CIGNA Kills Girl, Doctor Arrested

Grigor Sarkisyan tells us of his daughter who was denied treatment and died because of it, as Dr. Matt Hendrickson MD and others get arrested and protesters chant "CIGNA profits, people die, arrest the real criminals." This happened in Glendale CA as similar sit-ins at health insurance companies take place around the country. Over 900 people have signed up to risk arrest at these ongoing sit-ins including a number of doctors. They do not accept the public option as the answer to this problem. Only a single payer system that covers all Americans at affordable costs is acceptable and these rallies and sit-ins will continue until that happens.

Margaret Flowers MD, seen in this video after a Senate hearing this summer, was arrested Thursday 10/28/2009 and remains in custody vowing to stay there until she gets a meeting with the CEO of CareFirst 3401 Boston St &1501 S Clinton St, Canton Crossing, MD.

In Louisville KY seven occupied the Humana lobby for over 24 hours. Humana allowed them to stay as long as they wanted and stated they too want health care reform.

In Warwick, CT, sit-protesters, including Robert Darling, a cancer patient being denied care, occupied the United Health Care office, demanding that the insurer cover Robert’s bone marrow transplant immediately. The CEO was unavailable but the PR manager talked with them and promised to meet with Mr. Darling within a week to answer him.


40 risked arrest at a San Francisco sit-in while 200 rallied in support and 30 others blocked entrances to Blue Shield offices. Protesters advocated a “single-payer” system in which the state or federal government would create one system of health insurance to cover everyone, as would be created by Rep. John Conyers’ H.R. 676, which would improve Medicare and expand it to cover everyone. The California legislature has twice passed bills creating a similar single-payer system on the state level, but Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed both these bills.

In New York nine were arrested at a Welpoint sit-in. Simone Morse, a 19-year old student at Hunter College, was the first to be handcuffed and pulled up from the floor this morning at 1 Liberty Plaza in lower Manhattan, the corporate offices of WellPoint, one of the largest health insurers in the United States.

Cameron Gibson, a 23-year-old medical student at SUNY Downstate, was one of the next to go, followed by Frank Broadhead, a 67-year-old senior on Medicare, who was carried out on his back and deposited into a nearby police van by two members of the New York Police Department. In total, nine protesters were arrested on Wednesday morning on charges of disorderly conduct and/or trespassing, according to an NYPD officer on site who spoke off the record.

“My name is Matt Hendrickson, I am an Emergency Physician and a member of Physicians For A National Health Program.

I am sitting in at Cigna tomorrow to ask Cigna why the health insurance industry is denying health care.Why are they charging America a 25% tax on all healthcare transactions to support a system that avoids the sick? Why has the number of physicians grown by 200% in the last 40 years while the number of insurance administrators has grown by 3,000%? Why does their industry have 1 million administrators, while there are half as many physicians and Medicare only has 15,000 employees?

Why does Medicare pay their chief executive $150,000 while Cigna pays Ed Hanway $12 million? Why is their industry raising premiums for small businesses by 15% a year? And then diverting 15 cents off every dollar to deny care to their paying customers.

I'm going inside Cigna today to ask these questions. I’m going to bring some pictures with me. Some of the faces will be familiar to Cigna.Like Nataline Sarkisyan who lived in Glendale until she was 17 when she died because Cigna denied her transplant. But they may not know Jenny Fritts who was 24 when this picture was taken with her two-and-a-half year old daughter Kylee. She was also seven and a half months pregnant with her second child- a beautiful baby girl. Jenny is dead. Jenny’s unborn baby is dead. They died because she was turned away for appropriate care from a for-profit hospital due to lack of insurance.

I want Cigna to know about this young woman, seen here at her two-year-old son’s birthday. She came to my ER with a mole behind her ear and a swollen lymph node. Her husband had recently lost his job when their tech firm downsized.

We recommended she get a biopsy. The family used part of their savings to get the biopsy done promptly by paying cash. The biopsy revealed metastatic melanoma. Now the Thomas family has no income, depleted savings and the mother of their three young children has an invasive cancer with no health insurance.

If Cigna won’t let me inside their offices, I’ll sit down outside and wait to speak to them. If police won’t let me wait, I will be arrested. It is my duty as a physician and my honor as a citizen to be speak out for My patients who are losing their savings, losing their homes and losing their lives because of the existence of the private insurance industry.

America cannot wait any longer. Our uninsured cannot wait. Our small businesses cannot wait. Our middle class cannot wait.

This is just the beginning Cigna. Other physicians are risking arrest today. And there will be more next month, and the month after that. We will not stop speaking out for our patients and stating unconditionally that private health insurance must go.”

Matt Hendrickson, MD MPH
Vice Chair, PNHP/CaPA LA
Chair, LA Single Payer Coalition

Rape in the Ranks: The Enemy Within

This is a synopsis of the 28 minute French film by Pascale Bourgau who interviewed US military women raped on duty. It's been seen on European TV but not in the US. Pascale, a reporter for the Belgian channel RTBF (Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon), while six months pregnant, along with Anne Barrier, toured the United States to meet these women and tell of their pain, rebellion and today, their struggle. The documentary was selected for the New York Independent Film Festival and will be shown Monday evening, October 26 at 5:45pm at the City Cinema East, 181 2d Ave, NYC. Following the showing of "Rape in the Ranks", we will have a panel to discuss rape in the US military at the Telephone Bar and Grill, 149 2nd Ave (212-529-5000). See http://nyfilmvideo.info/2009-new-york-october-film-schedule-tickets/monday-octob... Filmmaker Pascale Bourgaux is available for interviews. Her telephone is 212-982-0684 and 646-2638402.

Synopsis:

Raped by their comrades, Tina, Jessica, Suzanne and Stephanie have been ignored by U.S. military officials in seeking justice. Though the Pentagon acknowledged receiving 3,000 reports of sexual assault in 2006 alone, and had launched a rape prevention program in 2004, the number of reported sexual assaults has since skyrocketed, but not the number of convictions. Only 2% of accused rapists are ever brought before a courts martial. Very few women have been willing to speak out, with the exception of these four brace women. Unable to stand the nightmarish daily rapes by her commander in Iraq, 21-year-old Suzanne refused to report back for mission and was brought before a courts martial. 25-year-old Jessica was raped in the U.S. and Korea, yet still dreams of going back to active service and seeing her attackers brought to justice. Stephanie has come to regret never reporting her own rape and perpetuating the law of silence. 20-year-old Tina, who was raped in Iraq, is no longer around to recount her nightmare. She supposedly "killed herself." Her mother claims she was murdered. This report tells the story of their pain, revolt, and uphill battle for justice.

Image captions: Left: Pascale Bourgaux interviewing Ann Wright, a former colonel who resigned before the war in Iraq; now a pacifist and defender of the cause of raped female soldiers (Washington, outside the White House). Right: Jessica and her husband Brendan Brinkman.

En francais: http://www.capatv.com/?p=2609

Visit the Stop War Project: http://stopwar.lafilmonline.com

Single Payer is NOT Off the Table

Los Angeles 10/15/09 – 12 arrested for a sit-in at Anthem Blue Cross offices as Maureen Cruise, Public Health Nurse, explains why single payer is not off the table. Along with a contingent of doctors, Cruise believes universal health care (a.k.a. single payer or medicare for all) is the only option. As Dr. Jo Olson recently told me, single payer is the only fiscal and moral solution. She has been working for a single payer system for the past five years. Nurse Cruise was an L.A. public health care nurse at numerous clinics until they all closed with the recent economic downturn. As she explains, over 100 people die every day for lack of health care in the U.S. More die every day because they are denied health care from insurance companies despite paying their high premiums. Yet we see public free clinics closing. People are forced into medical debt and foreclosure to pay for health care, unlike every other country. “What kind of country does this to it’s people?” she asks.

Nurse Cruise goes on to say that Pelosi’s announcement to the world that single payer is off the table was a ploy to make everyone forget about it and go for a public option instead, a public option written by and for the insurance industry, which spends over a million dollars per day lobbying Congress. The public option, as she says, is an insurance industry bailout, because with our economic downturn and the insurance industry’s annal retentive (my words) policy of raising rates to make up for losses, they are losing customers and so they look to the deep pockets of our government in the corporate welfare state we call America. But as long as we don’t have a viable health care system without the for profit insurance factor, and as long as we don’t have universal health care, people will continue to rally.

It’s interesting that the right tea baggers agree with the left in this area. Both sides agree that government bailout spending is wrong. But the right has been deluded by the right wing bumper sticker mentality media propaganda into believing that it is an Obama socialism agenda at fault. in fact it is a Wall Street corporate socialist agenda, since as cruise and many others agree, Wall Street owns Congress, and seemingly the Presidency as well.

But the bottom line is that, by law and on paper, this is still a democracy for and by we the people, not the corporations; and so the people have taken to the streets, lead by doctors and health care professionals like nurse Cruise, Dr. Olson and many others. They hold rallies and sit-ins around the country and get arrested in protest. Dr. Susie Baldwin calls the public option a government insurance industry jobs program, which leads me to wonder, why can’t the insurance industry make an honest living selling a service that people need? Why must they resort to living off the government, pushing Congress to make laws forcing people to buy their worthless product which amounts to a mafioso payoff to keep their useless thug industry alive. Why must the insurance industry live on government corporate welfare? Are they too lazy to get a real job and pay their way like the rest of us?

As Dr. Paul Papenek told me, people don’t need actuaries or claims adjusters. People need doctors and nurses. Shouldn’t we forsake the misguided careers of insurance professionals, not only for the 45,000 lost lives every year for lack of health care, but also for the high cost and fiscal deterioration of our country due to the exorbitant waste, fraud and spending on health care due to a corrupt monopolistic health insurance industry.

Parts of this clip will be included in a feature documentary, Got Healthcare?

Sam Pullen Arrested at Health Care Sit-In Remains in Jail to End Insurance Abuse

Washington DC – Chanting “patients not profits,” citizens and health care providers held rallies and sit-ins at health insurance company offices in New York, Washington, Phoenix, Palm Beach, Portland, Boston, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Reno. (Full list of cities and arrests below.) 54 were arrested to support an end to insurance abuse and win health care for all. 14 arrested in New York have not yet been released. Sam Pullen, 31, arrested in Los Angeles is refusing to give information to police, vowing to stay in jail until Blue Cross, where he protested yesterday, stops denying care to those who need it most. Another round of sit-ins and rallies is planned for Wednesday, October 28.

Pullen was inspired to action by his mother, who was denied coverage for a lifesaving bone marrow transplant by Blue Cross when he was a teenager. Weakened by her cancer treatments, Pullen’s mother staged a one-woman sit-in at the insurance company office, resulting in the approval of the transplant that extended her life for years. Thanks to the transplant, she lived long enough to see Pullen reach 18 years of age.

“I am honoring my mother’s sprit by refusing to leave custody until Blue Cross ceases its practice of denying doctor-requested treatments for patients with life-threatening conditions,” said Pullen, who is being supported by Mobilization for Health Care for All and other groups. “We will not back down until profit-driven insurance companies no longer stand between the American people and the health care they deserve!”
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The above was copied from the Mobilize for Health Care website, which updates the article daily. Sam Pullen organized the Los Angeles financial district sit-in at the Anthem Blue Cross offices. 12 were arrested there as seen here.

Rallies and more such protest actions are planned for future events and will continue, not until a public option is passed, but until a universal fair affordable health care system is agreed upon, a system such as medicare for all or a single payer system. A silent rage has been awakened in Americans across the country and this will only escalate as the right and the insurance industry push back.

Pelosi has stated that single payer is off the table. But the doctors, health care professionals and other activists who continue to stand up for universal health care will not acknowledge Pelosi’s statement. Single payer is not off the table. It’s the people’s table, not Congress’.

