Response to Donald Trump and Q&A with Margaret Flowers MD on Healthcare

This is a response by Margaret Flowers, M.D., of the Green Party of the United States, to President Donald Trump’s Address to the Joint Session of Congress on 2017–02–28. This video response with Q&A has been uploaded with permission from Doctor Flowers and was originally broadcast Live at her Facebook, here.

For more information on the Green Party of the United States (GPUS), see Green Party US.

You can also see Doctor Flowers’ website here: Flowers for Senate.

If you’re interested in getting involved with Health Over Profit, go here: H.O.P.E. — Health Over Profit for Everyone.

The English-language Closed Captions (not the automatic English Closed Captions) were transcribed by me.

My transcription follows, if you prefer to read what Doctor Flowers has to say …

“Hi. This is Margaret Flowers, and, um, we just finished listening to President Donald Trump give an address to Congress, where he spoke about a number of issues, and one of the issues, of course, that he spoke about was healthcare.

“And so I thought that people might want some clarification on, you know, what’s going to be happening next under a Trump administration, and what can we expect when it comes to healthcare, and what can we do about that. So, I’m going to speak for a few minutes about some of the things that Trump talked about, and I really urge you to ask questions or make comments in this post and also to invite other people that you know, uh, to watch this. You know, spread it out, share it on your personal page and other pages, so that we can have a little bit of a conversation about healthcare in the United States, and I’m just gonna keep my reading glasses on so that I can, uh, read your comments, if you submit them.

“So, first off, let’s start out by talking a little bit about what, uh, President Trump said tonight. Of course, he reaffirmed his intention to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. He acknowledged that it’s in trouble, and the reality is that it has been failing, uh, over the last few years. It has been failing to solve the crisis in healthcare and of course we expected that that was what was going to happen, because it was never designed to be a truly universal or affordable plan. So, um, right before the November elections, people received their insurance premium renewal notices, and for many of them, they saw significant increases in the cost of their insurance premiums as well as in the cost of their co-pays and deductibles that they have to pay out of pocket before they can even get the care that they need or have their insurance kick in. So that may have had something to do with the outcome of the presidential election this year, just getting those notices. So, you know we have to do something. Now, what is the Trump administration talking about? Sadly, I don’t think that when he says what his goals are that he’s going to be able to meet those goals with the types of policies that he’s talking about putting forward.

“So, in terms of insurance, he says that he doesn’t support the individual mandate to purchase private insurance. Now, I don’t personally support the individual mandate, either, because it’s not the type of situation where we have a big pool, you know, insurance pool, and people buy in and then it’s there to cover everybody; we have twelve-hundred different pools, and so forcing people to buy into these is not going to give the kind of savings that we need so that we can cover healthcare. We have to remember that private health insurance in the United States is a financial instrument that’s legally required to produce profit for their investors. They do that by charging high premiums, shifting more of the cost over to individual patients, and denying or restricting care. So they were never actually designed to pay for healthcare in the first place. So lowering the cost of insurance is another priority that President Trump has, and he talks about (and I’m going to get to that; thank you, Ryan, right) um, he’s talking about allowing the sale of private health insurance across state lines. So what does this actually mean? Different states have different regulations requiring health insurers to cover certain things and they kind of make their relationships with the different facilities in the states, and so allowing insurers to sell across state lines basically means that insurance companies are going to incorporate in the states that have the fewest regulations, create insurance products that may not be very expensive, but at the same time they’re not going to be covering as much as private insurance covers now, even though it’s still not adequate for our needs. So it really would just drive a race to the bottom in terms of the quality of private health insurance plans, deregulate them, and allow people to buy very cheap, but very skimpy, plans that won’t protect them.

“He did talk about making sure that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions, but the way that they’re going to do that is by charging higher premiums, and we’ve seen this happen before, and it really means that people who have significant health problems continue to struggle to be able to afford the health insurance that they need, especially if those conditions make it difficult for people to be able to work and have insurance through their employers. So covering pre-existing conditions is great; he hasn’t really outlined any plan for how he’s going to be able to do that in a way that is also affordable.

