Baucus Healthcare Plan: Arrest Doctors, Nurses

By John Nichols, The Nation. Posted May 14, 2009.

Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, the insurance industry-friendly Democrat who is managing show hearings on healthcare reform, has come up with a novel way to express his commitment to care for the almost 50 million Americans who have no healthcare and roughly equal number who have inadequate care.

The senior senator from Montana is ordering the arrest of doctors and nurses.

Medical practitioners who have shown up at Baucus-chaired "roundtable discussions" to demand consideration of a real fix -- the single-payer, genuinely-public reform that assures all Americans will have health care while at the same time holding down costs -- are being taken into custody and removed from the hearing rooms.

At the first Finance Committee session last week, Dr. Margaret Flowers and seven others were taken into custody when they urged Baucus to include witnesses who support single-payer.

Dr. Flowers discussed her arrest on Ed Schultz's MSNBC show, explaining that physicians, nurses and reform groups representing more than 20 million Americans had repeatedly asked to be heard by Baucus and his colleagues.

But the answer from Baucus, who has been charged by the Obama administration with shaping a health-care plan, has been to call in the cops.

"They just don't want to hear from single-payer," explained Dr. Flowers, a pediatrician from Maryland. "We've been trying for months now, meeting with members of Congress, to be included in the hearings at the events that they are holding and they keep excluding us."

After reviewing the details of the Baucus overreaction, Schultz asked: "President Obama: Do you support excluding people from the discussion?"

Obama has not responded.

But Baucus has.

On Tuesday, at the second Finance Committee session, dozens of California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee members and their allies showed up to protest the heavy-handed tactics. At the opening of the hearing, roughly thirty of them rose and turned their backs to Baucus. On their backs were signs reading: "Pass Single-Payer" and "Nurses Say: Patients First." Other signs, reading "Stop AHIP," protested the collaboration by the Obama administration and Baucus with the country's most powerful industry lobby, the America's Health Insurance Plans group.

While the health-insurance lobby has been welcomed to the roundtable discussions organized by Baucus, the nurses and their allies were told to leave. When five objected to their exclusion from the hearing, and to the the exclusion of single-payer from the debate about how to fix a broken private healthcare system, they were arrested. Among those taken into custody were Dr. Judy Dasovich, Dr. Steven Fenichel and California nurses DeAnn McEwen and Sue Cannon.

Their crime? As healthcare professionals, they dared to dissent from the Baucus-led attempt to impose an insurance company approved plan under the guise of "reform."

Dr. Dasovich, a physician from Springfield, Missouri, dared to say, "We request that single-payer advocates be allowed at the table. Healthcare should be for patients, not for profits." Nurse Cannon said, "People at the table have failed Americans for 30 years. We want single-payer at the table. We want guaranteed health care so we can give the care we need, when we need to give it."

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John Nichols is The Nation's Washington correspondent.

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