Guaranteed 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. 

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.   

Check out this video I shot at the Yearly KOS Convention in Chicago where I interviewed random bloggers about the need for HR 676 (Conyers) - SINGLE PAYER Healthcare for everyone in America. I blogged from the convention last week about the workshops I attended, how diversity had dramatically increased from the first Yearly KOS in Vegas, and how healthcare relates to cultural diversity, video production, and union organizing.

Now you don't have to have seen SiCKO to know that if there is one area of human endeavor where private enterprise doesn't work, it's health care. Consider the private, profit-making, insurance industry that Bush is so determined to defend. What "innovations" has it produced? The deductible, the co-pay, and the pre-existing condition are the only ones that leap to mind.

The following commentary by Rose Ann DeMoro first appeared in the Huffington Post. 

So much for the overblown rhetoric about shared responsibility in healthcare reform.Apparently the Massachusetts officials who enacted the law that has been hyped from coast to coast as the model for other state and national plans believe that only low and middle income individuals and families should carry the financial burden for resolving the healthcare crisis.