“He has support for tax credits and health savings accounts as ways to help people buy their insurance, their private insurance, to be able to afford it. Let’s look at tax credits. That’s been tried at the state level before, and tax credits mean that people have money up front to pay for the private health insurance and then will get a tax credit when tax time comes around, and we’re in an economic situation in this country where so many people are struggling to make ends meet, are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and so a tax credit does not help that part of the population. And I’m going to talk about Medicaid in just a moment, um, Bill, thanks. The other things that health savings accounts are a financial instrument that the wealthy can use to put money into a health savings account and then it’s tax free for them, and they’re allowed to use that money to cover the cost of their premiums as well as to purchase healthcare services, medications, and even gym memberships, so again, this is something that helps the wealthy but health savings accounts don’t work when two-thirds of people in the United States don’t have enough money on hand to handle a five-hundred dollar emergency.

“He did talk about Medicaid; he talked about giving states ‘flexibility,’ so I’m not really sure exactly what the details of that are going to be, but if it’s consistent with what he has been saying, or what’s been coming out of the White House, what the Republicans in Congress have been talking about, it’s about giving each state a lump sum of money for their Medicaid and then the governors of those states can decide how they use that money. Now this is very concerning for a number of reasons. One is that at least for now, Medicaid has been what we call ‘defined benefit plans,’ so each state determines what they’re going to cover and what people need to, you know, what conditions make them qualify. Right now, it’s income below 138% of the federal poverty level. And then however much money it costs to cover the number of people that qualify, to cover the benefits that they are given, that’s how much money that the state and the federal government pay into the Medicaid system. Once you have a block grant, a set amount of money, that means that if more people need care, you have to cut back on the services, and so, and it also means that governors, when they’re given this flexibility, which we’ve already seen under the Obama administration, because the Department of Health and Human Services has been giving out waivers to various states for their Medicaid plans, we’re seeing that it, particularly in very conservative states, they’re charging co-pays up front so that patients who are on Medicaid have to pay out of pocket before they can get care, and this is a population that doesn’t have that money on hand, that discretionary income, and so it’s actually causing people to not be able to get the care they need. We’re seeing states that want to move to requiring people who qualify for Medicaid to purchase insurance on the insurance exchanges, with some support for that, and again, this throws people, makes them vulnerable, throws them into a situation where they can only get the insurance that they can afford, and most of the time, it’s low coverage and very high out of pocket costs. So this is not the direction that we want to see Medicaid going.

“He talked about decreasing the price of pharmaceuticals. I think that that’s really important, because, in the United States, we pay the highest prices for our medications, and there’s no rhyme or reason to why we pay the prices that we pay, compared to other countries. It’s really because we have a market-based system where pharmaceutical companies have been acquiring other companies so that they become, they develop a monopoly over certain medications, and then they can charge as much as they can get away with for those medications, and so it’ll be interesting to see what President Trump thinks he can do to get the cost of pharmaceuticals under control, but, in general, looking at where things are going under the Republicans and under the Trump administration, what we’re going to see is a greater privatization of our healthcare system, more people who may be able to purchase insurance but it will cover less and leave them vulnerable. We’re continuing to see lots of people that go bankrupt, develop personal bankruptcies, because of medical costs; that has not changed and … so someone has a question ‘supply and demand?’ … I’m wondering, maybe you can expand a little bit more on what that question is. But we have to remember that, in this country, having health insurance is not the same thing as having access to care or having what we call ‘health security.’ ‘Health security’ means that when you get sick, you know that you can get the care that you need without having to worry if you have the money up front or not having to worry about going bankrupt or not being able to pay for food or other things that you need, not having to worry about losing your house if you have to have very expensive treatment, and this happens here in the United States. It doesn’t happen in any of the other industrialized nations.

“So, what I advocate and many others advocate for in the United States is moving to a national improved Medicare for all. So basically what that means is building on our traditional Medicare that we’ve had in this country since 1965; it means that each person pays into the system through a progressive tax up front; it gets rid of the private insurance companies, you’re absolutely right, private insurance companies should not be practicing medicine in the United States, and that’s what they do; they tell doctors and patients what they can and cannot have. So we would have an … we’re advocating for a national improved Medicare for all, paid up front through progressive taxes, every single person living in the United States is in the system, all of the health professionals are in the system, and when someone needs to get care, they decide where they want to get care. It’s not an insurance company network telling them where they can and cannot go; it’s really patients can choose where they wanna go, so if there’s a center, you know, hospital near you that is specializing in a particular condition that you have, that’s where you can go to get the care; it gives us the most freedom.

