continuing economic gloom.” National Nurses United is calling for a “tax on Wall Street stocks, bonds, derivatives and other financial instruments that can raise up to $350 billion every year to help mitigate the economic crisis created by the banks, with the revenue available for jobs, healthcare, education, and other basic needs and services.”

MARGARET FLOWERS, M.D., mdpnhp at gmail.com,
Flowers is an organizer of the Occupy G8 Peoples’ Summit in Maryland. She appeared on Democracy Now this morning and just co-wrote the piece “Why We Protest the G8,” which states: “Countries representing concentrated wealth will gather in remote Camp David this week to try to prop up a failing global economic system that has funneled wealth to the top, leaving everyone else behind. From its founding, the G8 has been engaged in a struggle between the wealthiest people in a handful of nations and everyone else. The losing side of this corrupt bargain has increasingly come to include many people within those wealthy countries, as well.

“In 1974 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration for the Establishment of a New International Economic Order. This document laid out an economic vision that would have created a much healthier planet and fairer international economy. It would have empowered countries to regulate and control multinational corporations operating within their borders. It sought to develop international trade that was fair so countries received equitable prices for raw materials and labor. It also opposed the use of military, economic or political force to prevent countries from acting in their own economic self-interest, whether individually or jointly. This latter point was in defense of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, whose oil embargo occurred two years earlier.

“The response from the wealthiest nations was to create the G6, the forerunner to the G8 (as it did not include Russia or Canada) which first met in 1975, amidst another recession that featured high unemployment, inflation, and deficit. The G6 sought to circumvent the UN’s Declaration and prevent the world from participating in economic decision-making that benefited all, not just a few. The G6 put the world on an economic path of concentrated wealth and corporatism that has looted our resources and brought the economy and environment to the breaking point.”

KINDA MOHAMADIEH, kinda.mohamadieha at annd.org or via Ryme Katkhouda, rymepmc at gmail.com
Mohamadieh is with the Arab NGO Network for Development and is currently visiting Washington, D.C. with a delegation from several Arab countries. The delegation just released a paper, “Overview and Suggestions for Improving Key Areas in U.S. Foreign Policy Towards the Arab Region,” which states: “U.S. development assistance to the Arab region has been closely linked with promoting foreign policy and strategic military goals, while not necessarily serving democracy and human development.”

Filed Under: Tagged With: ANND, Charles Idelson, Donna Smith, economy, G8, global economy, income inequality, Kinda Mohamadieh, Margaret Flowers, National Nurses United, unions,

Beyond “Both Sides” — Doctors Against Mandate and for Universal Coverage

March 26, 2012

In a recent letter published by the New York Times, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Arnold Relman, notes that their coverage of the debate about a health insurance mandate didn’t “mention an important new argument against the Affordable Care Act’s mandated purchase of private insurance, the key issue before the Supreme Court.

“Last month, an amicus brief was filed by 50 doctors and two nonprofit organizations arguing that Congress could avoid a mandate by legislating a national single-payer system that provides nearly universal insurance coverage.

“Congress has already created two limited single-payer systems — Medicare and the veterans’ health system — and no legal barriers prevent doing more. Since a mandate isn’t necessary for Congress to exercise its legitimate role in regulating health insurance, there is no justification under the Constitution’s ‘necessary and proper’ clause for such a legislative requirement.”

The following are signatories to this Supreme Court brief and are available for interviews; those in D.C. will be at the Court on Tuesday. See: “Single Payer Doctors to Rally at Supreme Court,” which links to a PDF of the brief.

MARGARET FLOWERS, M.D., mdpnhp at gmail.com
Flowers an organizer with the National Occupation of Washington, D.C.

RUSSELL MOKHIBER, russellmokhiber at gmail.com
Mokhiber is founder of Single Payer Action and editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter. He said today: “The Obama people say: uphold the law. The right wing says: strike down the law and go back to how things were. We say: strike down the Obama mandate — it’s unconstitutional and pass single payer — everybody in, nobody out.”

CLARK NEWHALL, clark.newhall at health-justice.org
Executive director of Health Justice, Newhall is a doctor and a lawyer. He said today: “The divide is not between liberal and conservative so much as it is between corporatists and everyone else. The current system is in effect a subsidy to the heath insurance industry. We should instead move to get rid of that industry, it is simply not sustainable.”

Filed Under: Tagged With: Clark Newhall, healthcare, Margaret Flowers, Russell Mokhiber,