Guaranteed Healthcare

By Donna Smith 

Ah, Independence Day.  We Americans love our freedom and our freedom to choose.  But when it comes to our healthcare system, it seems we’ve forgotten that our choices are most limited and our freedom most restricted under the broken, for-profit, private health insurance model that has been outdoing itself on greed and sleaze for decades.

Kids, women, all non-white ethnic groups, seniors, sick folks – all of these groups have been among those discriminated against by the high-cost, high-profit U.S. healthcare system.  Periodically when the abuses became just too egregious politically and socially, our government would struggle to put programs in place to address the disparities and quiet the storm.  But profits must be paid under this system, and Americans are not free to choose either their doctors or their treatments when the bottom line is the top priority.

When I wrote a piece earlier this week about a $7 laboratory charge holding up blood work for my husband, I did not expect the outpouring of stories from other Americans who have experienced similar problems over small medical bills.  From coast to coast and in every state of insurance, un-insurance, under-insurance and in poverty, in middle income or in wealth, it seems many of us have had our medical care interrupted and sometimes prevented by providers holding many of the keys to the kingdom of our healthcare system.  Heart attack, cancer, bleeding disorders, stroke – none of these potentially life-threatening conditions have prevented patients from being asked for money before being treated.

Pictured above:  The Wilkes family of Colorado (read on to learn more)

By Donna Smith

OK, if this wasn’t personal enough just yet for me, it just got a whole lot more so.  And if you think for one instant that in this nation at this point in history and with this popularly elected President and Democratic Congress you will be treated for a heart attack simply because you might die if you are not treated, think again.  And if you think having insurance helps, think some more.

On Friday, my husband was denied a blood test because a computer record from some distant time past and some other state showed he had a $7 balance with LabCorp.  I am not making this up.

My husband had a heart attack this week.  He woke up one morning sweating profusely and with a heart rate dropping.  I watched his color turn first ruddy then ashen, and then he felt as though he was going to pass out.  He would not allow me to call 911 as he slowly began to feel sick to his stomach and he believed his symptoms were digestive rather than cardiac. 

Is the public option that some have deemed the sword we should all fall on in the healthcare debate little more than fool's gold?

In the wake of the now widely touted New York Times poll this weekend that showed 85 percent of Americans believe our health care system should be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt and that people are even willing to pay more in taxes to get that kind of system,  the next question ought to be why are Democrats and some liberal constituency groups willing to settle for so little?

Sing along with the healthcare pirates... brought to you by our Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care partners Consumer Watchdog.

By Donna Smith, community organizer and legislative advocate 

You'd think after eight long and ugly years listening to pompous and wealthy officials slam their versions of social hatred down our gullets, we'd have sent those folks packing for good on January 20, 2009. You'd think as we debate healthcare reform for this nation, we'd have left the arrogance and the flaunting of greed back in the pre-Wall Street bailout days of summer 2008. And you'd think in the People's House, the United States House of Representatives, we'd at least have stood up and said that every single American is deserving of and yes, entitled to, healthcare and protected from going broke in the process of getting care when ill.

You'd think.

With an unusual overflow crowd of more than 200 people, the House Education and Labor Committee, sub-committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions heard testimony from Geri Jenkins, RN, co-president of CNA/NNOC, during its historic convening of an official hearing on single payer healthcare reform yesterday. Jenkins provided members with the RNs' perspective on the failings so rampant in healthcare delivery today and how a single payer system would address those failings.

Nurses, doctors, and patient advocates have long demanded such a hearing and debate, for the simple reason that there is no logic by which you can defend our current system—and political expediency is not a sufficient answer to ignore the strengths of the best solution to our healthcare crisis.  

Yesterday's hearing marked an important start to this debate and in the words of Chairman Andrews "This is the beginning of the conversation, not the end."  Which is wonderful, because as Nurse Jenkins said, "People talk about evidence based practice, we need evidence based policy."

Now that we have a new president espousing health care reform and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, isn’t this a time to be excited and optimistic for long-overdue reform?  Much as we would like to say “Of course!”, we cannot.  The “reform” effort is already way off the track, despite the hype of “progress” in the uncritical mainstream media.

Geri Jenkins, RN, co-president CNA/NNOC

A co-president of the nation's largest organization of registered nurses will testify Wednesday in the first official public hearing in Congress on single-payer healthcare reform. 

Geri Jenkins, RN, co-president of the 86,000-member California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, and a practicing RN at the University of California San Diego Medical Center, is expected to describe how the nation's healthcare meltdown is a "patient care crisis" and how single-payer reform best meets the goals identified by President Obama for reform of the broken system.

Watch the segment on Democracy Now.

Please VOTE Rose Ann DeMoro Among this year's 100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare
Modern Healthcare (through 06/26/09)

RN Leader to Testify at Congressional Hearing Wednesday on Single-Payer Healthcare Reform
Press Release 06/09/09

Congressional Hearing to Consider Single-Payer Healthcare
National Nurses Blog - Daily Kos 06/09/09 - (Please comment!) 

Original post by: William Hughes
ThePeoplesVoice.org

Rose Ann DeMoro is the executive director of the California Nurses Association and a National V.P. of the AFL-CIO. On June 3, 2009, she spoke at a Capitol Hill press conference called by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), on the issue of a Single Payer Healthcare System. Ms. DeMoro said: “There is a conspiracy of silence” against Single Payer in the Congress. “We’re going to have to turn up the heat” if we want to get anything done. She added that Single Payer “has been kept off the agenda” and that there was a lack of “political will” in the Congress about doing the right thing with respect to the current crisis in health care. The press conference took place in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The healthcare activists are supporting HR 676 and S 703, now pending before the Congress.

By Donna Smith

They arrived on May 26 to the DC courthouse in business dress and on time.  The single payer supporters now known as the Baucus 8 who were arrested on May 5, 2009, in your United States Senate hearing chambers came ready to be arraigned on Tuesday morning and to find out what the formal charges against them would be.  I witnessed the proceedings the day they were arrested, and I came this day to court to see the process through with these brave Americans who stood for all of us and demanded that a witness advocating for a single payer healthcare system be seated in at least one of the 41 witness chairs filled in recent Senate hearings on healthcare reform.

www.YouBetYourHealth.com
 

When American patients trust their health to a for-profit insurance company, they’re doing nothing less than gambling with their lives in a game where the odds are stacked in favor of the insurance company. Read the press release. Try your luck - play the game here!

Washington's abuzz about healthcare, but why isn't a single-payer plan an option on the table? Bill Moyers speaks with California Nurses Association representative Donna Smith about how our broken system is hurting ordinary Americans and features coverage of our National RN Day of Action in DC with RN leaders. Click here for local listings >

Also read the article by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

by Donna Smith

It's coming. You and me and every middle class, working person in this nation is about to start handing over more and more of their hard earned cash to the private insurance industry, courtesy of our own elected members of Congress and our very popular President. Fire up those Treasury Department presses. We're going to be printing and providing money for insurance companies like no bail-out we've seen yet this economic crisis cycle.

On May 13, Congressman Dennis Kucinich addressed a conference of Registered Nurses on the need for Health Care Reform. The conference was sponsored by several nursing organization including the California Nurses Association and the United American Nurses and took place during National Nurses Week.