“One of the reasons that I fight so hard for this solution is that we’re already paying for it in the United States; we’re spending twice as much per person per year on healthcare as most other industrialized nations. Those nations cover everybody and they have much better health outcomes and satisfaction rates than we do, and that’s because they have some type of a universal, publicly financed healthcare system. And so if we’re already spending enough money to provide high quality comprehensive coverage to everyone, why are we continuing with this system of private insurance where they’re really just, the private insurers are trying to make as much money as they can, suck as much money out of the system as they can, the pharmaceutical companies are trying to suck as much money out of the system as they can? We’re seeing private-investor-owned facilities and hospitals that are really just operating on a for-profit model and not really about the health of our patients. Why are we allowing this situation to continue?

“And the reality is that even though, when single payer is talked about, when it rarely is talked about, in the commercial media, (and you know, national improved Medicare for all and single payer are the same thing), when they’re talked about in the commercial media, overwhelmingly they’re talked about in a negative way, but despite that, we still have super majorities of people in the United States that support this approach overall, across the board, sixty or more percent of people in the United States want a national improved Medicare for all. Republicans are growing in their support for believing that the government should make sure everybody has access to care; for Republicans that make under $75,000 a year, there’s a twenty percent increase over the last year in how many of them support this approach. When it comes to Democratic voters, 80% of Democratic voters wanna see this approach. But it’s off the table; it’s been off the table under a Democratic administration, and of course it’s off the table under a Republican administration. It’s really because these industries that are profiting off of our system are the same industries that fund the campaigns of our elected officials.

“So what do we do? It’s up to us to put national improved Medicare for all on the table, and we can do it. The people have the power to do this. When we fought in 2014 to reclassify the internet, we went out against the giant telecom industries; they’re some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and we won; we were persistent in that fight and we won reclassification of the internet. We have to continue to protect it, but we did win that and established that into law. When multinational corporations were working behind closed doors with the Obama administration to negotiate trade agreements that would give them greater powers to exploit our communities, to drive down wages, to offshore their facilities, people in the United States worked together and we fought back and made that politically toxic. We made the Trans-Pacific Partnership so politically toxic that members of Congress ran away from it. So now our job is to unify again around national improved Medicare for all, and make it so popular that members of Congress have to support that if they want to get reelected.

“We have legislation in the House of Representatives; it was introduced in January. It’s called ‘HR 676 The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act.’ It was introduced by Congressman John Conyers, and it has 59 co-sponsors so far. We need to have that same legislation introduced in the Senate, so that we have what are called ‘companion bills’ in the House and the Senate. This means that if we pass them in the House and Senate, and they’re the same bill, that it gives the Congress a … it removes the ability of the leadership in Congress to then weaken those bills. So we’re asking Senator Sanders to introduce legislation in the Senate that is the same as HR 676 in the House. He started out last Fall, after the election, saying that he was not going to introduce any single payer legislation this year, and he said that because they, the Democrats, are really going into just a purely defensive mode, and really just want to obstruct everything the Republicans do, and that’s not okay. We need to be fighting right now for the things that we need. We’re not gonna let the Democrats obstruct for four years and then if they get in power four years from now, then just make all sorts of excuses for why they can’t do the things that we need them to do then. We have to fight now for it. So please call Senator Sanders and contact his office and ask him to introduce a companion bill to HR 676.

“Then we have to educate ourselves about what a national improved Medicare for all is, and we’re organizing national calls; we hold them every other Monday night at 9 pm Eastern, and the next call is going to be March 13th, and on those calls, we educate about different aspects of what national improved Medicare for all are, we educate about how to organize, how to reach members of Congress, how to pressure them, how to do actions, and we’ll be doing that ongoing. So you can go to HealthOverProfit.org and sign up for the campaign that will put you on our email list and we’ll let you know about those calls and also let you know about actions that you can take. If you go to the news section of that website you’ll find at the very top information about the national calls that we’re holding. You’ll also find an action page, and if you go to the action page, you’ll find actions that you can take. Right now we’re organizing towards, um, we just finished organizing around the town halls, and those were really amazing; they were, many of them were supposed to be focused on preserving the Affordable Care Act, but it came out at so many of them, many of our people involved in the campaign who went to the town halls reported back that people said everywhere they went ‘What we really want is a national improved Medicare for all,’ so that’s a really great sign for us. Now we’re organizing to be part of an international day of action against the privatization of health; it’s called ‘Our Health Is Not For Sale,’ and people are organizing all sorts of actions from teach-ins to marches to rallies, and so we’re providing tools for people to do that.

