“GOP + HMO = R.I.P”
Consumer activists Jamie Court and Frank Smith, authors of Making A Killing: HMOs and the Threat To Your Health,announced today a grassroots bumper sticker campaign to protest the appointment by GOP leaders of a House-Senate conference committee that does not favor strong HMO reform, which would include the right to sue HMOs for punitive damages.
Court and Smith will distribute, as part of their promotional efforts for Making A Killing,bumper-stickers that read, “GOP + HMO = R.I.P.” They will also seek commitments from other patients rights activists to buy and distribute those bumper stickers. Making A Killing(Common Courage Press, October 1999) is an indictment of corporate medicine’s deleterious impact on patients, physicians and nurses, and includes a platform for reform and patient self-defense kit.
“The appointment of a pro-HMO conference committee is cash register politics at its worst,” said Court, whose Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights sponsored California’s new HMO liability law. “HMOs have put money over good medicine and for a cut of the HMO’s take the GOP leadership is complicit in this public offense. They will and must be exposed. The bumper stickers will remind Americans that the party of Lincoln has become the party of Aetna. Its soul must be saved through a public shaming.”
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