"The reform process in Washington has been hijacked by the private health insurance industry"

Democracy Now!

Over 2,200 US Veterans Died in 2008 Due to Lack of Health Insurance

"DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Well, we think that the Congress needs to start from scratch on this bill. The reform process in Washington has been hijacked by the private health insurance industry. If you look at the Baucus framework, which was the basis of the Senate bill—it’s on the Senate Finance Committee website. Just right-click on that document, and it turns out the author of the document was Elizabeth Fowler, who’s a former vice president of Wellpoint, the nation’s largest private insurance company, covering 35 million people. So the private insurance industry has hijacked the process. What’s come out of the House, what’s likely to come out of the Senate, is a completely inadequate bill that takes about $500 billion in taxpayer money and hands it over to the private health insurance industry.

...

It’s $500 billion in new subsidies to the private health insurance, millions of mandatory new customers for private health insurance.... I think down the line we’re actually likely to be worse off in handing over so much taxpayer money to what is essentially a private health insurance industry bailout."

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, professor of medicine at Harvard University and a primary care physician in Cambridge. She is also a co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. She testified about uninsured veterans before Congress in 2007.