“One of the tools that we have, that we’re kind of organizing around, is a diagnosis; we’re calling it an epidemic in the United States, that is surprisingly surprisingly stops at our borders with Mexico and Canada, which have universal healthcare systems, and it’s called ‘PISD,’ Privatization-Induced Stress Disorder, sounds a little bit like PTSD, and it’s what’s happening because we have this privatized healthcare system. And so we’re developing messaging and tools around that that people can use to hand out and let’s talk about this, let’s talk about what the impact is of being the only industrialized nation in the world that treats healthcare as a commodity instead of treating it as a public, something that’s in the public interest that every person should have access to.

“So for those of you who may have just joined, in a nutshell, it looks like, more and more, the Republicans are moving towards wanting to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Even if they didn’t repeal it, we know that it didn’t solve the healthcare crisis in this country. So we have this opportunity right now to push forward and advocate for what we want and for what we need, and if we do that, if we work together and understand that healthcare impacts all of us, that it’s connected to all of our issues, and we work together, then we can win this fight. This is really the time to do this, and so, contact your member of Congress, find out if they’ve sponsored HR 676. If they haven’t, you need to pressure them to do that, and if they have, say ‘Great; Now I need you to do more; I need you to talk about it, I need you to write Op-Eds about it in your paper, I need you to get your other colleagues in your state to get on board, hold town halls about it, let people speak out, educate them about it.’ There’s so much that members of Congress need to be doing beyond just co-sponsoring legislation. Push on your members in the Senate, particularly everyone can call Senator Sanders and ask him to introduce HR 676 in the Senate, and then work on your members of the Senate to support this approach. Maybe one of them would be interested in if they would, you know, maybe they’re seeking reelection and they’re, maybe their reelection is a little shaky; this is a way for them to really, um, to do something that their constituents want and need. Maybe you would consider running for office on this platform in 2018 for Congress, or if the Senate race is open, running for Congress on this issue, and educating people and pressuring the other candidates to speak out and to learn and support this issue.

“(Offscreen: ‘What’s HR 676 and how do you pay for it?’) What’s HR 676 and how do I pay for it? So, HR 676 is a bill in the House of Representatives; it’s called “The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act.” If you go to thomas.loc (stands for Library of Congress) .gov, thomas.loc.gov and type in HR 676, you’ll be able to read the text of the bill; it’s very easily readable; you can see who’s co-sponsored it. It would create a national improved Medicare for all where everybody’s in the system, it’s paid up front through taxes, and it’s comprehensive. It includes mental healthcare, vision, dental, hearing, longterm care, rehabilitation, substance abuse care, inpatient, outpatient, emergency care, medications, medical devices, all of the things that we need, because when everyone’s in the system, and it’s comprehensive, that creates the simplest administration.

