Guaranteed Healthcare

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?

The celebrations happened across the country, including more than 1000 healthcare advocates gathered in Washington DC, an occasion headlined by President Obama’s former personal physician  Dr. David Scheiner, as well as Barbara Ehrenreich, Congressmembers Conyers, Kucinich, Massa, and Weiner, Senator Sanders, and a wide range of activist nurses, doctors, patients, seniors, and trade unionists.

The events were organized by the Leadership Conference on Guaranteed Healthcare—which includes the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, Physicians for a National Health Program, Healthcare Now, and Progressive Democrats of America.
 
Outside Washington DC, events happened in dozens of cities, from Portland ME to Portland OR, from St. Louis  to Fort Lauderdale.  The local events were generally held at the district offices of members of Congress, to keep local pressure on for genuine healthcare reform, and were organized by the state-based healthcare grassroots, a group solidly in favor of single-payer reforms.

The lobbying focus for these birthdays is the "Kucinich amendment," which is currently part of RH 3200 and would simply allow willing states to experiment with single-payer solutions—which is after all how Canada got their system.  The amendment was added in a bipartisan vote, over the wishes of committee chair George Miller.  

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports:

Kucinich's amendment, which the House Education and Labor Committee adopted in a 27-19 vote, would relieve states from a provision in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act that lets the federal government block state programs that impinge on employer-based health care plans.

Kucinich's office says legislators in several states, including New York, California and Kansas, want to launch state-run plans, and his amendment will clear their path.

"A single payer health care plan is the best and most tested way to provide health care for everyone while increasing quality and controlling costs," Kucinich said in a press release.

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This is great news for those in favor of genuine healthcare reform—and should offer a way forward for centrist Dems to support whatever compromise bill comes down from Baucus, Waxman, et al, while also offering hope for a system that as President Obama himself put it: "Now, the truth is unless you have what’s called a single-payer system in which everyone’s automatically covered, you’re probably not going to reach every single individual."

In my home state, my union, the California Nurses Association has sponsored a single-payer bill that twice passed the legislature.  It got vetoed each time by Schwarzenegger, but he’ll be gone soon—and this Kucinich amendment lifts the legal barriers it faces.  From Pennsylvania to Maine, other states also have single-payer bills that have made progress in the legislature.

Finally, the caution portion of today.  44 years ago we took the first step, and now seniors over the age of 62 have guaranteed healthcare and a single-payer system.  Since them, politicians have discovered the narcotic of insurance industry funds, and have generally run away from finishing the job.  It’s why Paul Krugman was able to point out that Americans hate government-run healthcare "because they don't know they have it."

Because activists and elected officials have been unwilling to educate the public about what Medicare is, and how we can expand it to cover everybody, we have had a debate whose terms were set by the insurance industry.  We're now seriously considering, not single-payer reforms, or expanding Medicare to all, but an individual mandate, akin to forced marketing of insurance policies.  We shouldn't be here, and we shouldn't have given up the fight in the first place.

Jeff Cohen, from FAIR, asks why we’re making the same mistake again:

Never has so much passion {as for the ‘public option’} been so misdirected. If what these liberal groups ultimately wanted out of President Obama and corporate-funded Democrats in Congress was a topnotch public plan to compete with the first-rate private plans, the wrong way to get it was to make that the demand...

Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Sen. Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate healthcare patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option -- to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All.

In honor of Medicare’s birthday, I’ll leave you with this clip of Bill Moyers (who was present at the birth of the program) discussing single-payer with Dr. Marcia Angell and superjournalist Trudy Lieberman.  And here's a great article from In These Times about the labor leadership for single-payer.

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