Guaranteed Healthcare

Today's Updates from the Movement for Guaranteed Healthcare:

Let's remember: This is a healthcare election.  It’s time for a healthcare change!

Healthcare hero Sheila Keuhl--author of the first “single-payer” bill to pass a legislature—gives us her thoughts on the way forward

Minnesota docs are even more likely that those in the rest of the country to support single-payer healthcare--64% to 59%

One more member of Congress supports single-payer healthcare…California’s Jackie Speier

Bill Moyers reports on CNA/NNOC’s leadership in the fight for guaranteed healthcare

1,200 patients get their health insurance back…but what about the rest of us?

 Today, May 14th, is the 119th anniversary of the passing away of Mary Seacole, the Mother of Social Justice nursing.

RNs now celebrate Mary Seacole Day as part of National Nurses Week—and as the day we honor the social justice aspect of the work of nurses.   Mary Seacole remains an important inspiration for the national nurses movement being built by CNA/NNOC (California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee), which focuses on improving patient care and safety in hospitals and on bringing this country the guaranteed, single-payer health care that our patients deserve. 

Join the movement for Health Care Justice! Don't miss this
opportunity to make your voice heard on May 15th in Oakland, CA!

There has been a lot of spin lately around uninsured young adults being "free riders" on the health care system. The reality is that many young adults cannot afford the available plans because of outrageous premiums, or they may be working for nonprofits or other organizations that cannot afford to provide health insurance. Even worse, they may have a pre-existing condition that will prevent them from ever being eligible for private insurance as is stands today. According to this article, 87% of young adults think the government should spend money on health care even if a tax increase is required to pay for it. We are ready for a national, guaranteed health care system!

May 5 Updates From the Movement for Guaranteed Healthcare:

From our friends up North: “…There is no one-single public policy instrument in Canada that promotes equality more so than our public Medicare system…” especially for people with disabilities. 

Good news!  There is a “growing consensus among practicing physicians that our broken health care system would be best fixed by legislation establishing national health insurance…”

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that health costs are becoming an even more odious burden for people with insurance, because “of some combination of higher premiums, less extensive coverage, and bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments. “

The California public has named the California Nurses Association—high-profile single-payer supporters—as the most trusted group involved in healthcare policy. 

Finally, interested in how people can keep denying our healthcare crisis?  Here’s how they do it!

Single-payer Snippets: Quick Updates from the Medicare for all Movement

In Pennsylvania, a single-payer bill is aggravating the Governor.  One business owner explained his support like this: “To the contrary: fighting for single-payer is fighting for the survival of our business community and economic stability.”

Amy Goodman writes about the new wave of single-payer supporters, “Like Dr. Rocky White, a physician from a conservative, evangelical background who practices in rural Alamosa, Colo. A tall, gray-haired Westerner in black jeans, a crisp white shirt and a bolo tie, Dr. White is a leading advocate for single-payer health care.”

Is United Health, the largest health insurer in the world “dead money”?

Norman Solomon points out where the money for Medicare for All healthcare went: Iraq.

Finally, the SF Chronicle chronicles the harm and destruction that is part-and-parcel of our current healthcare racket.

Families making tough decisions about babies and birthing and living the American dream as the for-profit healthcare system gobbles up personal choice and freedom.

The healthcare crisis is not just bankrupting our economy—it is relentlessly impoverishing Americans.  Recent data highlights cuts in wages, gaps in life expectancy, and a healthcare industry that looks more like Bear Stearns everyday.  None of this will be solved until we make politicians get serious about health care reform.

Until we get rid of the health insurance corporations, we can at least fight back, shame them, and force them to do the right thing.

We did with the tragic story of Nataline Sarkisyan.

And now, Kim Kutcher enters the stage.

She’s in full-on patient revolt mode, working with fellow nurses to get the back surgery she needs to avoid a lifetime of disability.  We’ll take a look at what’s happening and why.  It’s an important template that someday might help your friends or family—and ask you to lend a hand, or at least a couple of dialing fingers.

So this is what it’s come to.  This isn’t a plot point from the set of a disaster film.  This is the front line of our healthcare crisis: Oregon is holding a lottery for health coverage.  3,000 or so winners gets to sign up for health insurance with the Oregon Health Plan.  We'll take our chances, below...

In 1995, Taiwan had 40% of its population without health coverage, a huge rich-poor gap in life expectancy, and a ton of social and economic problems as a result. 

So they did the rational thing:  they introduced a national, non-profit, single-payer health care system.

Sen. Clinton Defends Healthcare Plan Built on Extending Customers and Revenue of Private Insurance Corporations

Filmmaker Michael Moore participated in a press conference call today organized by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee that reunited struggling patients from the movie Sicko, including Reggie Cervantes, a 9/11 rescue worker, Donna Smith who has recently joined CNA/NNOC as a healthcare organizer, and Julie Pierce, whose husband Tracy died when her insurer denied his necessary treatments as “experimental.”

Is this any way to run a healthcare system?  Today we learn that patients across the country are entering the “DNA underground,” purposely avoiding or hiding DNA tests because they know their insurer will kick them off the rolls, or jack their rates up, in they don't.  These very same insurers, we also learn today, have taken to combing facebook profiles in a bid to kick sick people off their rolls.

In a single-payer system, everyone is in and nobody’s out.  In today’s healthcare system, the healthy are in, and the rest of us are out.  How is that a good thing?

This could be the start of something huge.

The sociopaths who run our nation’s health insurance corporations might—just might—begin to face justice for the countless Americans that have suffered at their hands.  Health Net, one of the largest insurers in the nation, is facing multiple civil and criminal charges for retroactive recissions, their habit of kicking people off the insurance rolls as soon as they get sick.

This practice is not a coincidence—it’s at the heart of their business plan, in fact of the whole model of for-profit health insurance.  Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo was brave in standing up to the practice,and justified.  We need other activist prosecutors to follow his lead, and help turn the public disgust with insurance corporations into national momentum for replacing them with universal, non-profit guaranteed coverage…also known as single-payer healthcare.

I was speaking to a reporter recently about single-payer healthcare, when she said something striking: “I hear from people all the time complaining about the pharmaceutical companies.  But where’s the movement against the insurance companies?  I hear almost nothing.”

Well, I think it’s out there and it's growing—-in individual states and around the country.  There are a couple of great examples just from today.