With just ten days until the election, PDA national director Tim Carpenter led a team of PDA activists from Washington, Maryland, Ireland, Liberia, and Massachusetts into Ohio yesterday. There the team joined with Ohio PDA state coordinators Mary Nichols-Rhodes and Michael Carano, and PDA allies from the California Nurses Association/National Nurses' Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) and the Ohio Nurses Association to get out the vote and to advance their joint support for HR 676, the Single Payer Healthcare initiative.
The group met with progressive Democratic candidate for Congress Bill O'Neill, who warmly welcomed them and articulated his support for single-payer healthcare for all. Bill, who is a registered nurse as well as a decorated Vietnam era veteran, made clear that Healthcare NOT Warfare was one of the pillars upon which his campaign is founded.
- DCblogger's blog
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Good News, Indeed
Again, thanks so much DCBlogger for covering this.
In spite of my sympathy with HCAN, I want to make it clear that I consider single-payer to be by far the better way to go.
Something we should all be thinking about - more and more, considering the mess the economy is in, and the deficits Bush & co managed to rack up while ruining the economy, it seems like single payer is the best economic choice. However, it takes the maximum amount of downpayment at the beginning and the maximum amount of change, which often means discomfot for those who are still in some kind of system they perceive to be working, even if not entirely satisfactorily, what kind of arguments, and what kind of movement can we mount to pressure both Democrats in congress and Obama to be bold when it comes to health care for all.
Remember that HCAN is also commited to health care for all, and now, not later, and I've been following Obama's speeches on the stump and he isn't backing down from the notion that he recognizes the need to tackle health care early on; I don't expect him to propose single payer, but in the long run, that is the system that will return dividends the fastest in the form of lowering the total that is being paid to provide health care per person, which is how we can pay for finally covering everyone.
I think the unions are incredibly important here, because they are on the front line of how difficult it is to keep our current employer-based systems without giving into reduced coverage at ever higher costs.
My own union, the Writer's Guild, has been absolutely stalwart in trying to keep the maximum benefits, including those for retirees, but it is damn tough.
Most important, if unions can mobilize their own members to be part of going to the streets on this one. I don't mean anything that dramatic here, but I think some sort of large demonstrations might be necessary to get the attention of Democrats and an Obama administration.
Just saying, we might be thinking about what shape such a movement might want to take.
I wonder if maybe Corrente should be trying to make contact with the unions who have endorsed single payer to start a discussion in this area?
One thing for sure; let's keep collecting the horror stories of what it's actually like to try and get health care in this country. I have a few of those myself, and I imagine all of us who come here to post or to read do to. Please, share them with us.
My union
AFT has endorsed HR 676, and I fully intend to keep after my local to get to the streets for this (as I fully expect they will.)
Let's not forget the demo planned for NYC at Bryant Park, 4 PM on the 13th of November. [organizers: Private Healthcare Must Go]
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
hcan is behind the curve on this, leah
they should have been spending that $40 million on decribing in plain simple english exactly how single payer works. for good measure, they could also explain exactly how the insurance companies are both stealing our money and letting us die, although i suppose maybe they could get sued for that.
i live in a very conservative area. most of my friends, family, neighbors, colleagues are [or at least think they are ;)] small-government, personal-responsibility conservatives, but when i take just a few minutes to explain to them exactly how single payer works, and what all the limitations are that insurance companies put on the health care we can get, i get quite a number of converts. it's been my personal experience that about 2 out of every 3 people decide they like the idea of single payer, which follows the national polls on this issue pretty closely.
there will always be a certain number of idealogues among the voting population who are holdouts. there won't be any way to convince them to give up their love of "free markets". trying to convince them ahead of time is a waste of money and effort, but i'd be willing to bet that once they've had the security of government-guaranteed real true health CARE, you'd have a hard time convincing them to go back to the old way.
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but let's just say the obama plan gets put into effect, and i get to buy into fehbp, or a similar plan. in my area, the only fehbp plans avialble for the likes of me would cost me a total of 20% of my gross income for premiums and out of pocket expenses. i can see why congress [and obama] thinks fehbp is a good bargain, the same amount of money is maybe 3 or 4% of their incomes, and the few who are likely to max out on the lifetime benefit are probably rich enough to not have to worry about that.
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more horror stories? yes, the plural of anecdote is data, but really, how many more do we need? i don't feel like sharing my life story with everybody, and besides that, why should i have to?
the data i'd like to see, and would be happy to put together if someone were paying me [because it would be a fulltime job] is this -- just exactly how much money are we spending on each of the many layers here [ignore for the moment the theme of that post, about number of jobs], and do any of the countries that have social insurance, or socialized medicine, or single payer have any of these layers? my guess on that last one is no, they do not have all that waste in their systems.
It's all about the fees
with a fee collected at each layer.
Exactly like the financial system -- except the fees are to deny care in the one instance, and to create useless complexity in the other.
And just as the bankers will fight desperately to keep their fees, so will the insurance companies.
The only problem here is that, well, er, they really are killing people for those fees.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
yep
and i want to know exactly how much money we're spending on killing people.
The problem with the "health care for all" concept...
... is that it's so amorphous -- it could encompass both single payer and a kludged together system of the ER, tax credits, and jawboning the insurance companies.
Wouldn't it be terrific if, when GM comes for a bailout -- as they will, since all their profits, IIRC, come from the finance unit -- that their support of single payer is extracted from them as a quid pro quo? Since it's in their interests anyhow? That would be just as useful as union endorsement, I would think.
Meanwhile, may I suggest that every Correntian adopt a parasite, and track the depredatations of an individual insurance company? I forget the reader we saved $1000 for that way, but save it we did, by explaining how to fight them...
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi