Dr. Oliver Fein reports on the White House health summit - PNHP’s official Blog
An excerpt:
Sphere: Related ContentWhat was my role in all of this? Despite my best efforts, I was unable to make a public statement at the meeting, although thanks to the PNHP staff in Chicago we were able distribute my prepared remarks to the media while the summit was under way. Our staff member in Washington, Danielle Alexander, also handed out hard copies to summit participants as they left the White House.
I took the opportunity to talk one-on-one with six senators and seven representatives and suggested that if their committees held hearings on health
reform, at least one or two single-payer advocates should be included on the
hearing panel. I also said that single-payer bills like H.R. 676 should be
compared with all other proposals for health care reform by the Congressional
Budget Office. There was considerable receptivity to these ideas among some of
the Congress members. We will pursue these leads.The media took great interest in the successful battle by Rep. Conyers and myself to get into the summit, with stories in the Congressional Quarterly, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among other places. We have also been able get the single-payer message out on radio, with myself and Drs. Walter Tsou, Steffie
Woolhandler, David Himmelstein and Quentin Young, among others, being invited to
appear on the air, often on programs with national reach. This was a plus.In sum, I came out of the White House Health Care Summit with conviction that
single payer – that is, publicly funded, privately delivered health care, which
removes the wasteful for-profit, private health insurance companies as middlemen, remains the only solution that can guarantee access to comprehensive, quality health care with choice of doctor and hospital, and reduce overall cost. Single-payer, an improved and expanded Medicare-for-All, is the gold standard against which all other proposals for health care reform should be measured.