“Right now, we’re wasting a third of our healthcare dollars just on paperwork. If we move to a national improved Medicare for all, it’s estimated that will free up over five-hundred billion dollars a year that’s not necessary towards the administration and can go to pay for care. The HR 676 says that there should be no co-pays and no deductibles; you just pay for it up front through a progressive tax. So employees would be paying, I think, I have to double check the numbers, but I think it’s 3% tax for employees, and a 6% tax for employers, and then on top of that, there are some taxes on unearned income or wealth and progressive taxes for those who are wealthy that will help to pay into it. We’re currently spending more in public dollars in the United States per person per year than other nations are spending, and, again, they cover everybody and they have better health outcomes, so even if we just use the public dollars that we have right now, we could provide a high quality healthcare system. It has some very significant savings, so one saving I mentioned is the administrative savings, and not only does that save money, but it saves headaches, like, uh, patients struggle to figure out where they can go for care, and then once they go, what kind of care can they get, can they afford the medication that they need. People don’t need to have these headaches about getting care, these stresses. It’s hard for health professionals, because we have to figure out with each different plan if our patient needs to see a specialist or get a certain test, or get a certain medication, is it covered, where can they go; we waste so much time on just these efforts that are really just designed for private insurers to be able to not pay for care. So, administrative simplicity saves money, and it makes it easier for all of us. We also save money because now we have a system that can negotiate for fair prices for pharmaceuticals and also for health services. Health professionals are still gonna be paid just fine in this country; we’re just really overpaying for many of our healthcare services. And then it allows us to give hospitals and other health facilities what are called global operating budgets, so every month they get a check, they use that to pay for the care for people in their community, and then if they need something extra, like a particular piece of technology or a new building for a new facility, that’s determined by the system based on is it really needed or does the hospital across the street already have that; we don’t need to duplicate that, we could use that money to put that facility in another area that doesn’t have access to that, so it really allows us to actually do health planning. So, single payer saves money for us, it saves money for the system, it controls the healthcare costs; it’s a win all the way around.

“(Offscreen: “What is the strategy to win?”) The strategy to win, um, I was saying earlier, is really to make this the only politically feasible solution to our healthcare crisis. We do that by educating ourselves, organizing in our communities, and then putting pressure on our members of Congress, and really being willing to escalate that pressure in whatever ways are necessary. When we were fighting around the Trans-Pacific Partnership, we, there were a lot of great, creative direct actions that people did to put pressure on members of Congress so that they wouldn’t support the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We need to be willing to do those things again, going to their town halls and bird-dogging them, going wherever they go and pressuring them, going to their offices, bringing people in there to meet with them, meet with their staffers, and maybe even sit in and stay there if that’s what we have to do, and if they don’t support it, we shame them in the public media, we write letters to the editors, and say ‘Why is Congressperson So-and-So not supporting the plan that most people in this country support and that would save lives and save money?’

“(Offscreen: ‘What are the three types of healthcare in the United States currently that we have?’) Three types of healthcare in the United States. So we have a purely socialized system that would be the Veterans’ Administration. In general, when we look at that system, its one that’s owned and operated by the government. It is the most efficient; doctors are generally happy in there; they’re paid by salary. It has an independent institution that looks at treatments and medications in a non-biased way and gives that information to its health professionals. It is under a lot of stress; we have been in really endless war for the last decade plus, and it’s not being funded adequately to meet the needs of veterans, so it is the most efficient, but it is underfunded. The second system is Medicare, traditional Medicare, which is paid up front through taxes, but then people can go to whatever health facility, so it could be a public hospital, it could also be a private facility, and that’s Medicare, and that’s what we’re advocating for right now, is a national improved Medicare for all, although a national health service like the UK is also a very efficient way to provide healthcare for everyone. And then the third system is our privatized health insurance system, and, as I said earlier, we have to understand that private health insurance is a financial instrument; it’s owned by investors, and has a financial obligation to make as much profit as possible for those investors. It does that by charging the highest premiums possible, shifting as much cost of care onto individuals through co-pays and deductibles, and then denying and restricting payment for care.

“(Offscreen: ‘Carol Paris asks: <Do you really think the President will go after the pharmaceutical lobby and reduce the cost of of drugs?>’) You know, that’s a great question, Carol. I think that um, you know, he’s a businessman, he’s a billionaire, and the pharmaceutical industry is a very influential industry in this country, so it remains to be seen whether he’s really willing to take them on once he sees what that entails. It’s a great question.

