The doctors are in! Ralph welcomes Dr. Steffi Woolhandler of Physicians for a National Health Program to give us the latest on the campaign for single-payer health care. And Yale psychiatrist, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, tells us what’s really behind the words Donald Trump is saying.
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Dr. Steffie Woolhandler is a practicing primary care physician, distinguished professor of public health and health policy in the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health an adjunct professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Woolhandler has authored more than 150 journal articles, reviews, chapters, and books on health policy. She is a co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, which is a non-profit research and education organization that advocates for single-payer national health insurance.
“The beauty of the single-payer system once you implement it: you get huge savings in administration. It’s very easy to implement insurance that’s universal. You have a very low overhead, only about 2% versus the multi-payer systems where the overhead is usually about 12%. You make it possible for your hospitals to simplify their billing departments – pretty much get rid of their billing departments – and just receive a lump sum budget the way like any other service like a fire department would get a budget. You make things simpler for your doctors, because they send all their bills to one place. That kind of administration in Canada saves them at least half a trillion dollars a year on just paperwork and bureaucracy costs. And you use that money to cover everyone.”
Dr. Steffi Woohandler, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program
Dr. Bandy Lee is a forensic psychiatrist on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Lee edited the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Prior to the impeachment vote in the House, she, along with 970 other health professionals, sent a letter to Congress members warning of Trump’s “dangerous” mental state arising from his “brittle sense of self-worth.” Dr, Lee also did a psychological “translation” of President Trump’s recent letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“(Donald Trump’s) primitive desire to be the king of everything, the best in everything and admired by everyone allows him to sense the primitive drives in other people far more effectively than any conscious mind strategy could. So, it’s very dangerous indeed, because he will be echoing those thoughts. People would mistake that for being empathy or understanding other people. He is not doing it to understand other people. He’s doing it for his own purposes: for overpowering them, for using them, deceiving and manipulating them, and preying upon them.”
Dr. Bandy X. Lee: psychiatrist Yale School of Medicine
“Whenever he names other people derogatory names, he’s actually denying these qualities belong to him. It’s all an unconscious process, though. If he calls someone else those things before he gets called out, it feels like he is immunizing himself.”
Dr. Bandy X. Lee: psychiatrist Yale School of Medicine
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12 Comments
King of everything huh? Sure, I get that … but what does Bandy Lee make of Xi Jin Pin?
Whataboutism, Bruce, lookitup.
Happy 2020 Jim. It seems that I understand whataboutism better than you.
Whataboutism is a pejorative aimed at Republicans, used to describe Republican behavior when they use Obama as a DISTRACTION to answer any question that has an embarrassing or incriminating answer for them.
My question here was to bring some perspective to Trump by comparing him to Xi. Since you shot back attacking me, as a distraction to avoid seeing and responding to my comment, your use of whataboutism is the typical one that coined the phrase … and you either missed or did not want to think about Trump WRT Xi.
Does Bandi Lee ever headshrink Xi Jin Ping? What do you think?
“25 ways the Canadian health care system is better than ObamaCare” ?
Ralph, your messaging stinks.
All anyone is going to see and register is – “better than ObamaCare”
What even is ObamaCare these days? What we have now is Trump’s
monstrosity … and you are not talking about that? Why?
When the average voter sees something like that, the brainwashing
they get from right-wing media interrupts their brain and they do not
bother with what you have to say, they see instead “ObamaCare is
bad” … not even as good as Canada’s system which we are constantly
told is terrible, and then they move on with their lives.
You are a thoughtful competent man, so how can you have missed
this? I can only assume you want to put out incoherent and incompetent
propaganda deliberately, again; and like your ill-fated Presidential bid
that accidentally contributed to helping give us W Bush, you find yourself
in this grey zone of what you want people to think you stand for versus
what actually accomplish by your actions. What gives man?
Assuming the best intentions on your part, one would want to suggest
that you pay some attention to the actual message you want to broadcast
and shape your language and messaging accordingly.
Dr. Steffi Woolhandler ( misspelled in your subtitle: Dr. Steffi ”Woohandler”,
co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program ) is wonderful.
I have read quite a bit of her writings and she is a accurate and to the
point and a great spokesperson for universal health care. Good to hear
her.
As someone who believes in single payer, $15 minimum and strong unions and thinks Donald Trump is dividing this country, I strongly disagree with Dr Brandy Lee. Her clinical attacks on Donald Trump is similar to the Soviet Union who used Psychiatry to put their rivals in mental hospitals. What she did to Donald Trump, she could of done to Hillary Clinton. She laughed at Ghaddafi being killed, wild eyes during celebration with balloons and loud noises, calls people who don’t support her deplorable and irredeemable.
