TRANSCRIPT: Keith Olbermann's Hour-Long 'Special Comment' On Health Care

[Hissyspit]

"... the Insurance companies who are right now at war against America ..."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33213245/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann

Health care reform: Saving American lives

Keith Olbermann on what really matters when it comes to health reform

SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
msnbc.com
updated 9:26 p.m. ET, Wed., Oct . 7, 2009

Since August 23rd of this year I have interacted daily with our American Health Care system and often done so to the exclusion of virtually all other business. It is not undercover reporting, and it is not an expert study of the field, but since that day, when my father slid, seemingly benignly, out of his bed and onto the floor of his home, I have experienced with growing amazement and with multiplying anger, the true state of our hospitals, our doctor's offices, our insurance businesses, our pharmacies.

My father's story as a patient and mine as a secondary participant and a primary witness has been eye-opening and jaw-dropping. And we are among the utterly lucky ones, a fact that, by itself, is terrifying and infuriating.

And thus tonight, for all those who we have met along the way, those with whom we have shared the last two months inside the belly of the beast, and for everyone in this country who will be here and right soon tonight, Countdown will be devoted entirely to a Special Comment on the subject of health care reform in this country.

I do not want to yell. I feel like screaming but everybody is screaming, everybody is screaming that this is about rights or freedom or socialism or the president or the future or the past or a political failure or a political success. We have all been screaming, I have been screaming.

And we have all been screaming because we do not want to face, we cannot face, what is at the heart of all of this, what is the unspoken essence of every moment of this debate; what, about which, we are truly driven to such intense ineffable inchoate emotions. Because ultimately, in screaming about health care reform, pro or con, we are screaming about death.

This, ultimately, is about death.

- snip -

We are moving backwards! We are letting people die because they do not have insurance.

What's worse is that barring meaningful health care reform, this will only grow. The difference between the surveys from 1993 and now suggest this fatal insurance gap is growing by about one percent, per year. Your chances of dying because you don't have insurance are now 40 percent higher than those who have it.

By extrapolation, three years from now your chances will be 43 percent higher. Your chances of dying because you used to smoke, compared to those who never smoked, only 42 percent higher. You heard that right. At the current rate, in 2012, you will be more fortunate, more secure, more long-lived, if you used to smoke, than if you don't have insurance. It is mind-boggling, and mind-less. This is the country you want? This is the country you will accept?

Do those other people in this country have meaning to you, or are they just extras in your movie, backgrounds in your painting, choruses in your solo? Without access to insurance for all of us and the only way we get it is with the government supplying the gaps, just like it does in flood insurance for God's sake that fatal gap will just keep growing.

A 45 percent higher likelihood of death for the uninsured compared to the insured by 2014.

By 2022, the figure will be 53 percent higher. Fifty-three percent! In the 1840s, as Dickens wrote a "Christmas Carol" - in a time at which we now look back with horror, the city of Manchester in England commissioned a crude study of mortality among its residents. A Doctor P.N. Holland categorized the sanitary conditions of the houses and streets of Manchester into three classes.

And when he compared the death rate in the First Class Houses in the First Class Streets, to the death rate in the Second Class Houses in the Third Class Streets, he found mortality in those worst locations was 53 percent higher.

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Once you said "Medicare For Everybody," there would be just as much to explain. If you were under 65 you'd be paying for it. You wouldn't have to buy it. You wouldn't have to change from whatever you have now. There are just as many caveats.

- snip -

Only now he could send you a bill and you could have insurance pay you back for it, so your mother and you will know, when the time comes, exactly what each choice would bring.
And some buffoon decided to call that a "death panel." On the list of preventable deaths diabetes, stroke, ulcers, appendix, pneumonia we are 19th. Canada is 6th, England 16th, we're 19th. Portugal is 18th. You're better off in Portugal.

Death panels? We have them now. They're called WellPoint and Cigna and United Health Care and all the rest. Ask not for whom the insurance company's cash register bell tolls. It tolls for thee. What you and I might able to do about all this, when my Special Comment continues.

So far we've covered our collective unwillingness to admit that this isn't a health care debate. We are talking, ultimately, about pain, and life and death. I've recapped my own father's trip through our health care system. And we've looked at the horrible statistics that this country is 19th world-wide in preventable deaths, worse than Portugal. And how, if the current gap between the insured and the uninsured continues to grow, at this pace, by the year 2020, the uninsured will be 53 percent more likely to die than will the insured, a number that matches exactly, the increased mortality rate for the poor in the England of Charles Dickens.

What do we do?

- snip -

Months ago I got in a line at a drug store here. A woman ahead of me, obviously a familiar figure to the young pharmacist behind the counter, trying with mixed success to take in the gentle explanation. "You've maxed out your prescriptions on that insurance," the professional said slowly, "I can't give it to you." The customer shook her head in resignation.

