Who is Celinda Lake and WHY is she telling DEMOCRATIC politicians to obfuscate the truth about how dysfunctional the American healthcare system is?
Trudy Lieberman, one of the only healthcare journalists who is not afraid to sugar coat the loathsome state of affairs in Washington today, did what so many others NEED to do, to prevent a repeat of 1993's healthcare failure. In a CJR article today, she singled out a major source of frustration and dishearteningly dishonest verbiage.
Non-experts in the fields should not be setting public health, scientific or economic policy. The world should have learned that with Lysenkoism. But systems that were built on lies can NEVER admit their burden of lies.
As Arendt said, maintaining all these lies is such a huge drain on the system that it can eventually lead to the system's implosion due to their excess weight. It dooms important problems to never, ever getting solved. But breakdown in the net of lies is to some, an even worse fate than failure.
So we get..
"advocates should not compare the U.S. to other countries, or assert that America does not provide quality health care; neither should they mention that the U.S. is thirty-seventh in the world in health outcomes."
"Does Lake want to hide the fact that the U.S. performs poorly? My goodness, she almost sounds like a Republican!" I think that that need to CONTINUE to preserve bubbles, to cover up unpleasant truths with lies, is at the root of our current problems. and health reform based on the associated preconditions WILL BY NECESSITY FAIL.
PNHP also recently wrote about Ms. Lake's disinformation campaign in their article "Americans Support Single Payer. Why Doesn't Celinda Lake?" (Also, please read their analysis of Ms. Lake's performance in defense of the craptacular reality distortion field produced by the healthcare industry, essential for maintaining our dysfunctional approach to health care.) Doesn't it remind you of Obama's campaign promise of amnesty for Bush era criminals, i.e. "not to stir up old ghosts"?
But endorsing a whole package of lies can ONLY lead to MORE LIES.
Maybe thats the WHOLE POINT. You're either part of the "lie club", or you're against it, right?
WRONG, because then you are against all of us ever learning. And under that model, nothing in America could EVER grow and evolve. We would be doomed to repeating old mistakes, again and again. Like our old adversaries in the ex-USSR, who could never admit the mistakes of the past, because they were so horrible.
On a smaller scale,though, not learning from our own past mistakes and not learning from other nations experiences, is what we are doing, and thats a situation we need to stop. Read this article, which includes the excellent example:..
"But Such a System to Could be a "Step" Towards Universal Coverage, Right?
No. Enacting phony "universal coverage" has not brought any state closer to a single-payer system. Since the early 1990s, Minnesota, Oregon, Maine, Florida, Utah, Washington, California, Vermont and Massachusetts have been among the states that have attempted to "patch-up" their fundamentally fl awed systems while retaining a place for insurance companies. All have failed. Upon passage, incremental reforms in each of these states were hailed by politicians and the media as a "step toward universal coverage." Yet despite all the claims of pragmatism, incremental reformers have been unable to shepherd through meaningful change in nearly four decades of trying. And while reformers in these states continue to wait for the next "step," residents continue to suffer.
The definition of insanity is to repeat an action expecting a different result. This is exactly what we have done in continuing to advocate incremental reforms as "steps" toward single-payer. What Americans need is not more proposals for patchwork reforms. We need leaders willing to stand up for the only solution that will work."
The most basic of lies being circulated concern what Americans want. They don't want unaffordable uninsurance. (But, unless we face the causes of our dysfunction, and the very real facts like that that incomes and home values - along with Americans equity, are going down, probably never to rise again to what they were twenty years ago, thats what we are going to get. Banks get bailouts, insurance companies get bailouts and lies, they get out of the Ponzi scheme, But WE get lied to.)
"In 2006, a Congressional Task Force created by the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act hosted 29 town hall meetings across the U.S. to ask Americans what type of health care reform they favored. The results of the "Citizen’s Health Care Working Group" were overwhelmingly in favor of single payer health insurance despite considerable bias against single payer health insurance in the way the meetings were structured. In fact, 25 of 29 of the meetings (86 percent) reported that a national health program was their most favored option (see press release and chart, "Congressional Task Force Disregards Public’s Call for National Health Insurance and chart,").
"
Poll after poll going back decades has shown strong support for a true national healthcare plan, financed by taxes, but the crafty and dishonest mainstream media always tries to spin these results as meaning that we just want to buy cheaper insurance. Thats NOT what the people are saying.
Well, it turns out that Ms. Lake is the source, the mother lode, as it were, of much of this widely parroted SPIN.