In her new job as Executive Director of the American Progressive Caucus Foundation, former Democratic House candidate Darcy Burner is reportedly frustrating activists for progressive health care reform.
Single Payer Action—a non-profit, grass roots group pushing for a Single Payer health care system—posted a story in their newsletter yesterday reporting that Burner tried to intimidate Nick Skala, formerly of Physicians for a National Health Care Program, out of criticizing (from the Left) President Obama’s plan in a June 4 speech to the Caucus.
From yesterday’s report in the Single Payer Action newsletter:
He sent his presentation ahead of time to Bill Goold, the executive director of the Progressive Caucus, and Darcy Burner, executive director of the American Progressive Caucus Foundation.
Both were not pleased with Skala.
“Bill Goold emailed me after reading my testimony and materials I was going to present to tell me that they were not acceptable and that there could be no comparison between single payer and the public option with side by side comparison,” Skala told Single Payer Action. “Darcy Burner told me that they would construe talking about the public option — even comparing it to single payer — as an attack on the members of the Progressive Caucus.”
“Now, I can’t see how honest discourse about whether or not a public option will work — especially when it comes from 16,000 doctors and the majority of nurses — as an attack on anybody who supports it. We see it as telling the truth.”
Despite Goold’s and Burner’s objections, on June 4, Skala went ahead and made his presentation to the caucus.
“During the presentation it was very nasty,” Skala said. “I got some very dirty looks from Darcy Burner. During the question period and once during the testimony, I was interrupted, told that the Progressive Caucus had taken a position on this issue and unless I had something positive to contribute, then there wasn’t really much point to answering my questions. At least one of my questions to the staff of the Chairman of the caucus was interrupted by the staff of the Congressional Progressive Caucus unfortunately.”
And what exactly was Skala’s crime?
He believes the public option being pushed by Obama and the Democrats will fail.
“The public option preserves all the systemic deficiencies that we see in the current system,” Skala said. “It maintains a finance system that is based on private insurance and private insurers and their drive to fight claims, issue denials, screen out the sick and make a big profit generate tremendous administrative waste — 400 billion dollars a year.”
I’ve got an email out to Burner for her comment.
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What a shock! Burner wasn’t a “progressive” or an ‘outsider’, but a tool of the democratic establishment.
Ah ha. But then what about Obama? It’s his plan that Skala was taking on.
He was barely better than McCain after he picked Biden to be his running mate, and he’s done nothing but slap the faces of his ‘base’ ever since. He’s already broken nearly every promise he made to everyone but the richest bankers and he’s barely been in office 6 months.
The public option is the path to single-payer. When the private industry has to compete with the government to deliver affordable health care, people will find that the government achieves better health outcomes at a lower price. The private industry will slowly die as people switch to the government plan. In the end we will have achieved single payer health care through free market forces.
Basically the entire progressive establishment is opposed to single-payer health care right now, claiming that the time is not right.
http://www.inthesetimes.org/article/4459/skewed_debate/
They claim to be pro-single payer (“path to single-payer” nonsense), but they cannot answer the question: if not now, WHEN?
By not even trying right now, they have no real bargaining chip with which to even force concessions from the health care/ insurance industries. “Reform” is looking more and more like passing more of the costs on to consumers.
Perhaps the tide has turned? The Progressive Caucus just axed Bill Goold!