Dr. Margaret Flowers on Medicare Speaks With Bill Moyers on Single Payer System Movement And The Arrests

The doctor has been arrested 3 times in trying to get the attention of Congress and the White House address a single payer system.  She says it’s all about what the insurance department will allow.  She likes the relationship she has with patients and wants to practice medicine.  Here she is a Mom and a good citizen and felt it was the only way to get her voice heard. 

She did testify in the committee meeting where they seated her next to the CEO of Aetna in the Senate.  She said it has fallen apart with the politics and was not sure of exactly why everything stalled.  Dr. Flowers said she was bringing doctors and nurses in to talk to legislators and the White House.  She feels she’s had been somewhat put off all the way around.  She addresses the number of people dying in the country this year due to no access or little access to healthcare.  She stated the special interest groups have a hold on processes in politics stronger than what she realized.  Here we are today and little or no progress has been made.  BD 

“Dr. Margaret Flowers is a Maryland pediatrician with experience as a hospitalist at a rural hospital and in private practice. She is currently the Congressional Fellow of Physicians for a National Health Program, working on single-payer health care reform full time. In addition to her activity with PNHP, an organization of 17,000 doctors who support single-payer national health insurance, she is a member of Healthcare-Now! of Maryland and a co-founder of the Conversation Coalition for Health Care Reform. Dr. Flowers obtained her medical degree from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and did her residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital .”in Baltimore.”"

While many in Congress, the press and the public have given up on the idea of even a limited public option in health care reform, Flowers and her group, Physicians for a National Health Program, are standing firm for a single-payer plan. Specifically, they want to extend the Medicare program, which they see as a functioning single-player plan, to the nation as a whole. Flowers has testified before Congress and penned Op-Eds and she has been arrested three times in her attempts to get Congress and the White House to pay attention to single-payer.

>Read Dr. Flowers' open letter to President Obama

Bill Moyers Journal . Dr. Margaret Flowers on Medicare for All | PBS

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