Guaranteed Healthcare

New Energy for Healthcare Reform After National Bills Stall

To ecstatic applause from healthcare advocates, the California Senate today breathed new life into national prospects for fundamental health reform by passing on a 22 to 14 vote a major bill to guarantee healthcare in the state through creating a Medicare for all system that would cover every Californian. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders outlines the case for single payer/Medicare for all on the Senate floor, following withdrawal of his single payer amendment due to parliamentary maneuvers by Republican opponents.

• Click here for the C-SPAN video clip

The idea of a Medicare for All type, single-payer healthcare system will be heard on the Senate floor.  Late last evening, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont filed Senate Amendment No. 2837, and there are two additional original co-sponsors of this amendment, Senator Roland Burris of Illinois and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Does passage of a bill that funnels millions of additional Americans into the private insurance system, and the decision of House leaders to shut down debate on one single payer amendment and scuttle another, mean the end of the years of efforts by single payer activists to win the most comprehensive reform of all?

Your calls are needed to keep single payer amendments alive in the U.S. House of Representatives. The message is simple: Keep the Kucinich Amendment!

• Speaker Nancy Pelosi:
  DC 202.225.4965 - SF 415.556.4862

• Representative George Miller:
  DC 202.225.2095 - Concord 925.602.1880
  
• Representative Henry Waxman:
  DC 202.225.3976 - LA 323.651.1040
  

How many horror stories will it take before Congress decides to act on the most ignored problem in the present healthcare debate, denials for people with insurance? In September, San Francisco's KPIX-TV reported the story of Rosalinda Miran-Ramirez of Daly City, who woke up one April morning with her left breast bleeding and her shirt soaked in blood.

Bob Schieffer of Washington Unplugged interviews Donna Smith, of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Ogranizing Committee, who was a featured patient in the Michael Moore movie SiCKO, and Robert Zerkilbach of America's Health Insurance Plan (AHIP) about a new report of insurance claim denials.  
Watch CBS News Videos Online

For anyone not interested in slogging through the debate on the 500-odd amendments to the Baucus bill, it has become increasingly and painfully apparent that the healthcare legislation soon to emerge from at least the Senate will fall far short in reigning in out of control health care costs.

That lapse is especially ironic in that "affordability" is perhaps the only goal that seems to top everyone's to do list, from President Obama to the "keep the government hands off my (government-financed) Medicare" crowd.

But as long as our policy makers refuse to throw the elephant out of the room, the insurance company pirates and their predatory pricing practices,  all their subsidies and tweaking will amount to little more than an umbrella in a hurricane.  

CNA/NNOC Executive Director, Rose Ann DeMoro calls on AFL-CIO convention attendees to support single-payer healthcare for everyone in America.

Unanimous Vote for Medicare-for-All Reform

PITTSBURGH – In a historic vote that adds the nation’s leading voice of American workers to a broad national campaign, the AFL-CIO voted unanimously at its national convention here today to endorse the enactment of single-payer, universal healthcare for all Americans.

Lost in the increasingly dysfunctional healthcare reform debate over phony death books and how much protection money must be paid to the drug and insurance industries to soften their opposition, a major public health tsunami is about to slam the U.S.

It's name is H1N1. OK, not exactly an unreported story, but perhaps under reported. Even with a President's task force report Monday that concluded:

There's a fundamental lesson in collective bargaining that seems to have been lost on the White House, and those in Congress who devised their failing strategy on healthcare reform:

Don't make all your compromises before you walk in the room.

For all those now wringing their hands over the apparent abandonment of the public option and like Rachel Maddow  dissecting the train wreck of the once promising opportunity for genuine healthcare reform, it's time to ask:  what happened? who could have foreseen that semi barreling down the highway? and what do we do now?

Tell your Congress Member it's not too late to win single-payer! Attend Town Hall Meetings in August! -- It's the culmination of our national work for healthcare reform, so we must send a message to your member of Congress and Senator:

1. Support single payer in a floor vote in both houses (HR 676/Senate bill 703)

2. Enable states to establish single payer systems – keep the Kucinich amendment as part of the final healthcare reform bill

3. Employee health benefits should not be taxed; employees have given up salary increases to keep quality health benefits

Find your member of Congress here. Click more for a list of Town Hall meetings. Together we can make a difference–don't let the "tea-baggers" stop our movement for real reform!

Medicare turned 44 today, and activists across American turned out to do three things:

Celebrate the success of this all-American single-payer system...lobby for its extension (via single-payer reform in general and the state-based single-payer amendment specifically) to those Americans who aren’t yet fortunate enough to be 62 years or older...and caution that we’ve had four and a half decades of failed half-measures in healthcare.  Isn't it about time to educate the public and fight for genuine healthcare reform, not start our fight for healthcare reform by agreeing in advance to lock the heartless private insurers into the system forever?

Before you start celebrating the pending passage of a healthcare bill in Congress, you might want to make sure you have enough savings to offset the huge out of pocket costs coming your way. Reports out of the Senate Finance Committee on what individuals and people would have to pay is not exactly a reason to pop those corks. Unless, of course, you're a health insurance CEO already making the down payment on your seventh vacation home.

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?