Listen to Dr. Flowers on health care

By JOHN NICHOLS
The Cap Times
November 18, 2010

If the Obama White House and congressional Democrats had listened to Dr. Margaret Flowers, they would have produced a single-payer “Medicare for All” health reform that would have excited the party’s progressive base. That base would have waded into the 2010 election campaign to defend real reform, closing the “enthusiasm gap” and changing the course of political history.

Unfortunately, instead of listening to Dr. Flowers, top Democrats had her arrested, and forcibly removed one of the nation’s top experts on health care from Senate hearings on the issue.

The Democrats who did that were fools, and they got their comeuppance Nov. 2, to their own and the republic’s disservice.

Now it’s time to listen to Dr. Flowers, a genuine hero in the struggle to reform our broken health care system.

No one did a better job than she when it came to challenging the Obama administration and compromise-prone Democrats during a health care debate that ended up creating a weak and dysfunctional “reform” rather than the “Medicare for All” system that would care for all Americans, cut costs and break the stranglehold of the big insurance companies.

I’ve been writing about Flowers and the fight for single-payer health care for years and I am a huge fan of the group she works with, Physicians for a National Health Program.

That group, with which the beloved Madison-area physician Dr. Linda Farley was closely associated before her death (and with which Linda’s husband, Dr. Eugene Farley, remains active), will be holding a fundraising event Friday night with Dr. Flowers, state Sen. Mark Miller, D-Monona, and state Rep. Chuck Benedict, D-Beloit. It will run from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the EVP Coffee House at 3809 Mineral Point Road. Anyone who wants to get up to speed on the ongoing fight to achieve real reform should make a point of being there.

Flowers has been in the thick of the fight and she is not giving up.

She has some “war stories” to tell about battling not just Republicans but misguided Democrats.

Here’s part of a piece I wrote about her in the spring of 2009, when she and other doctors and nurses tried to force senators to open the debate that was needed:

“Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, the insurance industry-friendly Democrat who is managing show hearings on health care reform, has come up with a novel way to express his commitment to care for the almost 50 million Americans who have no health care and roughly equal number who have inadequate care.

“The senior senator from Montana is ordering the arrest of doctors and nurses.

“Medical practitioners who have shown up at Baucus-chaired ‘roundtable discussions’ to demand consideration of a real fix — the single-payer, genuinely public reform that assures all Americans will have health care while at the same time holding down costs — are being taken into custody and removed from the hearing rooms.

“At the first Finance Committee session last week, Dr. Margaret Flowers and seven others were taken into custody when they urged Baucus to include witnesses who support single-payer.

“Dr. Flowers discussed her arrest on Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show, explaining that physicians, nurses and reform groups representing more than 20 million Americans wanted to give voice to the more than 60 percent of Americans who in polls have repeatedly expressed support for a single-payer reform.

“But the answer from Baucus, who has been charged by the Obama administration with shaping a health care plan, has been to call in the cops.

“ ‘They just don’t want to hear from single-payer,’ explained Dr. Flowers, a pediatrician from Maryland. ‘We’ve been trying for months now, meeting with members of Congress, to be included in the hearings, at the events that they are holding, and they keep excluding us.’

“After reviewing the details of the Baucus overreaction, Schultz asked: ‘President Obama: Do you support excluding people from the discussion?’

“Obama has not responded.

“But Baucus has.

“On Tuesday, at the second Finance Committee session, dozens of California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee members and their allies showed up to protest the heavy-handed tactics. At the opening of the hearing, roughly 30 of them rose and turned their backs to Baucus. On their backs were signs reading: ‘Pass Single-Payer’ and ‘Nurses Say: Patients First.’ Other signs, reading ‘Stop AHIP,’ protested the collaboration by the Obama administration and Baucus with the country’s most powerful industry lobby, the America’s Health Insurance Plans group.

“While the health insurance lobby has been welcomed to the roundtable discussions organized by Baucus, the nurses and their allies were told to leave. When five objected to their exclusion from the hearing, and to the exclusion of single-payer from the debate about how to fix a broken private health care system, they were arrested. Among those taken into custody were Dr. Judy Dasovich, Dr. Steven Fenichel and California nurses DeAnn McEwen and Sue Cannon.

“Their crime? As health care professionals, they dared to dissent from the Baucus-led attempt to impose an insurance company approved plan under the guise of ‘reform.’

“Dr. Dasovich, a physician from Springfield, Mo., dared to say, ‘We request that single-payer advocates be allowed at the table. Health care should be for patients, not for profits.’ Nurse Cannon said, ‘People at the table have failed Americans for 30 years. We want single-payer at the table. We want guaranteed health care so we can give the care we need, when we need to give it.’

“When the doctors, nurses and their allies left the Capitol, activist David Swanson reported, members of the CNA/NNOC, Progressive Democrats of American, Code Pink and allied single-payer advocates chanted: ‘Lock Up Baucus!’ and hoisted a sign reading: ‘Most Physicians Want a Single-Payer National Health System.’

“At the White House, reporter Helen Thomas asked Obama administration spokesman Robert Gibbs: ‘Did anyone represent single-payer at this meeting today?’

“Gibbs tried to spin it.

“ ‘Well, I don’t think it was a full meeting of those that might be at the table,’ the scrambling spokesman said. ‘I believe that people of varying opinions have been here for different meetings, have been part of the larger health care reform summit that was done earlier this year, and I don’t doubt that in the coming days differing viewpoints about how to achieve cost savings in increased coverage will be part of that discussion.’

“If that sounded like a dodge, it was.

“But single-payer advocates weren’t fooled.

“They’re raising the banner of real reform higher. …”

John Nichols is the associate editor of The Capital Times. jnichols@madison.com