Guaranteed Healthcare

By Donna Smith

After this past weekend of horrific storms and tornadoes, it was clearly appropriate for our elected officials to declare a federal disaster in some areas.  With the designation comes some federal money and help for the storm-ravaged areas and residents.  Few would quarrel with our government stepping up and stepping in when so many lives and so many livelihoods have been damaged and lost.  It is the right thing to do, and some suffering will be mitigated.

By Donna Smith

Today, I heard the news.  President Obama supports the Wyden-Brown amendment allowing states to innovate on healthcare reform.  You’ll have to pardon some of us while we readjust the mirrors.

Just 20 brief months ago, I recall the trepidation and trauma that surrounded allowing the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor committee to even take a vote on what was then known as the “Kucinich amendment.”  The amendment would have provided a path to waivers of some of the federal restrictions and requirements that keep states from implementing state-based single-payer healthcare plans or other kinds of health reform under the new law.  At the time, text messages were flying back and forth from all the President’s men to all of the members of Congressman Miller’s committee to keep the flock in line – no one was supposed to vote for the Kucinich amendment.

It passed anyway.  It was the only piece of health reform legislation of any kind that passed with bi-partisan support during the rough and tumble debate of 2009-2010.  Republicans hated single-payer possibilities but voted for the Kucinich amendment as a states’ rights issue; Democrats voted for it if they thought their state might pass something better that the current federal bill, maybe even single-payer legislation.   Some Democrats fought against it because they thought it was an affront to the President’s bill.  But in a remarkable moment of sensibility, the amendment passed only to be stripped from the final bill to keep the President happy and more secure in his path to passage of his larger bill.

By Donna Smith

Ah, we must be more civil.  No more taunts.  No more tirades.  No more gun crosshair targets, no matter how innocently placed on our graphics (though I am not sure gun crosshairs are ever really innocent in placement).  We’ll be more civil in our discourse.  In light of the tragedy in Tucson. Maybe. 

But stand at the front desks in a hospital admissions area or a doctor’s office or at other providers’ offices and civility is the last thing we’ll know.  We can be sick – shaking with fever, bending over in pain, bandaged for wounds, chest aching with unknown agony, and the questions and responses will be anything but civil.  “What insurance do you have?  Where’s your co-payment today?  Is that a check, debit or credit card?  Do you have a picture ID?  Have you signed our legal forms and signed our privacy forms?” 

And if you make it through all of that, you may still not receive the kind of care needed to make you feel better or even save your life.  You may sit waiting for a doctor who may or may not treat you based on what an external organization or agency says you are entitled to receive.  The doctor may be annoyed that you are in his or her care instead of farmed out to another specialist.  If you do find yourself referred for a test or another doctors’ visit, you’ll start the process all over again from the beginning.  Co-pay paid?  Insurance in order?  Credit or debit card?  Picture ID?

By Donna Smith

The budget crisis in Arizona means the Republican Governor Jan Brewer and her Republican legislature have decided some death is preferable to more debt.  Human life has a very measureable price in Arizona, and those who look the other way as folks who might be saved die in Arizona can expect the same to come to their states sometime soon.

Many Republicans like to frame themselves as the party that protects human life from the moment of conception, no matter what.  Many Democrats like to frame themselves as the party that protects the downtrodden and the working class folks.  So, where are any of these people when the sick in Arizona are preparing to die?

Here’s one take on the news stories of recent days:

By Donna Smith

It’s about now that the campaign ads start to annoy beyond belief – especially in this year of the nasty, selfish and supposedly self-made, conservative woman candidate.  They may not know it, but compassion is strength.  It’s easy to be selfish and self-absorbed but it takes a real woman to show compassion in times of challenge in relationships, in communities and in our nation, and then back it up with action.  So far, the candidates calling themselves “Mama Grizzlies” want to brand themselves as tough enough to throw the weak and the suffering to the curb in order to display appropriate conservative credentials. 

This might someday be known as the year of the ugly, self-absorbed, anti-family, pro-corporate profits female candidate.  Sad to see when we all know so many wonderful and balanced women are out there and fully capable of serving.

