Guaranteed Healthcare

There’s a reason that registered nurses across the country oppose the individual mandates that require people to purchase products from heartless insurance corporations—-and support replacing these insurers with a universal, non-profit,single-payer coverage fund.  Nurses deal with insurance corporations every day and know that you just can’t trust them.   

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."

While politicians debate individual mandates—a/k/a forcing Americans to purchase expensive, unworkable insurance products from the very corporations who brought you our healthcare disaster—more evidence rolls in about how Americans being bankrupted by their health insurance.

As a vehicle for health care reform, Mitt Romney's flawed Massachusetts' plan is breaking down after a year on the road.  The plan fails to deliver the health care reform goods as promised. There ought to be a law against repackaging and reselling this lemon to the public. 

The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee said today that it will oppose the latest healthcare plan proposed by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, which would sentence patients to patients to forced insurance, threats to seize wages to pay the premiums of the very for-profit insurance companies who are speedily wrecking our health care system, and no controls on the costs patients would be legally required to bear.

“As more details continue to emerge, it is apparent that this proposal is riddled with flaws that could exacerbate the healthcare crisis for countless numbers of California families,” said CNA/NNOC Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro.