What forced me to watch the clip below was this great read over at The Nation. Let me start by saying I wish to hell Anthony Weiner was my Congressional critter. He is spot-fucking-on with his logic in this interview with Joey Scar. Just a few of his points, courtesy of The Nation piece:
He even repeated Weiner's points clearly: The goverment would take over only the "paying mechanism" of healthcare, not the doctors or their medical decisions themselves. His ears perked up every time Weiner mentioned that the nonprofit Medicare spends 4 percent on overhead, while private insurers spend 30 percent.As for the free-market freaks..Weiner asks Joey Scar and Mika..what exactly does the Health Insurance Industry provide, create, make or manufacture? Health Insurance is NOT a commodity!
*snip*
Maybe the real turning point came when Weiner asked, "How does Wal-mart offer $4 prescriptions?" Joe and co-host Mika Brzezinski looked as if they'd been thwacked by a hardback copy of Atlas Shrugged, and sat back to let the congressman explain it all to them:
They go to the pharmaceutical companies and say, "Listen, we have a giant buying pool here. You're going to give us a great deal."
Who's bigger than Wal-Mart? We are, the taxpayers. Do we do that? No. Because we have outsourced this to insurance companies who don't have necessarily as much incentive to keep those costs down because, frankly, they are getting a piece of the action.
What is an insurance company? They don't do a single check-up. They don't do a single exam, they don't perform an operation. Medicare has a 4 percent overhead rate. The real question is why do we have a private plan?The Insurance companies are nothing more than carpet-bagging middlemen that are subsidized by our tax dollars in many instances. 40 percent of Insured Americans get their healthcare from a single payer, government-run source-VA, Medicaid, Medicare, SCHIP, Dept of Defense, etc.
