David Sirota made this video in June/2012, just prior to the Supreme Court decision about the health care bill mandate youtube/watch?v=st2pQ1WvXQM TRANSCRIPT: SIROTA: In 2006 I spent a day with Barack Obama. He was a U.S. Senator at the time. He didnt like a couple of things that I had written about him and some of the positions he had taken, so he gave me a call, invited me to come spend a day with him. I wrote it up into a big article for the Nation Magazine in 2006 called, Mr. Obama Goes To Washington. thenation/article/mr-obama-goes-washington And through a series of interviews with Barack Obama in 2006 we got onto the topic of health care and how he sees health care and health care reform moving forward. Remember, this is back in 2006. And there is a clear philosophical question now that the Supreme Court is raising about...whether the government can force private insurance companies to be between us and our physicians. And this topic actually came up in my discussion with Barack Obama. We have the full audio which has never been released before on our website right now, sirota.am760.net, of what Barack Obama said about the question of the centrality of private insurers in the health care system. Only a brief line of it got into the article in the Nation Magazine, because it was piece about all sorts of different issues. Obviously, it wasnt clear at that point he was going to be president of the United States. But were going to play this audio for you, and I want you to listen carefully to it. Specifically listen for the phrase legitimate interests, because I think this gives us about the most accurate idea of how this White House will react to a Supreme Court ruling that potentially undermines the existing health care bill. It also gives us some insight into why the existing health care bill is so organized around empowering, strengthening the private insurance industry, and not creating a system like every other industrialized country on earth -- a system of single payer where the government is the single payer of health care, essentially medicare for all. So this is an am760 exclusive. These are tapes that have never been released before of Barack Obama. ...This is part of a discussion about single payer health care. Id asked Senator Obama about where he was in his previous support for single payer. Listen to this: OBAMA: It might be the best way if you started completely from scratch, if you had no legacies, right? The question is, you know, lets just take a real simple example. Everybody who supports single payer health care says look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paper work. Well that represents -- what? -- a million, two million, three million jobs of people who are, you know, working at Blue Cross/Blue Shield or Kaiser or what have you. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them? Ah, you know, do we expect them to just sort of sit by the wayside? Because those arent wealthy people. The executives are maybe, but a lot of those folks are making thirty or forty thousand bucks a year. So, we have to take into account how do we transition from where were at now to a place where weve got universal health care. So, when you ask is it a political problem, its not political in the sense of can you get it passed. Its political in the most profound sense of does it take into account all of the interests, legitimate interests that are represented. There are a whole bunch of illegitimate interests defending the status quo in the health care system. But everybodys embedded in the existing system. And how do you get from A to Z? So then I think, you know, lets say Mitt Romney in Massachusetts just imposed a different model for the state using mandates. So he takes medicare, medicaid, he, ah, looks at who is not, he then mandates coverage for everybody. Those who cant afford it or arent getting it from their employer, they subsidize, which leaves the insurance companies intact. It sort of works within the existing system. Now, its too early to look at that experiment and say that thats a model thats either going to work in Massachusetts or could ever work at the federal level. Because at some level it depends on federal subsidies, the medicare and medicaid system. But if it worked, then I would be happy to embrace it, regardless of whose idea it is, because the bottom line is youd have a bunch of working families who dont have health insurance right now whod have health insurance. So, I guess my point is this: I am agnostic in terms of the models that solve these problems. If the only way to solve a problem is structural institutional change, then I will be for structural institutional change. If I think that we can achieve those same goals within the existing institutions, then Im going to try to do that, because I think its gonna be easier to do, less disruptive, less costly... So there is Barack Obama in 2006, and I think there are some very important points that come out of this as we move forward this week after the Supreme Court ruling. First of all, it gives you a sense of exactly why ultimately President Obamas health care bill became a bill about strengthening the insurance companies. Barack Obama believes that insurance companies are legitimate interests -- thats his quote -- legitimate interests that need to be represented in any discussion of health care. Gives you a sense of why the White House opposed a public option that would challenge the private insurance companies. And I think moving forward -- and this is the key point -- if the Supreme Court eviscerates, invalidates the health care bill, I think this is a disturbing warning that this president does not believe that we can have a system that doesnt integrally involve private insurance companies. ...And its very important to understand that this is a person who believes that health care should be managed by private insurance corporations. Thats what that quote says. That he believes private insurance companies are legitimate interests who need to be represented. ... I think its a mistake to assume that the Obama Administration -- which put the insurance industrys agenda item into the health care bill from the beginning, that individual mandate written by the insurance companies which in that bill gives huge subsidies to those insurers -- I think its a mistake to assume that if theres a renewed push for medicare for all that Barack Obama will be supportive of it. Because as early as 2006, having just entered the United States Congress, he was already insisting that private insurance corporations, for-profit insurance corporations, must be at the center of health care. ... Here is the youtube video youtube/watch?v=st2pQ1WvXQM
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 15:42:23 +0000