The Green Party of the United States has released its rebuttal to President Obama’s speech before Congress on September 9, 2009, in which he encouraged US Representatives and Senators to support his health care reform plan.

• America needs Medicare For All/Single-Payer, not a life-support system for insurance companies and HMOs
• Whether Obamacare passes or the GOP blocks health care reform, insurance companies will win and American people will lose
• Attention paid to Obamacare vs. town hall hecklers eclipses the fact that most Americans want national health care, according to polls

There are no Green members of the US Congress, although dozens of Greens have run for the US House and Senate in the past and more will run in 2010.  The Green Party’s response to Mr. Obama’s speech represents what a Green member of Congress might have said Wednesday evening, if the media gave the Green Party the same air time as they give Democrats and Republicans.

President Obama was correct when he said, quoting the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, that health care was fundamentally a moral issue and a matter of “social justice and the character of our country.”  President Obama understands that we’re in a national crisis — that’s why he wants to lead on health care reform.

But the President stopped short of asserting that health care should be made a right for all Americans.  He said he has “no interest in putting insurance companies out of business.”  He did not admit the fact that the insurance industry’s very existence depends on the power to restrict coverage, deny claims to those with coverage, cancel coverage for people when they need medical care most, and reject people who are high-risk because of low income, age, and prior medical condition.  (President Obama related several accounts of such outrages in his speech.)  The insurance business plays a middle-man role, exacting huge fees for its profits, administrative costs, overhead, and high CEO salaries, while providing no medical services.

As long as for-profit insurance continues to exist, access to health care remains secondary to corporate middle-man profits.  Replacing private insurance and HMO coverage with a plan to make Medicare universal is the only solution.

Since Medicare doesn’t function to make a profit, its administrative costs are about three percent.  For-profit insurance takes about a 30 percent bite out of health care spending and imposes unwieldy administrative costs and paperwork on doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers.  That’s why health care eats up over 15 percent of domestic spending in the US, compared to about 9 percent in Canada, which has a Single-Payer system. Read more »

Filed under: 3rd party, grassroots democracy, Green Party, Healthcare | Leave a Comment »