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

I’m up for some political behavior modification work.  How about we support and reinforce the elected officials who do what we want to see happen and stop giving power to those who act in ways we do not wish repeated?

I think Vermont has it right.  When their state House members passed a very inclusive and progressive measure to provide healthcare to all Vermonters, that is what humanitarian effort looks like.  Providing access to healthcare for all is much more humanity-friendly than dropping bombs, I think.

Read about it here:  http://www.boston.com/news/local/vermont/articles/2011/03/24/vt_house_resumes_debate_on_health_care_bill/

So, for me, dropping bombs and allowing people to suffer in other less overtly violent ways are undesirable political behaviors and I will not reinforce them.  Providing access to healthcare and promoting peace is something I like and want to see more of in the future.  I want to see a lot more peace and a lot better healthcare access, so I want to reinforce those elected officials who make those things happen.

Staring today, for me, my political effort and advocacy goes even more pointedly toward reinforcing behavior like that of the elected officials in Vermont who understand that warfare on ones own citizens, even if it is economic warfare and class warfare and healthcare warfare, is not desirable behavior and will not be rewarded. 

I think I’ll find a way today to very concretely reward at least one of the Vermont elected officials who acted so appropriately on behalf of us all.  Wish we could get lots of people to do that and send a powerful, positive and behavior-modifying message.  It used to work when I was parenting; maybe it’s worth a shot now.  Peace.  On Vermont.

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

When I saw the cut to the low income energy assistance programs proposed by President Obama in his budget, I knew that meant more energy/utility shut-off notices for people already struggling all over the United States.  The cold day in hell has arrived for many patients and many caregivers who already find their budgets bursting from the costs of healthcare insurance, co-pays, deductibles, and out-of-pocket medical expenses, and their bank accounts strained from the loss of income and unemployment that has marked recent months for millions and millions of people.

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

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

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. 

Undaunted: Movement for Improved Medicare for All Grows in Illinois and Across the Nation

By Donna Smith

Just blocks from President Obama's Hyde Park home south of the Loop in Chicago, more than 70 activists gathered on Saturday, March 27, 2010, to plan strategy for advancing an improved and expanded Medicare for all system as the law of the land.  Activists across the nation are undaunted by the passage of the current health reform bill as they know that mandating the purchase of private insurance is not the same as providing access to healthcare.

Joining the activists from throughout Illinois was Illinois State Representative Mary Flowers, chief sponsor of Illinois' single-payer health reform bill HB311, seen in the photo on the left.

By sharing their successes in advancing the Medicare for all, single-payer position, the activists spent eight hours together, broke into issue panels and came away with the formation of four task forces to explore the most effective and strategic ways to move the movement in Illinois both in terms of state legislative energy and as part of a larger national movement.