Guaranteed Healthcare

Ed Asner explains what your health care premiums pay for–and a lot of it’s not health care. About 30% goes to paperwork, advertising, lobbyists, obscene executive salaries, and profiteering. That’s why we need single payer, California OneCare.

Does passage of a bill that funnels millions of additional Americans into the private insurance system, and the decision of House leaders to shut down debate on one single payer amendment and scuttle another, mean the end of the years of efforts by single payer activists to win the most comprehensive reform of all?

With the final White House Forum on healthcare scheduled Monday, April 6 in downtown Los Angeles, advocates of single payer/guaranteed healthcare have one more opportunity to shake up what has become a dreary conventional wisdom about the presumed acceptable parameters of the debate.

Hundreds of nurses, doctors, healthcare and labor activists will rally at 9 a.m. outside the California Endowment, 1000 North Alameda St., Los Angeles.

It will mark the fifth time, at all five White House regional forums, that the single payer/Medicare for all message will come to the stage, outside and inside the forum.  You can extend that to the town hall meeting at the White House last week where the President was asked why we can't have a national healthcare system like they have in other industrialized nations.

Haven't we heard this song before? It sure looks like the people who already control our healthcare system are framing the biggest issues of the present healthcare reform debate.

From the back rooms to the committee hearings to the White House summits to the front pages of the newspapers, the demands of the insurance industry are given enormous deference and accommodation.

Is it fear of Harry and Louise, the insurance campaign that some believe torpedoed the muddled Clinton health proposal? Is it the considerable influence of insurance industry contributions in the pockets of many legislators?

Hours after President Obama's speech to Congress in which he laid down a marker for achieving "comprehensive" healthcare reform, and getting it done this year, top administration aides have outlined the goals of what they want to achieve.

What Politico called "the 8 keys to his health plan,"  certainly reflect a bold determination for action and a grand vision.

There's only one problem. Virtually all the proposals being bandied about in various Congressional committees -- and the administration made it clear this week they will let Congress figure out the details -- fail to meet the test of those "8 keys."

"Meanwhile, businesses and individuals are dropping coverage in the wake of higher insurance premiums."

I'm a cardiac rehab nurse at a mid-sized community hospital in Northrn California,  Today was just another day at work, but a day that kept bringing me face to face with the reality of how our lack of real healthcare hurts ordinary folks

In this essay, CNA/NNOC Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro spotlights a way that California can jumpstart the single-payer movement for the entire country: California legislators, the majority of whom have already voted in support of establishing single-payer for the state, should organize the two-thirds vote needed to override Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's likely veto of similar legislation this year.

A broken healthcare system and my journey through it.

Juanita Anderson, a retiree living in Los Angeles, never imagined that in her later years she would suffer from an incurable disease, nor that she'd be so afraid of losing her healthcare benefits. Even with retiree healthcare, she spends almost all her financial resources on managing her disease. Yet she knows life would be even worse if she lost her retiree health -- a very real possibility for millions of Americans as companies cut costs by reneging on promises to former employees. Check out Anderson's story as published in the April 2008 issue of Registered Nurse magazine.