Guaranteed Healthcare

It's a fact. The US already spends more per capita than any industrialized nation on earth on health care, while failing to deliver any coverage at all to some forty million of its people. Medical bills are the nation's number one cause of bankruptcy. Tens of thousands of people die prematurely in the US every year because they simply could not afford timely, life-saving life-prolonging medical care.

The corporate media zealously protect us from any discussion of the single payer, the only truly viable means of protecting everyone. Under a single payer system private insurance companies and their 25% to 30% cut of every health care dollar are eliminated. Government or a quasi-governmental agency becomes the insurer, sets the rates and makes the payments. Sound big-governmental, sinister and wildly expensive? We already do it. It's called Medicare, and has worked just fine for millions of Americans the last forty years.

Less than 3% of every Medicare dollar goes to administrative expenses, much like the Canadian system which has about the same administrative margin. Single payer is nothing more than Medicare for everybody. How hard can that be?

Great Job Colette!
As one of your interviewees said so well, this is really the problem that cuts across so many lines in this country. Middle class people, poor people, sick people, well people, people of all colors and origins are suffering for lack of reliable access to health care. My nephew is a good case in point: He's a (now) self-employed mechanical engineer. He worked for years for a big company when he really wanted to be out running his own operation. But he was forced to stay in the corporate world because his wife had a history of thyroid cancer. Finally the kids got old enough that she could go back to teaching and get insurance for the whole family from her job and he could finally follow his dream of his own company - five years later than he should have. Not the kind of heart wrenching tragedy we've heard about from Michael Moore, but mulitplied by thousands, how much does it hold back our country's economy?
And it's so important that those who do have good insurance realize how easily it can be taken away!

Universal Health Care is a DISASTER everywhere it's tried, and people are dying waiting for surgeries.

Universal Health Care is NOT worth dying for.

WATCH VIDEO to see how bad it really is in Canada:
http://www.onthefencefilms.com/video/brainsurgery.html

Thanks, Colette; Awesome clips of Dr. Claudia Fegan's remarks. She cuts to the chase with passion and righteous indignation. That really touched my heart when she talked about Christopher Reeve exhausting his health care "benefits" and she stated, "no one, not even Superman, is wealthy enough to pay for their healthcare when they need it."

I took care of a man a couple of months ago, and to his family he was Superman. He immigrated from Korea with his wife and two young daughters 23 years ago. They proudly became naturalized citizens. He started his own business, appliance and air-conditioning repair. His wife managed their home office, inventories and supplies, while raising their children.

"We are a team, he's a good man, he work so hard," his wife told me, through her tears. "He put our daughters through good schools, they graduate with honors. Our oldest daughter graduated from Stanford University two years ago. Our youngest daughter graduated from UCLA two days before the accident. Now, I don't know what we will do..." her voice trailed off, and then, with out regard to the monitors, the life supporting tubes and alarms, or even my presence, she began singing hymns to him in Korean. I did not know the words she sang, but I could clearly hear the love. Absolutely sacred and beautiful and heartbreaking.

My patient fell from a roof while working on an air conditioning unit and suffered a severe head injury. After four weeks, and still comatose, the hospital case managers were pushing to have him transferred to a sub-acute facility, miles from their home, because the cost of his care had reached the cap. Since he is no longer able to work, he's not able to pay the premiums on his family's private policy. His youngest daughter would have been eligible for care under their policy until age 23. His wife is now without coverage also. The co-pay will be catastrophic, and when she signed the consents for treatment, the billing office was right there, asking for her signature consenting to financial liability. She's still in shock and numb from her personal tragedy. A tragedy that will be compounded by financial ruin. I think that's wrong.

Dr. Fegan nailed the blues to the cross by saying, "...if everytime they view spending money on your care as a loss, there's a problem with the way we view health care in this country." She's right, private insurance companies are wrong. Single payer is the only solution for our patients and for our country!