Good luck to Sam and the other American heroes who remain in jail to protest our corrupt monopolistic socialized corporate welfare state insurance industry that preys upon all Americans for it’s very survival.

The Public Option: Obama's Health Insurance Jobs Program

President Obama recently mentioned at a town hall on health care reform that he didn't support a single payer system because it would be too disruptive. He didn't explain what he meant by disruptive but industry professionals assume he refers to health insurance industry management and employees who would become jobless in short order under a single payer system. It's not clear if management outnumbers other employees.

Obama is keeping these insurance industry jobs on as part of the government public option plan to persist health insurance industry control over people's health care. Even without a public option, insurance companies stand to have an even better stake in the health care market. The future looks bright for health care insurance employees who will be able to continue their never ending thankless job of denying health claims to people in need of medical care.

The 45,000 people who die every year due to lack of health care and from denial of insurance as well as the 14,000 daily who lose their health insurance are apparently forsaken for the few hundred thousand jobs in the health insurance industry. What's a few hundred thousand lives and disrupted families every few years to as many well fed well paid industry office workers' jobs? We need to have at least one or two industries that continue to make record profits while the rest of us face financial ruin.

The move by Obama is in line with America's ongoing shift toward corporate welfare socialism. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation that does not have a single payer type system to ensure all it's citizens have health care and have healthy productive lives. It's not certain if this fact is the symptom or the result of America slipping into the list of third world countries where 5% or less of the population control 95% or more of the country's wealth and power. America is no longer considered a democracy by most people who understand the meaning of the term. We are at best an oligarchy, with our government under corporate control by the wealthy few.

In light of America's failure to deliver health care, despite our advanced technology (only available to the very rich here) we now rank 37th in the world in health care. France is number one.

My suggestion is that Americans stop buying health insurance if they can avoid it. Vote with your wallet. That's the only thing these people understand.
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Follow Jon Raymond on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jonraymond

This video is a clip from a longer film currently in production. The title of this clip is based on Dr. Susie Baldwin's reaction to Obama's statement that a Single Payer system would be too disruptive, as seen in this video. So blame her for it.

Much of this video was shot at the recent Mad as Hell Doctors' rally in Hollywood last week. Special thanks to Dr. Jo Olson, Dr. Susie Baldwin, Dr. Paul Panacek, Dr. Nikki Mihara, and Dr. Horace Williams for their participation.

See more on this project or join us at http://outinthestreetfilms.com
Also on YouTube

No Health Care? Tough. This is America. Die.

Here's a rundown of the right's genius response to heath care reform based on interviews at this recent health care town hall in Alhambra CA.

1. Solution for the 48 million uninsured: Life is tough. Get over it. Die.
2. Solution for those uninsured who end up walking into hospitals: Well there should be some kind of program for them (duh - like government socialized health care?).
3. Major concern: the health care reform is not about health care (What's it about then? Toilet paper?).
4. Yup. Major problem with socialism: Toilet paper (Wasn't that a 60s U.S. propaganda spin?)

So if we keep the current system and 48 million people remain uninsured, who picks up the bill when they walk into the hospital? The government.

So, it is then the government's prerogative to insure these people ahead of time in order to save money on their hospital bills, is it not? It is also only fair that everyone else has the same option to choose that government insurance as well.

Keep posted on our projects and videos: Sign up at http://outinthestreet.ning.com.

The End is Here

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? How about if our troops kill a million innocent Iraqis and none of it is reported (no pictures, no video). Did it happen? What about if five billion people around the world decide to stop using banks and the present day financial infrastructure has to rely on corporate social welfare to survive, but they eventually fade away anyway. Did they ever really exist? I mean, the money we all have is our money. Even if it's in a bank, it's our money. Take the bank away and it's still our money. Banks are a mere illusion that charge fees for a show.

Suppose they gave a war and no one showed up? Suppose a lot of filmmakers (tired of playing Hollywood games) went out and made their own films, self-distributed them and banded together to help each other in what eventually became an alternate movie industry of and by real filmmakers instead of executive fat cats who do nothing but collect dust, money, and hookers. Suppose said fat cats disappeared from the movie scene altogether. Were they ever really there to begin with? I mean the filmmakers still make their movies with or without them.

What if people stopped using insurance companies altogether and got the government to be there for them in case of medical emergencies and accidents, just like the police and firefighters, and then no one would have to dole out 30% to insurance company administrators? Would those administrators have ever really existed?

If you were one of the million plus Iraqis who was killed, and who saw your family, friends, neighborhood, and country annihilated before your eyes, I think that would qualify as your rapture. By the same token, if you're a conservative authoritarian who lives by the rule of law and order and follows whatever the current law and order of the day has been determined to be by whoever is in charge, but then things suddenly turned on you and suddenly there was no law and order as you once knew it, there was no democracy or free market capitalism, and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it (What can you do? Drop a nuke on Wall Street?) - if all of that were the reality (which it is by the way) would that be your rapture?

The end is here.

Right Wing Nut Cases

The other day I went to a health care town hall meeting in Alhambra CA, with Congressman Adam Schiff. (D-CA) who supports a single payer health care system. The meeting was jammed with the now typical right wing nut cases. I hesitate to call them Republican, though most Republicans support what they do, but some do not, as you may have heard about Rep. John Isakson (R-GA) citing Palin as "nuts" for her "natterings about the health-care reform bill [that] are anything except the figments of a discombobulated imagination." In fact I heard that a number of advertisers are pulling out of Glen Beck's Fox News show, due to his remark that he considered Obama racist. Meanwhile, though down for a while it appears Obama's ratings are back up in the 60% area. Ain't that a bitch? What the hell is going on? Is there some kind of rational thought virus going around?
Let me push this a little further. I recently saw a video with Douglas Rushkoff, author of NY Times bestseller, Life Inc. who talks about how our current bank centered money system evolved from a personal based money system due to the aristocracy becoming comparatively poor to the masses of average people. He talks about a future utopia where people won't need money or at least not government issued currency. They'll trade on their own merits and labor. Money will come from the people up instead of a government controlled trickle down, which basically means people are pissed on by the government. This sounds kind of nuts at first but not when you think about how nuts our banking system is today it's certainly no where near as nuts as the right wing nuts going off at health care rallies, not to mention Sarah "fucking nut case" Palin.
So here's the thing. If you read John dean, another Republican gone rational, in his book, Conservatives Without Conscience, he talks about authoritarian conservatives, the worse kind of conservatives. These "nuts" (if you will) believe that people follow the rule of a leadership. It's a Nixonian, Cheyenian, Bushian, Palinesque kind of do what ever I tell you to do, and think whatever I tell you to think, organizational structure. Authoritarians are either leaders or followers. None of them subscribe to the idea that people can think for themselves. No. They are on a groupthink Orwellian mindset. So, what I'm thinking now is that we've had eight years of authoritarian conservatives running our government and its not easy for them to let go of that power they thought they had over us. Ergo, town hall nut cases.
The town hall nuts that I interviewed for a forthcoming documentary, stated that they were not protesting nationalized health care because of nationalized health care (I told you they were nuts). No. They stated their concerns are really about socialism in America. That America would become a socialist state. That nationalized health care was just the first step toward a terrible socialism, as bad as Nazi Germany, Russia or Cuba.
Now you have to feel sorry for these people. Obviously they are simply misinformed. They just didn't get the memo. The socialism town halls are not scheduled until like 2015. Someone must have got their dates mixed up. France, England, Canada and a total of 39 major countries have very successful socialized medicine programs. They have yet to become socialist states or Nazi Germany. In fact if any country is headed down the road to totalitarianism it's the present day capitalist United States of America, with it's now policy of corporate outsourced military, preemptive war, torture, and international terrorism on the greatest scale ever in the history of the world. If these people were really worried about a government socialism that takes away our freedoms they'd repeal the Patriot Act, and pull all (not just a token few) our troops out of the preemptive wars we continue to wage in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously they are not doing anything of the kind and reports of them being lead by paid insurance industry at these town halls shills seem quite reasonably true.
I personally observed a select few individuals at the town hall I was at, who consistently shouted out in disruption trying to interrupt proceedings with inane requests, or they'd attempt to lead the crowd in Palinesque chants about freedom and so on.. But most of the people there didn't bite. They didn't go along enough to make those chants turn into an angry mob of protests and disruption. People are on to this tactic. These few agitators later banded together to laugh and joke about how things were going. Obviously they aren't too smart to be so easily observed this way.
The jig is up guys. We all know for a fact that you're just a bunch of fucking nuts.