It was like the Medieval Courts of Chancery, where if you were poor, you could take your lawsuit against the rich or the government, and hope when they picked the handful of cases to be heard, they'd somehow pick yours. If they didn't, you could try again next year, or, in some cases, every year for twenty next years.

The woman who needed the prescription spoke even more slowly than the pharmacist had. She had almost no hope in her voice. "Try the Cigna. Please." Another drug store, late at night. The pharmacist was a friend of mine. "You have to do something about this," he said as he handed me my refill and then reached for somebody else's prescription. "You see this? Anti-fungal cream. I just filled this. You know what this costs wholesale? Four dollars. You know what I have to sell it for? Two hundred and sixty-three dollars. I sell it for less and I get fired and maybe we lose our license."

- snip -

And it's a man, roughly my age, and he looks worried to death. And I haven't seen him in 32 years. He was the nephew of the two brothers from Brooklyn who used to run the baseball card shows when we were both kids, and his uncles were the businessmen but he, like me, collected mostly for the fun of it, and it's amazing to see him again, joyous almost, for the sake of the continuity that the accident of us running into each other provides to us both. And he asks what I'm doing there and I tell him and he smiles because my father used to go to those card shows with me and Mike remembers him. And then I ask Mike why he's there.

"My daughter's in ICU," he says. "Three weeks now." The worried look returns to his face. "Lyme Disease. It's one thing, they knock it down, then it's another." There's a brief pause.

"Tomorrow I have to sell my farm. Did you know I had a farm?" I don't have to ask him why he's selling it. He then goes the next step. "Hey, you wanna buy my card collection? I've got some great stuff."

We must reform a system that lets my father get better care than yours does, or better care than Mike's daughter does, because by the accident of life, I make more money than he does, or my checkbook can hold out longer than his does, or yours does, as the bills come endlessly like some evil version of the enchanted water buckets in Fantasia.

The resources exist for your father and mine to get the same treatment to have the same chance and to both not have to lie there worried about whether or not they can afford to live!

Afford to live? Are we at that point? Are we so heartless that we let the rich live and the poor die and everybody in between become wracked with fear — fear not of disease but of Deductibles? Right now, right now, somebody's father is dying because they don't have that dollar to spend. And the means by which the playing field is leveled, and the costs that are just as inflated to me as they are to you are reduced, and the money that I don't have to spend any more on saving my father can go instead to saving your father. That's called health care reform!

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And we must recognize the enemy here: an enemy capable of perverting reform meant for you and me, into its own ATM that mandates only that more of us become the slaves to the insurance companies. The monied interests that have bled their customers white, and used their customers' money to buy the system, to buy the politicians, to buy the press, cannot now even be checked by the government.

Ordinarily the solution would be obvious: we would have to do it for the government. We would have to bring the insurance companies to their knees to organize, to pick a date, to say enough to, at a given hour, on a given day, to stop paying the premiums. An insurance strike.

But the insurance companies' stranglehold on us is so complete that lives would be risked, lives would be lost by the very act of protest. What parent could risk the cancellation of their child's insurance? What adult could risk giving his insurer the chance to claim that everything wrong with him on the day of an Insurance Strike was suddenly a pre-existing condition?

Even as the pay-outs move inexorably downwards, to being less than what you have paid in over the years, we are such serfs to the insurance companies that just to invoke the true spirit of the founding of this nation, is to give them more power, not less.

So I propose tonight one act with two purposes. I propose we, all of us, embrace the selfless individuals at the National Association of Free Clinics. You know them, they conducted the mass health care free clinic in Houston that served 1,500 people. I want a mass health care free clinic every week in the principle cities of the states of the six senators key to defeating a filibuster against health care reform in the Senate.

I want Sens. Lincoln and Pryor to see what health care poverty is really like in Little Rock. I want Sen. Baucus to see it in Butte. I want Sen. Ben Nelson to see it in Lincoln. I want Sen. Landro to see it in Baton Rouge. I want Sen. Reid to see it in Las Vegas.

I'll donate. How much will you donate? We enable thousands of our neighbors to have just a portion of the bounty of good health, and we make a statement to the politicians, forgive me, William Jennings Bryan, "you shall not press down upon the brow of America this crown of insurance, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of blue."

We think these events will be firmed up presently. You will be able to link from our website.

MORE AT LINK

[Forkboy]

1. Thanks for that link.

I'd rather read it than watch it for some reason. But I had to bookmark it for later because I've been up almost 40 hours now and my brain is turning to mush. Well, more mush than usual anyways. :)

[shireen]

2. watching it was painful ...

this is larger than health care reform. i'm too tired to elaborate, but i think most people know what i mean. :cry: