Single-Payer Health Care
SPAN NEWS
By Deb Silverstein
We have a winner! Mary Holtz won the quilt that represented coverage in our fundraising campaign "Donate to Win Coverage for All." Congratulations, Mary! The fundraiser brought in $660. The Portage County chapter will donate $400 of that to the state organization. SPAN's work is truly just beginning at this point.
With the election of Barack Obama we need to dig in our heels and really work to make single payer a reality. Obama did not promise us a single payer health care system. He kept to a more centrist proposal which would preserve the profit making insurance company stranglehold on health care. We need to convince him that single payer is the best solution to the crisis.
And that crisis is growing. With almost every job loss, the number of uninsured grows. With the economy in the situation it is, more people are delaying or refusing tests and treatments because they need to feed their children or pay their mortgage. Private insurance will not correct that.
We are asking every member to visit the website http://change.gov in order to tell the Obama team that we need a single payer, publicly funded, privately provided health care system. Use the following talking points:
TOP 10 REASONS TO SUPPORT H.R. 676,
THE U.S. NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE ACT
1. Everybody In, Nobody Out. Universal means access to health care for everyone, period.
2. Portability. If you are unemployed, or lose or change jobs, your health coverage stays with you.
3. Uniform Benefits. No Cadillac plans for the wealthy and Pinto plans for everyone else, with high deductibles, limited services, caps on payments for care, and no protection in the event of a catastrophe. One level of comprehensive care for everyone, regardless of the size of your wallet.
4. Prevention. By removing financial roadblocks, a universal health system encourages preventive care that lowers an individual's ultimate cost and pain and suffering when problems are neglected and societal cost in the over-utilization of emergency rooms or the spread of communicable diseases.
5. Choice. Most private insurance restricts your choice of providers and hospitals. Under the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, patients have a choice, and the provider is assured a fair payment.
6. No Interference with Care. Caregivers and patients regain their autonomy to decide what's best for a patient's health, not what's dictated by the billing department. No denial of coverage for preexisting conditions or cancellation of policies for "unreported" minor health problems.
7. Reducing Waste. One third of every private health insurance dollar goes for paperwork and profits, compared to about 3% under Medicare, the federal government's universal system for senior citizen healthcare.
8. Cost Savings. A guaranteed health care system can produce the cost savings needed to cover everyone, largely by using existing resources without the waste. Taiwan, shifting from a U.S. private health care model, adopted a similar system in 1995, boosting health coverage from 57% to 97% with little increase in overall health care spending.
9. Common Sense Budgeting. The public system sets fair reimbursements applied equally to all providers, private and public, while assuring that appropriate health care is delivered, and uses its clout to negotiate volume discounts for prescription drugs and medical equipment.
10. Public Oversight. The public sets the policies and administers the system, not high priced CEOs meeting in private and making decisions based on their company's stock performance needs. Thanks to the Leadership for Guaranteed Health Care.
The work of achieving a single payer system has two levels. One is on the national level and one is on the state level. We must focus on both and make our voices heard. On the national level, HR 676, known as the Conyers-Kucinich bill, will be re-introduced into the new Congress. We must encourage our elected representatives to support that measure by signing on as co-sponsors. Tim Ryan, Betty Sutton and Dennis Kucinich have supported this bill in the past and we need to encourage them to continue that support. Sherrod Brown also supported HR 676 when he was in the House of Representatives. We must encourage his continued support for a single payer system.
The Progressive Democrats of America, the Physicians for a National Health Care Program and the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee have formed the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care. Their mission is to promote HR 676. I would ask that we endorse their efforts and join with them to work on this issue nationally.
House Bill 186 and Senate Bill 168, the Health Care for All Ohioans Act, will also be re-introduced into the Ohio legislature. Mary Nichols Rhodes is heading a Lobby Committee for SPAN in order to educate legislators about this bill and to encourage them to sign on as co-sponsors of that bill. Locally, we need to encourage our representatives, Kathleen Chandler in the House and Tom Sawyer in the Senate to co-sponsor this legislation. We cannot do enough to let them know how important we feel their sponsorship is.
SPAN did not meet the petition signature goal in order to put the measure on the ballot in 2009. That is not a reason to quit. That is a reason to redouble our efforts in order to make sure it happens in 2010. We in Portage County did reach our goal of 3% of the voters in the last gubernatorial election. Congratulations to the team! The Portage County SPAN Chapter does great work! And if we continue to work, we can make a big impact on reaching our statewide goal.
The passage of Issue 1 makes our work more difficult, but not impossible. The effect of that issue is that in the second round of signature gathering, we will only have 45 days to collect signatures instead of 90 days. This can be achieved if we have adequate people working at the local level and adequate funds to hire additional signature gatherers.
More than endorsements, SPAN needs your commitment to work and SPAN needs money. We need to hire a director and we need to fund a campaign. We need to continue our education outreach. We are available to speak to any group with an interest in learning more about a single-payer, privately provided, publicly funded health care program.
Here in Portage County we have an active chapter of SPAN. We don't ask for abundant amounts of your time, but we do ask for your commitment to help. The work is not hard and can be quite pleasant. We ask that you educate yourself about single-payer, commit to collecting signatures on a petition and talk to those you come in contact with in order to educate them. Our next meeting will be on February 23rd at 7 pm. We meet at Townhall II on Water Street. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to join us.
We are also planning to show the film Sick Around the World, a Frontline special, that examines the health care systems of several industrialized nations and chronicles how Taiwan went about changing their system of health care to a single payer system. Watch for announcements about the film.
Please do not sit back and let "them" do this job or any other. Each of us has to be the "them" that gets the work done. As Mike Carano wrote, "We are contending as a people against large, monied interests, corporate and multi-national, whose interests are not those of working men and women. An agitated and agitating Left is necessary for real change to happen. Obama knows this and has said as much."
THE TWO FEET OF SOCIAL ACTION: WORKING FOR HEALTHCARE STATEWIDE AND ON THE NATIONAL LEVEL
I recently had the opportunity to attend the Progressive Democrats of America Grassroots Conference in Washington, DC and what an opportunity that was! A large portion of the conference concerned single-payer health care on the national level and HR 676, the national single-payer bill in Congress. PDA's campaign Healthcare Not Warfare is a strong one and those people have endless energy where that is concerned.
Ben, from Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream lent PDA his cookie mobile. Perhaps you've seen his demonstration of the federal budget using cookies. The car was redesigned to promote single payer health care and the cookies were used to show the financial benefits of a single-payer plan.
SPAN News
By Deb Silverstein
There was a panel discussion on single payer that included Donna Smith, featured in SICKO, Chuck Pennacchio, from the Pennsylvania single-payer group, Katie Robbins, from Healthcare Now!, and Michael Lighty, from the California Nurses Association. The discussion was enlightening and if anything, we have been way too nice in our approach.
Two ideas stick in my mind from that discussion. The first one is that we must DEMONIZE political contributions from health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. We must be willing to do the research and let people know why our elected officials are pandering to those two interest groups. For example, from Open Secrets.org the largest contributions from Pharmaceutical Manufacturing went to Barack Obama ($860,280), Hillary Clinton ($316,394) and John McCain ($276,453).
The second thing is that we have to make it very clear to our elected officials that if they do not support single-payer, they DO support insurance companies that make coverage decisions based on profits and kill people. We must ask the hard questions such as how they can justify spending public money, our tax dollars, to purchase insurance coverage from private, profit making businesses that may or may not provide a benefit rather than spending our money to provide actual health care for their constituents. Those who do not support single-payer support withholding health care from those who need it in order to support profits, CEO's and shareholders. We also need to demand from them evidence that their alternate plan will work. Will it eliminate bankruptcies due to medical debt? Will it provide affordable access to actual health care and not just an expensive insurance policy with a high deductible and high co-pay?
We need to hold our elected officials accountable to us and remember that they work for us, we don't work for them.
On the state level, SPAN Ohio will be holding a teach in for our state legislators sometime in February. Mary Nichols Rhodes is chairing the committee. Materials are being prepared to give to each legislator, hoping to gain their support.
The next state council meeting is January 31, 2009. SPAN is also planning the next State Conference on April 25, 2009 in Columbus. This is an excellent chance to learn more and to learn what you can do to help. Plan to attend.
Those Golden Oldies
Recently I spent an evening going through all my old music, listening to those golden oldies and thinking, sadly, how some of the old protest songs still fit today's society.
How many deaths does it take till we know that too many people have died?
A line from an old song from our activist youth still applies today in many contexts, especially when it comes to health care. So, I ask, how many people have to die needlessly simply because they are not wealthy enough to partake in our "world class" health care system? What is an acceptable number? (READ)