Convention for the Sake of Convention

There is a disturbing trend in Hollywood toward convention. By that I mean movies that are made with the conventions you'd expect to see in a given genre or even by studio. We expect certain types of films from Disney, and maybe certain other types from Warner, and something different again if the genre is horror, or romantic comedy and so on. This is convention and some people will even call it craft. This is especially proliferated in TV. I can't think of one sitcom that doesn't use bank lighting. That means banks of soft lights that flood the set in brightness. While in horror films we see mostly darkness with only glimmers of light here and there. Much more dramatic. But still so very conventional and expected.

Now take something like Pirates of the Caribbean. Generally it's lit with bright soft sunlight with everyone flooded in brightness. But there are occasional scenes of something more dramatic, as in the stables. But even there, it's pretty much all flat and soft. It's not until we get to the underwater scenes with the pirates walking or the moonlight on the deck of the ship, that we find something really interesting.

Anyway, my point here is that Hollywood and TV generally use conventions for the sake of conventions. There's no motivation there. Why would every room and scene in a sitcom be flooded with bright soft light? It's not real. The rooms in our houses aren't' like that. Look around in your house. The light is brighter near the window, or at night only around your lamps, and it drops off into darkness as you get away from the light source. So what then motivates studios to use something like bank lighting? I can't think of hardly a single place in real life where everything is flooded evenly with soft all penetrating light. Even in an office of overhead fluorescents, the light drops off near the corners of cubicles.

Obviously these so called Hollywood artistic professionals either can't be bothered to make something look interesting and real, or they don't want to spend the time on it. So we end up with pasty plastic looking people with caked on makeup to make sure they are evenly lit like everything else on the set. This is completely what you call unmotivated lighting. There is no motivation for this other than the studio budget or the grip's inability to do something interesting.

So you say, this is no trend. It's always been this way. Well maybe. But it seems so much of a standard now that if you make a film without pasty lighting, you get criticized for being too artsy. You become the one who is accused of not having motivation for the lighting you use. In other words, if it's not a horror film or some dark drama, you had better flood the place with pasty light and cake on the makeup.

But people ultimate don't buy it. It may be subconscious. But we all find something fake in these bank-ly lit scenes. That's one reason why reality programs have taken off. They don't light anything. They just shoot whatever is out there in real life. Of course this is the opposite extreme. Although in both cases of bank lighting and reality shows we have the common element of lazy unmotivated lighting. Seldom do they take the time to light something with true motivation for how the light should fall on the subjects.

Convention for the sake of convention is a lie. It's lazy, and it's ugly. It's an indication of poor sloppy work and under par production.

Just Back from Comic Con

Find more photos like this on Comics
I took my son Chris to Comic Con for one day. It was so crowded and we were so tired from the drive down there and the parking hassles that we didn't think to check out the schedules and conferences. So all we did was walk the floor.

Though that was pretty interesting and Chris enjoyed looking at the anime stuff which is what he's into. There are so many people in costume and makeup, and they are so good at it that you can't tell the professionals apart from the regular people.

It's really cool to see so many enthused people and all their costumes. You don't get crowds like that at film festivals nor all the celebrities and Hollywood studios. It's almost cool that it's so crowded with people like that.

We got back home and the rest of the family was jealous, though I had asked them back in April to get tickets with us. Next year we're all going and I'll make sure we get to the conferences and know what's what.