Advocates for national health care plan whether it’s called “single payer” or “Medicare for all” are politely told they are delusional. Now even public option people are being marginalized. Don’t we know that all things good come slowly and incrementally. So we should get in line. But just who is delusional? Perhaps we have different tasks in this fight for civil rights and economic justice. Perhaps it is not time yet to throw in the towel by throwing the game.

Dr. Paul Hochfeld is back in Corvallis, Oregon working in the Emergency Room. He tells the co-hosts of The Edge Talk Radio about getting into the White House doctors press conference. His talk with the Doctors for Obama and also reveals that the AMA has a secretive committee that decides how doctors get paid.

Tomorrow on our weekly radio show in Bozeman, Montana, Dr. Paul Hochfeld returns to The Edge Talk Radio. Dr. Paul will tell us how the Mad as Hell Doctors tried to get into the White House Rose Garden presidential photo op and how Dr. Paul got in.

I was involved in some of the earliest anti-war and civil rights demonstrations of the ’60s, both small and large, and over the years I’ve been to many political meetings. I’ve learned to discriminate between political meetings that are about elections, party gains, legislation pending in Congress, or other specific goals, and movement meetings which are about some “cause,” about righting wrongs, and about changing things comprehensively.

The Mad As Hell Doctors rally was such a movement meeting. Its purpose was not to get Medicare for All passed in the next few days, or next week, or this year. It was to recruit people to a social and political movement, to unite them into such a movement, to create social bonds and network people in order to build a movement that will be successful over the longer term in getting health care accepted as a human right in America that transcends the market system, economic concerns, and the profits of the insurance industry, and then getting that acceptance enshrined in Medicare for All legislation.

I ended up having a great experience at the rally because once I realized its purpose, I could join in with a full heart and understand that it was as successful at fulfilling that purpose as some of the best movement meetings I’d been to in the past. The small size of the rally makes it clear that single-payer is a movement that is still in early days. It hasn’t mobilized its public yet. It’s more like the civil rights movement in 1960, than it is like that movement in 1963. But many recent polls show that it has a majority of the American people at its back. And even though single-payer, Medicare for All, will lose out this year, I think the Mad As Hell Doctors rally tells me, at least, that this movement has the kind of stories, signs and symbols, songs, determination, cause, and people of courage and commitment, of which good and successful movements are made. So, whatever happens over the next couple of months, I think that the Mad As Hell Doctors, and single-payer advocates like Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese will be back next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, if need be, until this fight is won, the insurance companies are out of the business of funding essential health care, and every American can exercise their right to health care, whatever their background, or station in life, because “Everybody in, Nobody Out,” is, finally, an American reality.

On September 19, Katherine Q. Seelye, a New York Times “reporter” provided one of the most biased “hit pieces” I’ve seen yet on Medicare for All. The piece is called “Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,” implying that Seelye thinks it’s all three. But what does she say to support her implied characterization. Well, “crazy” is mainly supported by a reference to a scene in the West Wing where Alan Alda, playing a right-wing Republican Presidential candidate refers to extending Medicare to every American as “crazy.”Just as scenes from the television series “24” are often cited by Republicans as an authoritative justification for torture, Seelye, too, appears to believe that right-wing opinions expressed by a fictional character, played by a Liberal, also deliver authoritative verdicts on a policy proposal like Medicare for All. Alan Alda must have gotten really annoyed when he read her piece.