Submitted by Ave Cassandra, Jun 20, 2007 13:26

I've become acquainted over the past couple weeks with a woman whose story is included in Moore's film. She's a salt-of-the-earth type, mother of six grown children, and had worked as a newspaper editor in South Dakota -- before coming down with cancer at a time when she and her husband were already struggling with bypass surgeries for him. They always had health insurance.

He lost his job after a stint at Mayo Clinic, and their bills, including higher and higher insurance premiums, excluded items, deductibles and co-pays, which had already had them up against a wall, then snowballed into an impossible amount to catch up with. They declared bankruptcy -- and it was because of those medical bills, although, of course, the list of unpaid bills goes much further -- because they'd been told to pay those premiums and health care bills no matter what. So anyone looking at their debts could argue that Donna and Larry were just incompetent at managing their money -- and that's just what these slick think tanks have done. More than half of all bankruptcies are due to medical bills, according to the bankrupted people, and three quarters of those people had health insurance when they first became ill or injured.

This could happen to any of us, excepting a few billionaires.

Big Pharma would do fine under a single-payer system. Their profits would not be the highest of any industry except big oil, as they are now, but they would make a fair profit.

Every other industrialized nation in the world has universal health care for their citizens. We are the only country stuck with 1,700 insurance plans, all competing to keep sick people -- the people who need care -- out of the system. Those systems cover everyone for about half the cost with equal or better outcomes than we see.

Single-payer works. Don't fall for these lies.

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