Hillary Clinton said:
I know there are only 60 days left to make our case – and don’t get complacent; don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, “Well, he’s done this time.” We are living in a volatile political environment.
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
But the “other” basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that “other” basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but — he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
— Hillary Clinton, CBS News[9]
You have to have pretty poor vision to put that in the same classification as Donald Trump. They did that, using social media data they searched out and connected what are basically a lot of criminals that put them over the edge. Not all Republicans, not all Trump supporters, but a marginal number activated to bring about a forced political change not based on valid political interest or education.
The Republican nonsensical counter to that would be that Democrats want open borders so immigrants can come in and vote Democratic, but first generations immigrants rarely even vote, and some groups even tend to vote Republican, like Cubans for example.
That was my reaction also, Donald. As I listened, it seemed that the only reason Trump is viewed so abhorrently is because he is relatively obvious. HRC, Obama, Bush and countless others (except perhaps for Nixon) generally do the same basic things but do it in a more professional and polished manner. IMO the latter is true evil, not to put too fine a point on it. Because we’ve been indoctrinated by Hollywood for generations that evil is obvious and laughs maniacally doing it, that keeps us from recognizing it in the real world. That’s how it perpetuates. I’d say that HRC, Obama, Bush et all aren’t really all that different from Trump; it’s just that the former are better at it.
We’re all too easily whipped up as a nation into believing this or that foreign dictator is evil, but yet when we actually do far worse but with a nice suit, a smile and professional words, we listen and believe.
Concerning Mr.Trump America should now be worried about his state of mind seriously.
He will bring this country to the brink of war.
Being an obvious puppet of Russia he will obey their command for money and self gratification.
For the first time before long this country may know a real “coup” to protect it from this unfit person. America wake-up. Danger knocking at the door.
Wow, someone’s still peddling that unhinged, xenophobic Russian conspiracy theory that was cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign when she lost in 2016? In 2020? After the Mueller report came out and embarrassed every remaining evidence-free assertion left to debunk? And this person does this while criticizing hawkishness out of the other side of their mouth? What purpose do you think anti-Russia hysteria serves? Do you think it’s to foster peace?
Nice to see the kind of people Ralph has begun attracting to his radio show with the obsessive Trump pieces nearly every week these days. Or perhaps this is due to the fact that every time a guest came on the show for the last several years and snuck in some one-line hysterics about Russia “influence”, there was zero pushback by Ralph or anyone else. Steve, David, do you actually believe this stuff yourselves?
The problem with coming up with insulting names for Trump as Trump does to others is that the people that respond to his insults respond because they already don’t like the people that Trump insults. Insulting Trump won’t work on them because they like Trump because he insults people they don’t like.
So making fun of or coming up with insulting names for Trump will only work on people that already don’t like him and doing what Trump does how Trump does it may not impress those people and probably won’t bother Trump.
I am one of many that tried with a few youtube song parody videos during the 2016 campaign, but none of my videos caught on.
But even if the videos did catch on and it actually bothered Trump he would never admit anyway.
So even though the videos may only be good for a laugh:
http://youtu.be/Ma7ujo1XFrw (Trumpface sings “Grab a Rump”)
http://youtu.be/LSvznwnDWb8 (Trumpface sings National Anthem at NFL game in Mexico)
Medicare for might be good for 90% of the nation but as 60% disabled / retired veteran the numbers hurt me and my spouse.
Medicare for will likely lead to higher taxes on working people, that will return in in the form of free health care, so the average person will save. But for me and other disabled or retired vets we will paying for a benefit we already have, extra taxes could easily unbalance our budget.
After 2008 things got rough, we lived in the car for year, after hundreds of job applications that went nowhere I restarted my education , earned a BA with high marks (had to take loans to cover summer expenses, the GI bill only covers weeks with classes) but employment doors still refused to open, it took the dedication of my VA rehabilitation officer to find me a position. Now I work at government job in a high rent area so I need to combine my retirement and pay check to rent a studio apartment, one the keys to our budget is free medical for me and small co pays for my spouse…dental is another matter. I make very close the national average income but in the San Francisco Bay area that means you are just getting by, we don’t travel and we only have one old car, in other words we are just getting by until I retire and we can move out of the area.
His coping system is denial and projection. He is talking about himself so yes he is transparent. A contagious example is Jim Jones. Every Republican supporter will drink the cool-aid to prove they are loyal. Stalin said of Germany in WWII that Blind Obedience can not be eradicated. Trump and his supporters are dangerous to this country. Congress acts like oh it will go away if we just wait a little longer.