Guaranteed Healthcare

As a long term veteran of the fight for single payer healthcare - for a real solution that will meet the care needs of all Americans, I was pretty excited at first when I saw the splashy new rollout for "Healthcare for America Now"

You can see their web ads on this site and on many others.

You can see their splashy website

I took a look at it and at first, things looked pretty good.  They say lots of bad things about the health insurers, which is a good start.  My first clue that something was wrong was when I followed a link to a survey.  Follow me below the fold for that first clue.

They have this little survey, which pretty much offers you a choice: Are you happy with the insurers as they are now?, or do you want them to be more closely regulated?

Huh?  Where's the other choice: I want them gone altogether?

Not there.

Suddenly this all seems remarkably similar to the rollout of the Nunez/Schwarzeneggar plan last year in California and to the already failing Massachussetts plan and all the other failed attempts to solve our healthcare crisis with market solutions.  The first big step, now as then, is to take the single payer option off the table by simply pretending it does not exist.

So I enquired with key leaders in my union - The California Nurses Assn.

Here's what our executive director, Rose Ann DeMoro has to say about it:

Why is Health Care for America Now giving up on real reform?

here's only one way to stop the insurance industry abuses -- it's to actually stop them. The rest of the world has figured this one out --  see the study in Britain earlier this year that found that the U.S. ranks last in preventable deaths among 19 industrialized nations even though we spend twice as much on healthcare as anyone else. Isn't it time we figured it out here as well?

Doesn't this resonate just a bit of the whole thing we've just been through with FISA?  Is George Bush going to obey the law because the toothless Congress passes a new law?  Are the insurance industry going to start being good citizens just because we pass some rules saying they should? 

All of us who have worked on this issue for so long get one thing loud and clear:

Insurance is the problem.

More insurance is not the solution.

Efforts like this are perfectly predictable - as the status quo on healthcare has become increasingly indefensible, the effort has shifted away from preserving the status quo to making sure that what replaces the status quo is not single payer and preserves a big central role for the private insurers.  I realize that most of the members of this coalition - MoveOn and others - have good intentions.  They've all bought into the notion that real single payer is not politically feasible, so it's better not even to talk about it and just try to buy off the insurance companies with more money and more lives

Just like with FISA, this needs a big, citizen groundswell to send a loud and clear message - More of for profit private insurance is just a recipe for more of murder by spreadsheet.

And we aren't buying it.