Fighting right-wing smears of progressive healthcare proposals.

Fighting right-wing smears of progressive healthcare proposals.   Republicans have been so effective at smearing so-called “government-run” healthcare as expensive and wasteful that they have obscured just how much the current, private healthcare industry gouges Americans on everything from pharmaceutical drugs to routine care. This week, we’re re-airing two interviews with experts who say healthcare can be safer and more affordable if corporations got out of our collective pockets.  Dan Zuberi  If hospitals would spend a little more money paying their own employees, instead of outsourcing for the cheapest support workers, they would save money by cutting down on costly hospital infections. That’s the analysis from health professor Dan Zuberi. Steve Knievel  Steve Knievel is an advocate for Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, focusing on expanding affordable access to medicines. They say that to help stop Big Pharma’s price gouging in the U.S., Congress must listen to the American public, ignore the pharmaceutical industry’s high-paid lobbyists and finally pass legislation granting Medicare the authority to negotiate drug prices. Jim Hightower   The Sad Whine of Supreme Court Right   Ralph Waldo Emerson told about a guest who came to dinner and spent the entire evening prattling about his own integrity: “The louder he talked of his honor,” Emerson wrote: “the faster we counted our spoons.”   Today, America has not one, but six guests in our national home babbling about their integrity. They are the six extremist Republican judges who now control our Supreme Court, and it’s a bit unsettling to hear them go on and on, almost frantically pleading with us to believe in their judicial impartiality. Bill Press The View From Europe with NPR's Sylvia Poggioli   Sylvia Poggioli is senior European correspondent for NPR's International Desk. She covers Italy, the Vatican, Western Europe, and the Balkans. Poggioli has reported on the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and how immigration has transformed European societies.   If you'd like to hear the entire episode, visit BillPressPods.com.