The National Health Care Nightmare

That was the topic for the first 90 minutes of the show yesterday, when I filled in for Ron Reagan on Air America radio. In retrospect, we could have done the entire three hours on the topic.

I knew I wasn't alone in my frustration, or in my belief that our for-profit system of private health insurance companies is government sanctioned extortion.

At the beginning of the show, I spoke with Dr. Oliver Fein, President of Physicans for a National Healthcare System, who spoke Thursday at President Obama's Health Care Summit. PNHP a group that is backing Congressman John Conyers' HR 676, calling for a national singer payer health care system.

Unfortunately, it seems as if the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies are just way too strong in this country to ever allow us to overhaul the system the way we really need to!

Have a listen to our conversation by clicking on the link below, then listen to some of the calls. It is a truly despicable situation we find ourselves in. I also encourage you to visit http://www.pnhp.org/ and read up on the details of what a single-payer plan.

You then might want to visit http://www.hr676.org/, a site set up by a Florida man named Larry Pius (who I've interviewed on a few occasions). His site is all about getting the word out that this bill exists and urging concerned citizens to contact their representatives to try to get it through!

We dealt with a few other things on yesterday's show: the scary unemployment numbers, with Hale Stewart, who writes at http://www.bonddad.blogspot.com/ and had a piece on yesterday's Huffington Post. Unfortunately, it took a lot of prodding and leading questions to get anything encouraging out of him!

And we listened back to some of the calls that came in on the Rush Limbaugh apology line. There were some beauts!

Speaking of Rush and radio, I'm heading out to Los Angeles Monday to attend the Radio & Records (trade publication) Talk Radio Seminar. Again, you can scroll down for some of my posts about the state of talk radio and the whole Rush Limbaugh nonsense. But I hope you'll think of me next week, as I'll be in the minority in a room full of right-leaning talk radio people. Eventhough it gets me in trouble sometimes, I know I'll have plenty to say about the disparity of time on the public airwaves given over to right wing talking points!

One quick message to Ron Reagan... someone is masquerading as your father on twitter. I recently began tweeting (still trying to figure that whole thing out, but will twitter from the talk radio conference next week.. so you can follow me at twitter.com/nicolesandler) . I got an email yesterday telling me that "Ronald Reagan" was following me on twitter. I was, of course, curious, so I clicked on his link, and it is someone posing as Ron's father, the late President Ronald Reagan.

I guess since he was a public figure and is no longer with us that this might be legal. But I can't believe that Ron Reagan would be ok with it. I'm not sure what recourse he has, but did want to alert him to the fact that someone has approprated his dad's name on twitter!

Click below to hear yesterday's show in its entirety!