Did you watch "Reforming Healthcare on Bill Moyers Journal"?

allnurses Guide · May 23, 2009

some highlights from the transcript:

[color=#333333][color=#333333][color=#333333]"it's what we used to call national health insurance, so government collects the money for health care from taxes. you don't pay premiums - instead, you pay taxes, [which] pays all the bills. hospitals remain privately owned and operated. doctors remain mostly in private practice. but their bills go to the government insurance program, just as they do today with medicare, but we'd be able to streamline the payment system if we had only one payer instead of medicare being one among many. so a hospital would get paid like a fire department does today: you have one check a month that pays for the entire operation, and that means you can eliminate the huge billing apparatus of the hospitals and the doctors' offices where we're employing many people to do our billing." dr. david himmelstein

[color=#333333]"it's a great idea from the left, which is public financing, combined with a great idea from the right, which is private delivery. and you put it together in one system that takes out the waste and the abuse that's really happening, which is where all the money really goes in health insurance. up to 30 percent of the costs have nothing to do with healthcare at all and everything to do with fueling the health insurance needs... we've got to have a national health program, we just have to do it. it's the only way we fix this mess. it's spun out of control, it's gonna bury us financially, it's gonna mortgage our children, and it kills people." donna smith

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05222009/transcript2.html

UKRNinUSA, RN · May 23, 2009

Great show and I felt very proud to be a CNA member