Thom Hartmann: Heather Higgins on the line, she is the new chair, it says chairman, of the Independent Women’s Forum. Is that the title you use?

Heather Higgins: Chairman, yes. I don’t believe in politicized language.

Thom Hartmann: Ok.

Heather Higgins: Chairman is fine.

Thom Hartmann: All right. But you’re a woman.

Heather Higgins: I’m a woman. Last time I checked.

Thom Hartmann: OK. iwf.org is the website, and Heather, you guys are running a new ad. Let me play the ad for our listeners, so they know what we’re talking about, and put this all in context. Here it is, the new ad from the Independent Women’s Forum. Of course it’s a television ad and there’s a woman on the ad, and all that kind of thing. You get the sense from the ad.

"Like two and a half million American women, I survived breast cancer. My mother died of cancer, but today, I’m a survivor, and I’m worried about what Washington might do now. Almost everyone agrees we should reform healthcare, but many want to create a government-run health insurance plan paid for by taxpayers at huge cost. Independent experts say tens of millions of Americans could lose their current health insurance and wind up on this public plan. England already has government-run healthcare, and their breast cancer survival rate is much lower. If you find a lump, you could wait months for treatment, and potentially life-saving drugs could be restricted.

Government control of healthcare here could have meant that three hundred thousand American women with breast cancer might have died. My odds of surviving cancer were high because my care was the best. What are your odds if the government takes over your healthcare?"

"Go to Independent Women’s Forum to share your story and stay informed about your healthcare rights."

Thom Hartmann: Beautiful ad, Heather.

Heather Higgins: Thank you. She’s a lovely lady.

Thom Hartmann: I beg your pardon?

Heather Higgins: She’s a lovely lady.

Thom Hartmann: Very well done.

Heather Higgins: I said, she’s a lovely lady.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah, and she’s very photogenic. Couple of problems with it. Number one – the group that you’re citing, the Lewin Group is, the independent group that you’re citing the statistics from, some of the statistics, in other words, how many people are going to lose their health insurance, is the Lewin Group, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the United Healthcare Company, the largest healthcare insurance company in America, that has paid their CEO over the last five years seven hundred million dollars in compensation. These people are blood-sucking leaches on the back of America, and there’s nothing independent about the Lewin Group.

Heather Higgins: I don’t understand why the Democrats use and rely on them. Those numbers are the numbers that the Democrats have been using. That’s the firm that they’ve used, and those are the numbers that they use, and those are generally accepted to be real and credible numbers.

Thom Hartmann: No, they’re not.

Heather Higgins: Whoever has paid for it.

Thom Hartmann: They are absolutely not, and if any Democrat is using Lewin Group numbers, I’m unaware of it and they would be crazy to do so, because as I said, the Lewin Group is a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Healthcare which has the worst ratings of all healthcare insurance companies in the United States by their customers, and is a, and whose CEO is walking away with seven hundred million dollars for five years work. And they’re paying out five billions dollars in dividends. They are stealing our money.

Heather Higgins: I’m not here to defend any insurance company.

Thom Hartmann: OK, well let’s take the larger issue. Secondly, you’re suggesting that we’re going to adopt the British system. Nobody is suggesting that. Third, you’re suggesting that Great Britain has worse breast cancer outcomes than the United States does. That actually according to the Concord study, which I spent hours reading, and I don’t know if you’ve actually read that study or not, according to the study, which was published in “The Lancet” a couple of year ago, which was done based on 1999-2004 diagnoses, and a ten year follow-up, is actually accurate. The United Kingdom has amongst the worst numbers, but when they were looking ...

Heather Higgins: In fact, all of Europe has worst numbers on almost cancer, particularly solid tumor cancers, than the United States, because, their systems don’t choose to pay for the early discovery that ours do. And secondly, because in any sort of cancer treatment, as I understand it, and I not a doctor, where you have the patient choosing to do something other than take the pill or follow the established protocol, you get a very different outcome.

Thom Hartmann: Well, in fact, if you read the Concord study, they point out in the study that they only looked at fourteen states and five municipalities in the United States. And that when they looked at particularly sub-groups, for example, African-American men and women in the United States, the results were far worse than anything you saw anywhere in Europe under any circumstances. And they had some very severe concerns about the methodology that they were using to analyze the United States. We were simply too big for them to analyses. Also with the UK, they lumped five different parts of the UK: Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, England, and whatever is the fifth, together, and there is wide disparity in income.

And third, in the United States, for fifteen, twenty years, we’ve had a very aggressive citizen-lead, and God bless ‘em, 'examine yourself for breast cancer' programme, that doesn’t exist in the UK, cause just the idea of a woman touching her own breast is something that is not discussed in public in the UK, a remnant of Queen Victoria.

Heather Higgins: Ah yes. This is the same country that has pictures of naked women that say sell Murdoch papers. I don't think they're quite that prudish as you would like to pretend.

Thom Hartmann: I know. Murdoch is the big exception to this.

Heather Higgins: It's because Americans believe that they ought to be responsible for their own healthcare, and they don’t just defer to a National Health Service. They would not put up with waiting weeks and weeks and weeks to see a doctor to have even the initial diagnosis and then have the tremendous shortage of specialists and beds that they have in these other countries.

Thom Hartmann: These are not the reports that we’re hearing from people in the UK.

Heather Higgins: That is not correct. I mean, I realize that Paul Krugman wants to dismiss every story that comes out of the UK.

Thom Hartmann: And so does everybody that lives in the UK. We get callers from the UK all the time saying come on, quit picking on our system. But your goal here…

Heather Higgins: This is a country that denies people care for macular degeneration until they were already blind.

Thom Hartmann: We live in a country that denies people care and kills eighteen thousand of them a year. Are you not horrified by that?

Heather Higgins: We talk about statistics, statistics, and that really tops it.

Thom Hartmann: All right. Well, people can read all about it over at the Independent Women’s Forum, iwf.org. Heather Higgins, thank you, Heather, for dropping by.

Heather Higgins: We want women to have their own choices.

Thom Hartmann: There you go.

Transcribed by Gerard Aukstiejus.