Dr. Margaret Flowers, Single-Payer Activist, on Moyers Journal

By FireDogLake's ralphbon FDL

At least Bill Moyers hasn’t forgotten about the fight for straight-up single-payer (aka "Medicare for All") healthcare financing.

This Friday, he interviewed Margaret Flowers, MD, Congressional Fellow with Physicians for National Health Program, fresh from yet another arrest attempting to keep single payer on the table.

Last week, Dr. Flowers and her colleague Dr. Carol Paris were arrested in Baltimore attempting to respond to the President’s disingenuous call in his SOTU address. You know the line:

If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I’m eager to see it.

They were attempting to deliver yet another request for the White House to examine single payer on the merits, especially since it meets all of Obama’s stated criteria for ideas worth entertaining. Instead, they got arrested.

Dr. Flowers was arrested last May, as part of the Baucus 13, attempting to get the Senate Finance Committee to include single-payer advocates in their hearing. Moyers subsequently devoted an entire show to single payer, on May 22.

By the way, in case you didn’t know, Bill Moyers’ Journal and its sister program, Now, are about to go off the air. More on that, including PBS’s cardboard-flavored response to a petition to keep progressive voices on the network, from FAIR.