A group of providers and parents gathered in Reno, Nevada, today to discuss the remarks U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle made about autism and people with autism and people who try to serve people who have autism.  In keeping with her arrogant brand of elitist conservatism, Angle believes that the law so hard fought to win in Nevada, AB162, which provides mandated coverage of treatment for those with autism is just a cover, a ploy for those who would develop, as she puts it, cottage industries to benefit from providing autism treatment to people who may have been inappropriately diagnosed – purposely to bilk the system – with autism. 

By Donna Smith

Forgive me for being a tad confused.  I am finding it difficult to understand why one person goes to jail for privately selling an appointment for elected office while others have a legal right to buy their elected positions.  The U.S. Supreme Court says corporations are persons in terms of exercising free speech through political contributions.  Other persons who behave more like corporations than persons are spending personal fortunes buying positions of power in the public sector. 

Meg Whitman is working hard to buy the governorship of California.  Rick Scott is doing the same in Florida.  Millions and millions of dollars of their own personal fortunes have already been spent in their primary battles and both plan to spend “whatever it takes” to win.  In both states, the good that could be accomplished with what these two corporate born and bred candidates are spending to win their elections points to how insane our election process has become.  

In contrast, former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich faces another trial and millions in public funds will be spent trying to convict him of selling his favor in the appointment of a new U.S. Senator to Barack Obama’s seat after the 2008 Presidential election. 

We call selling a political office a crime; we don’t seem to mind buying those same seats.

By Donna Smith

For nearly nine years the 9/11 rescue workers have labored to have access to healthcare to treat the injuries sustained when they worked at ground zero on September 11, 2001, when planes slammed into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan.  And the bill that would finally have granted those sick 9/11 rescue workers some help failed in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday.

I know only four of these workers personally. And tonight I feel such shame and outrage that the only way I can express my sorrow is to let others know some of what I know and what I feel tonight.  Collectively we must do something to weigh in – our humanity demands so.

The failed bill was called the Zadroga Act, HR847, and it had 115 Congressional co-sponsors in the House.  It was named for police officer James Zadroga, who died of respiratory ailments after working at ground zero.

By Donna Smith

Sometimes, Washington, DC, can be a pretty stuffy place.  It’s not just all the business suits and the clickety-clack of high-heels down the marble hallways as staffers rush to and fro doing the bidding of their Congressional members.  It’s not just the daily drone of anemic cries for civility from both sides of the political aisle  in the midst of economic recession, planet endangering climate change, the latest corporate contamination in the Gulf or on Wall Street or in our healthcare system.  It’s just stuffy here much of the time.  The people are often as dead serious as the issues.

But this week, during National Nurses Week, the stuffiness lifted.  A rush of light, fresh, clean and energizing energy came to DC clad in 1,000 bright red scrubs worn by the registered nurses of National Nurses United and their affiliate unions, the California Nurses Association, National Nurses Organizing Committee, the Massachusetts Nurses Association, United American Nurses, and the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals. 

By Donna Smith

We Americans like to bomb moms.  Whether it’s in a far away country where we send our children to kill other mothers and their children or whether it’s here at home where we drop economic and cultural and sexist bombs on moms, we definitely like to bomb moms.

Then we like to show the First Lady tearfully honoring her own mother from a position of power and privilege in beautiful party dresses in a china and lace-draped dining room in the White House– like a well choreographed ballet of national proof one day every year that we love our mothers.   Doesn’t really matter which First Lady we chat about here.  Each of them plays their dutiful role in the annual Mother’s Day dance of pride. 

Inasmuch as the national healthcare reform effort did not produce a result that will provide the basic human right to healthcare to all in the United States, the work of reaching that goal remains ahead. Those of us who support a single-payer system as the only way to assure true universality for healthcare rights have not stopped our work following the passage of national health insurance reform. And many of us working on single-payer are doing so in our individual states rather than waiting for a national resolution to the escalating health crisis in the United States.

(Link directly to and sign Declaration of Health Independence and Security, before reading more: http://pdamerica.e-actionmax.com/takeaction.asp?aaid=4651)

In Wayne, Pennsylvania, on April 10, 2010, in conjunction with a regional conference of the Progressive Democrats of America, citizen representatives of 14 states gathered and decided to begin a more coordinated collaboration aimed at passage of state-based, single-payer health reform legislation. An additional four states expressed interest in moving forward with the shared collaboration between states.