More Quotes~"Health Care Terror" and The Greatest Threat to Capitalism Since the Cold War

Via The Sideshow, News Hounds has "The Outrageous Quote of the Week @ July 7, 2007." Their readers apparently chose Ann Coulter for what she spewed in her latest bout of head spinning. You can check it out if you want, but personally, I think it would be worthy of note if Ann had said something that wasn't outrageous.



Personally, had I voted, my pick would have been this one:


"I think this election poses the greatest threat to capitalism that this country has seen in a long - since the Cold War. I'm really serious. You know, we have candidates on the Democratic side that are saying they're anti-ownership society, they want to raise taxes. I am afraid of what could happen to corporate America, particularly at a time when the rest of the world is much more competitive." - Charles Payne, discussing whether or not a "President" Fred Thompson would be good for stocks. Cavuto on Business, 7/7/07


(Emphasis mine). A few days ago I did a post on Fox News picking up the insane ranting of a conservative blogger and turning his ravings into a discussion that universal healthcare would make us more vulnerable to terrorism. Then I pointed out:


for a lesson in how the insane elements on the right so often influence the news cycle and the debate with their deranged fear-mongering, MSNBC later took the scare tactics and ran with them and, jumping on the bandwagon as well was, not surprisingly, The New York Sun.


I now submit that the above quote from Charles Payne is the real "threat" from Micheal More's new film, the overwhelmingly positive reactions that it has been evoking, and the debate that it is instrumental in furthering. Conservatives, the healthcare industry, and the free market ideologues are freaking out over a threat, yes, but it is to their ideology.


This diary at Daily Kos sums up the tactics employed by CNN's medical expert in a segment prior to Moore's recent appearance on CNN with Wolf Blitzer. This diarist points out that CNN's medical expert falsely accused Moore of omitting facts that are plainly and conspicuoulsy included in Moore's film, tried to twist Moore's arguements by citing only part of the facts, and just plain lied. Moore didn't put up with any of it. Not only did he call out CNN and its expert and correct their errors and misrepresentations, he also immediately followed up with a fact check of CNN's claims including the following:


CNN: Americans have shorter wait times than everyone but Germans when seeking non-emergency elective procedures, like hip replacement, cataract surgery, or knee repair.


THE TRUTH:

This isn't the whole truth. CNN pulled out a statistic about elective procedures. Of the six countries surveyed in that study (United States, Canada, New Zealand, UK, Germany, Australia) only Canada had longer waiting times than America for sick adults waiting to schedule a doctor's appointment for a medical problem. 81% of patients in New Zealand got a same or next-day appointment for a non-routine visit, 71% in Britain, 69% in Germany, 66% in Australia, 47% in the U.S., and 36% in Canada. (The Doc's in, but It'll be AWhile. Catherine Arnst, Business Week. June 22, 2007 http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2007/tc20070621_716260_page_2.htm)

[....]

One way America is able to achieve decent waiting times is that it leaves 47 million people out of the health care system entirely, unlike any other Western country. When you remove 47 million people from the line, your wait should be shorter. So why is the U.S. second to last in wait times?


For a little more context, Moore also posted an internal, confidential memo sent to him by an employee who works at Capital BlueCross that discusses how to deal with the impact that "Sicko" is going to have. Moore points out some interesting things that the VP of Corporate Communications, Barclay Fitzpatrick stated in the memo:


He then assesses the film's impact: "[T]he impact on small business decision makers, our members, the community, and our employees could be significant. Ignoring its impact might be a successful strategy only if it flops, but that has not been the history of Moore's films ... If popular, the movie will have a negative impact on our image in this community."

[....]

BlueCross V.P. Fitzpatrick seems downright depressed about the movie he just saw. "You would have to be dead to be unaffected by Moore's movie," he writes. "Sicko" leaves audiences feeling "ashamed to be...a capitalist, and part of a 'me' society instead of a 'we' society."


(Emphasis mine). Here Fitzpatrick is expressing the real "threat" and the source for anxiety behind what we see when the corporate media runs with right-wing ravings, distorts the facts and plays the fear card by trying to associate universal healthcare with terrorism.


In a column yesterday, aptly entitled "Health Care Terror," Paul Krugman sums up perfectly what has been happening:


These days terrorism is the first refuge of scoundrels. So when British authorities announced that a ring of Muslim doctors working for the National Health Service was behind the recent failed bomb plot, we should have known what was coming.


“National healthcare: Breeding ground for terror?” read the on-screen headline, as the Fox News host Neil Cavuto and the commentator Jerry Bowyer solemnly discussed how universal health care promotes terrorism.


While this was crass even by the standards of Bush-era political discourse, Fox was following in a long tradition. For more than 60 years, the medical-industrial complex and its political allies have used scare tactics to prevent America from following its conscience and making access to health care a right for all its citizens....


What outrages people who see “Sicko” is the sheer cruelty and injustice of the American health care system — sick people who can’t pay their hospital bills literally dumped on the sidewalk, a child who dies because an emergency room that isn’t a participant in her mother’s health plan won’t treat her, hard-working Americans driven into humiliating poverty by medical bills.


“Sicko” is a powerful call to action — but don’t count the defenders of the status quo out. History shows that they’re very good at fending off reform by finding new ways to scare us.
These scare tactics have often included over-the-top claims about the dangers of government insurance.


“Sicko” plays part of a recording Ronald Reagan once made for the American Medical Association, warning that a proposed program of health insurance for the elderly — the program now known as Medicare — would lead to totalitarianism.


Right now, by the way, Medicare — which did enormous good, without leading to a dictatorship — is being undermined by privatization.


Mainly, though, the big-money interests with a stake in the present system want you to believe that universal health care would lead to a crushing tax burden and lousy medical care.

Now, every wealthy country except the United States already has some form of universal care. Citizens of these countries pay extra taxes as a result — but they make up for that through savings on insurance premiums and out-of-pocket medical costs. The overall cost of health care in countries with universal coverage is much lower than it is here.


(Emphasis mine). Apparently, somewhere between Regan and the current fear-mongering about terrorism, conservatives dropped the ball. Now they have to find a way to connect the terror threat to what corporate interests and conservatives see as the real threat--the threat to their version of capitalism, which should more accuratley be called corporatism.


CNN had previously fact-checked Moore's film and found "surprisingly few inaccuracies in the film" and informed us that "In fact, most pundits or health-care experts we spoke to spent more time on errors of omission rather than disputing the actual claims in the film." Despite what the corporate interests, the corporate media and conservatives would like us to believe, this is not an ideological debate (unless they can succeed in scaring us into making it one). The facts are clearly on Moore's side and some kind of universal healthcare is a commen sense reform and, as Krugman points out, a moral issue.