“(Offscreen: ‘What makes you think we can win this? You’re going against some of the most powerful corporations in the country and like the pharmaceutical lobby and the insurance lobby and the investors in for-profit healthcare, why do you think you can win this?’) Right, so why do we think that we can win this? First off, this is what the majority of people in the United States want, so we have what’s called a national consensus on this issue already. It’s an interesting time. Many of us have been advocating for this for a long time, and now we’re really at a moment that is, to me, unprecedented, that I see individuals and groups who didn’t traditionally actively advocate for this are saying that this is a top priority, so that tells you that there’s really, uh, there’s something about this time that people are really ready for this. I think when it comes to the health professional community, we’re seeing a level of desperation amongst health professionals which also is unprecedented because they really are on their knees to the insurance companies and pharmaceutical industries. Health professionals have no negotiating power with these entities, and so they’re cutting reimbursements, they’re raising the prices of the medications. Health professionals are seeing the real suffering that is a result of this. And I know that there’s, we now have a hundred years of history of how social transformation occurs, of research looking at this, and what it basically tells us is that when you have 3.5% of the population mobilized on an issue, and you have national consensus on that issue, you will win. So that’s what, you know, 3.5% of the population is still a large number, but percentage-wise, it doesn’t mean that we have to get everybody fighting for this; we just need to get a good number of people that are activated. Some people, you know, some issue groups have won with less of the population, but no government has withstood 3.5% mobilization, so it’s really, people have power; we just have to recognize that we have that power, and use it. And you already saw when the Republicans at the beginning of this year were talking about repeal, and it was a real possibility that they could repeal the Affordable Care Act, they, shortly after that, they held a retreat in Philadelphia, and someone audio-taped some of that retreat, and this was after constituents had been pushing back against members of Congress over the repeal, and what was interesting is that they were saying, secretly, ‘Whoa, what are we gonna do? We can’t take healthcare away from our constituents, you know, we can’t defund Planned Parenthood; our constituents won’t like this,’ so even with just that little bit of push back had them freaking out, so we do have power when we use it; there are more of us than there are of them. And so if we come together, we can win this.

“(Offscreen: ‘How about the, um, any polls of doctors, nurses, any medical associations or nurses’ associations taking any positions on this?’) Sure. Thank you. So, really interesting. In terms of physicians, there have been two national polls. One was done in 2002 and one, another one was repeated in 2007, and this was looking at physicians across the nation and across various specialties. They found, in 2007, that 59% of the physicians across the nation supported national improved Medicare for all. What was striking is that this was a 10% increase in just a five-year period. And then if you looked at certain specialties, like pediatrics, family practice, psychiatry, emergency rooms, you had 70 and even into the 80s percent support for this. So that was ten years ago. I imagine, just based on what we’re experiencing and what we’re hearing from people that are practicing, that there would be even more widespread support. Just, I think it was last week, the American College of Physicians, the Annals of Internal Medicine, published a full call for a national improved Medicare for all or a single payer system; that was the first time in their 90-year history that they did that, and now, we also know that the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians have called for or passed resolutions to study single payer as a solution to our healthcare crisis, so, and then when it comes to nurses, uh, National Nurses United, the largest nurses’ union in the United States, is also in support of this approach, so health professionals are behind this.

“(Offscreen: ‘Some people’ve come on since you started, you wanna do a quick recap of the, uh, Trump, uh, recommendations and your response?’) Sure, sure. So, um, for those of you that’ve just come on, I was giving earlier a little bit of, uh, feedback to what President Trump said tonight about his proposals for healthcare and it’s nothing really that was very much of a surprise. It’s about deregulating health insurance, opening it up across state lines, which means that private insurers may be able to charge less for health plans but they will cover less and shift more of the cost onto people, um, he doesn’t like the individual mandate. I don’t like that, either; I don’t think we should force people to buy a flawed product. But he wants to take away the subsidies that exist to help people buy private insurance and instead use tax credits, which do not work, and use health savings accounts, which don’t work for the majority of people in this country that can’t actually save money up, so those health savings accounts are really meant for the wealthy. In terms of Medicaid, moving states to what’s called block grants so they only have a set amount of money to spend on Medicaid; that really means that states are not going to be able to meet the needs of their Medicaid populations, especially in times of economic difficulties when more people need Medicaid. And then he said that he would include pre-existing conditions, but uh, that may not, you know, we’ve been here before, where when we required pre-existing conditions, but health insurers had the latitude to charge whatever they wanted, and, um, and people weren’t able to afford, people who had pre-existing conditions weren’t able to afford the plans. And then he said he would try to control the cost of pharmaceuticals, but it’s really unclear what he thinks he’s going to be able to do to take on the pharmaceutical industry.

