National Health Care Events

Health Care Now is encouraging all who support single payer a healthcare system (aka Medicare for All) to show up for these upcoming events:

June 19, 2008: Nationwide demonstrations at various headquarters of the nations's largest insurance agencies. Please visit their website for a location near you.

July 30, 2008: National call-in and visitation day to members of Congress. Let's encourage our representatives to support H.R. 676, the Single Payer Healthcare Act.

September 26, 2008: Washington, D.C. A Memorial Vigil to remember individuals who have died because insurance companies refused to pay for the care they needed.

We can all work with our local government entities: county, town, school boards, states, to help them see how much money they would save with H.R. 676 – if they never had to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars for insurance company premiums ever again.

Please get involved.

Better Health Care for All

There is something very wrong with the way we do health care in America. I'm sure this comes as no surprise to you. Unless you are quite wealthy, paying for doctor visits, prescriptions and (worst of all) hospitalizations really hurts.

I have a bare bones (no pun intended) Blue Cross Blue Shield hospitalization plan. With a huge $2500 deductible I pay around $200 a month for just myself, hoping against hope that I will never need to use the policy. In addition, I pay every cent of my visits to the doc, for any lab work I have to have done, for all of my dental and eye care and for my medications. Blue Cross does offer a small discount on prescriptions with my health plan so that does help a little.

Having reached the half century mark, my physician strongly advises that I get a colonoscopy, a test that is one of the most efficacious tools in the high tech arsenal to detect the onset of a very common form of cancer. The only thing stopping me is the $2500 price tag, all of which I will have to pay out of pocket. I'm one of the millions of under-insured Americans. I hesitate to call the doctor when I'm sick, fearing the cost. There have been a couple of instances when I had to decide whether or not to call an ambulance (for chest pains, say) and the primary reason I didn't dial 911 was that I thought I would incur huge, unmanageable expenses that would, in the medium term at the very least, do me more harm than NOT going to the ER.

I am starting to feel ill as I write this.

And what about the 45 million Americans who have NO health coverage? They're even more screwed than I am. The truth is that in the U.S. we spend more on health care than any other industrialized nation ($2.6 trillion in 2006, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) YET we rank 37th among all the countries in the world in terms of health system performance (so says the World Health Organization). Here's a fact that never ceases to amaze me:

The United States is the only "advanced" country (whatever that means) in the world that DOES NOT have universal health care.

How can that possibly be? What prevents us from seeing the most obvious solution to what is unquestioningly recognized as the most significant domestic issue facing us as a nation?




Health care is a human right. Everyone should be able to receive high quality, affordable health care services. The only way we can repair our badly broken system is to take health care OUT of the hands of profit driven health care providers and insurance companies. We will not be re-inventing the wheel by any stretch of the imagination if we simply establish a Single Payer National Health policy. A public agency, such as the very efficient one that runs Medicare, could be expanded to create a just, equitable and affordable system for ALL Americans.

There is a bill pending in the House of Representatives right now that creates just such a system. It is called H.R. 676. Very simply, it puts into place a mechanism that would ensure that:

1) Every resident of the U.S. is covered regardless of income, job status, age or health status.

2) Everyone may choose their own doctor without worrying about co-payments, deductibles or premiums.

3) All health care services are fully covered, including hospital stays, doctor visits, prescription medications, long-term care and mental health care.

Sounds idyllic doesn't it? Well, it is far from a utopian dream. There are systems just like this in place in many other of the world's "advanced" nations, including the U.K., France and Canada.



Don't let Fred Thompson and other morons of his ilk win this one. The interests of all of us normal folks must outweigh the interests of the for-profit health care industry - the HMOs, the health insurance companies, and the giant pharmaceutical companies who's marketing budgets far outstrip the amount they spend on research and development. We really do have to take this to the streets if we want to begin to heal one of the sickest aspects of our society.

Contact HealthCare-NOW to get involved.

Health Care for All of Us

I know that I am not smart enough to pen a cogent argument for a national single-payer health care system. But after having seen Michael Moore's most recent (and least politically polarizing) film Sicko I am galvanized to support the concept even more than I have in the past.

Right now there is a bill pending in the House (H.R. 676) that would create approximately the same kind of national health care system found in Canada, France and the U.K. As one Newsweek commentator puts it, you can think of it like "Medicare for all". This bill, by the way, is co-sponsored by Dennis Kucinich, the only Democratic presidential candidate who explicitly supports a single payer system. As a Chicagoan I know it's never a good idea to "back no losers" so I sent the Obama campaign a letter questioning the candidate's stance on health care. I got this pretty good response back:

Promoting affordable and accessible health care is a priority of mine in the U.S. Senate. Health care should be a right for everyone, not a privilege for a few. The U.S. is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, yet more than 45 million Americans are uninsured. This is unacceptable. Addressing this problem should be a top priority for our Federal government. I am constantly disappointed by the lack of positive discussion and action on health care issues in Washington. Too many Americans are working hard but cannot afford their health care bills. Too many employers are finding it difficult to offer the coverage their employees need. Day to day, this is an enormous problem, let alone when a personal crisis hits.

I am certainly supportive of the goal of universal health care in the U.S. As you may know, I have called for universal health care by 2012. This call for coverage does not translate into a call for a single-payer system. Although I personally see great merit in a single-payer health care system, given the current political climate I believe that building upon and strengthening our employer-based system will provide a better chance of creating consensus and achieving the goal of universal health care. Regardless, I view federal subsidies to expand coverage for uninsured individuals, controlling the costs of premiums and copays for those with coverage, increased focus on preventive health programs and quality improvement, and health IT implementation as a few of the key tenets of any successful health care reform plan.

It'd be nice if Obama had a more principled and less "practical" stance on this issue, but there's no arguing with the relative popularity of Barack vs. Dennis. So, there you have it.

It seems to me that this change is going to come from Congress, cajoled by the huddled, under-insured masses. Please urge your representatives to support and co-sponsor H.R. 676 if they are not doing so already.

For more info on an American single payer health care system, please visit:

Physicians for a National Health Care System

SickoCure

HealthCare-NOW