Guaranteed Healthcare

By Donna Smith, American SiCKO, communications specialist CNA/NNOC

What a great night of political speeches.  And it was wonderful to hear both the now-presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama, and the presumed runner-up Senator Hillary Clinton cite healthcare as a major concern. (Whew, the titles alone require hip-boots for wading.)

But we need a little retooling...  Both said every American should have health insurance.  Wrong.  Every American should have health care.

The presumptive Republican nominee Senator John McCain has a more outwardly obvious, pro-corporation healthcare strategy.  He wants to make sure he keeps the old insurance giants thriving.

But what did Barack Obama say there towards the end of his speech?  That we'll look back on this moment as the turning point?  That we'll see this moment as the time and place in which we made sure every American had healthcare.  Right on, Senator Obama.  But now we're going to help you see what real change looks like for every American: single payer, universal health care. Everybody in, nobody out. This is the moment.

Robert Kuttner, one of the most prescient health care writers, lays out the very real problems with individual mandates in a must-read article that could not be more relevant to the national healthcare debates:

"Massachusetts' experience with health-care reform illustrates the problem of an individual mandate absent comprehensive reform: It makes a social failure the problem of the individual."

Healthcare’s the hot topic in Nevada...California...insurance industry profit reports...and everywhere!

First up, Marc Cooper writes at Off the Bus that the healthcare debate is getting hot in Nevada:

Obama also complained that his supporters were getting calls and fliers from Clinton supporters accusing his health care plan of leaving 15 million Americans uninsured. Obama brushed aside the charge and then proceeded to criticize President Clinton and Hillary Clinton for attempting health care reform "the wrong way" last decade. "They went behind closed doors to do it and allowed lobbyists the and health care industry to shape the plan and eventually kill it."

From Iowa to California to Massachusetts, the national healthcare debates are finally starting to hit the key point: the problem of the health insurance corporations.  We'll take a look below…

When even a magazine called "The American Conservative" counsels the Republican Presidental candidates that they can't live on Hillary-hate alone, something is happening.

As nurses fighting for guaranteed healthcare, the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee tracks this trend in terms of health policy.  I will let our executive director Rose Ann DeMoro sum it up: attacking Hillary Clinton is not a health plan.  You can click through to the full article, but here's a taste:

There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton unleashed her healthcare plan with a better pr campaign than any other candidate…just as there’s no doubt that many of the plans being pushed by politicians look alike.

We’ll take a look at where the healthcare debate has gone since Hillary turned the heat up...

The second in the series of ads challenging Democratic Presidential candidates to get serious on healthcare launches in Iowa today—addressing Sen. Clinton—while nurses and doctors will converge on an upcoming Presidential forum with their critiques.

We'll take a look, cross-posted at the [http://www.GuaranteedHealthcare.org/blog National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s] Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

Is a new consensus emerging in the consumer media and presidential debates about healthcare, insurance corporations, and single-payer in this post-Sicko world?  We'll take a look at this and more in today’s Guaranteed Healthcare Update.

The political terrain is shifting underneath the “Big 3” Democratic presidential candidates as they take baby steps on the nation’s most urgent domestic issue: healthcare. While their campaigns try to negotiate with the toxic health insurance sector, in the hopes of making them slightly less dangerous to patients, public dislike of these bad actors is about to be crystallized by Michael Moore’s powerful new film SiCKO.