“We advocate for a national improved Medicare for all, because it would solve all of these problems; it would create a system that’s paid up for up front through taxes, that everybody’s included in, that is comprehensive, and that gives the system the muscle that it needs to negotiate for fair prices for pharmaceuticals and for, um, health services, and so we can, we can provide high quality healthcare for everybody and take away co-pays and deductibles which only serve as barriers to care. They mean that people have to make a financial decision when they need care instead of being able to just focus on, you know, where do they go for care, what do they need to do, what, you know, to get better, and that’s what it should be about. It should be about health as the bottom line, not profit as the bottom line, and that’s why we’re calling our campaign ‘Health Over Profit.’ It’s ‘Health Over Profit for Everyone,’ or HealthOverProfit.org and so if this is an issue that you care about, please visit that website, get involved, sign up, and get active.

“(Offscreen: ‘And what can people do to get active? What are some action steps they should be taking now?’) Uh, so, we have legislation in the House, HR 676, The ‘Expanded and Improved Medicare for All’ Act, was introduced in January. There are 59 co-sponsors. You can look and see if your member of Congress has co-sponsored it. It’s HR 676, and you can go to thomas.loc.gov and see the bill there, or you can also find links to that on Health Over Profit for Everyone or HealthOverProfit.org so get your member of Congress in the House to endorse that, and then call Senator Sanders’ office; it’s (202) 224–5141, (202) 224–5141, you can call right now and leave a message, or you can call in the morning and maybe speak to somebody, and our ask to Senator Sanders is that we want him to introduce a companion bill to HR 676 in the Senate, so that if we have the same bill in the House and in the Senate, that gives us the strongest position to push them through and not allow leadership to weaken them, so contact your member of Congress, and as I was saying earlier, if your member of Congress is already on board, pressure them to do more, pressure them to speak out about it, to educate about it, to hold town halls, you know, write Op-Eds, get other members of their delegation on board, every member of Congress can be doing something.

“(Offscreen: ‘Haul Tulock [sp?] asks <Given the rising costs of healthcare and the increasingly reduction in employer-paid healthcare combined with the rising usage of emergency room healthcare services, how do you, how do the people of the USA continue to think that their healthcare system is better with a for-profit system?>’) Yeah, well, I think that we’re seeing majorities of people in the United States that are seeing that it’s not working, and our healthcare costs are really skyrocketing to levels that are unsustainable, you know, we’re approaching 20% of our gross domestic product being spent on healthcare and most other nations spend 10% or less on their healthcare, and so we’re seeing it eating into family incomes where the average cost of a premium for a family now is $17,000.00 a year. How do families afford that? I mean, employers help with that to some extent, but this is a huge burden on employers as well, and it causes employers to not be able to hire as many employees. It causes them to be less competitive so there are some businesses that provide health insurance for their employees, but then they have to compete with businesses in the same area that don’t provide health insurance. It’s a significant disadvantage and a significant burden for our small and medium sized businesses, for our farmers, who are really struggling to survive right now, and they can’t afford, many of them can’t afford to buy health insurance, and so this is just a huge drag on our economy in a lotta ways, even beyond healthcare costs, just the lack of discretionary spending, so people are making choices between paying for their medicines and paying for other necessities that they have like food or clothing or rent. And so we know that if we went to this type of program, national improved Medicare for all, that not only would it help to solve our healthcare crisis, but it would also improve our economy from the bottom up. So it’s a win-win, really, all the way around.

“(Offscreen: ‘So we’ve had 3,000 views in the last 30 minutes, about 164 shares. But I think its a good time to wrap things up, if you wanna give people some final thoughts and we can close this off.’) Sure. Thanks, everybody for tuning in tonight, for your concern about this really important issue. I just want you to understand that this is the time for us to push for a national improved Medicare for all. The healthcare system, we’ve tried every tweak that there could be to fix our market-based system; it’s not gonna work. It’s time for us to join the rest of the industrialized world, and even some non-industrialized nations that provide healthcare for everybody. We can do it, so please go to HealthOverProfit.org Sign up to get on the email list, check out our and register for the national calls that we’re doing, use the tools, there’s tools for making media, there’s tools for education, tools for action. Join our international day of action on April 7th; it’s called ‘Our Health Is Not For Sale.’ And let’s get out there and just really talk to everyone you know about this, and make sure that you contact your members of Congress. So, um, if you ever have questions, or need things, please reach out to me through my Facebook page or you can reach me at info@popularresistance.org Thanks so much, everyone. Good night.”