After Bush vetoed health care for children, he signed an executive order to help preserve striped bass and red drum fish, and then he went fishing with Cheney.
If you’d like to read how loved this President is, be sure to read the comments.
Are you conservative or progressive? No matter which side you lean on, Professor Lakoff at the Rockridge Institute explores our beliefs on free markets, government and health care. He provides education on our present system, as well as guidance for understanding what needs to be done to protect our lives.
“The Logic of the Health Care Debate” online Read online - or - download the .pdf
“THE GREAT LA HEALTH CARE RALLY”
Saturday, August 11, 2007 at 1:00 pm, Los Angeles City Hall, South Lawn
Lily Tomlin, SB 840 Advocates, Labor Leaders to Appear
What is anticipated to be LA’s largest-ever health care rally, calling for California leaders to eliminate for-profit health insurance companies and to guarantee universal coverage for all residents, will take place at 1:00 p.m., Saturday, August 11, 2007 on the south lawn of L.A.’s City Hall at First and Spring Streets.
Organized by a new coalition of grassroots, faith and community groups and labor unions, the rally will be the 365th day of a record-setting one-every-day educational program that has been held throughout the state for SB 840 (Kuehl). The Healthcare for All/OneCareNow (HCA/OCN) campaign was launched when the bill, passed by a majority of the California Assembly and Senate last August, was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger in September, 2006. The August 11 Event will be used to reveal plans for “veto-proofing” the current SB 840 bill which was reintroduced this year by its author, State Senator Sheila Kuehl, and now has 43 co-authors.
The rally, which starts at 1:00 p.m., will begin at the arrival of a procession of “hearses,” which will have proceeded from Santa Monica to City Hall, representing the estimated 50 persons in the U.S. who die because they lack health coverage. The event will include entertainment with Lily Tomlin, live music, celebrity hosts, California reform leaders and victims of the health care crisis. Scheduled speakers include Senator Kuehl, Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi, Dolores Huerta, Maria Elena Durazo, and Andrew McGuire of the OneCareNow campaign and leaders of the State Strategy Group for SB 840.
Encouraged by the timing of the release and message of Michael Moore’s new film “SiCKO”, that for-profit insurance is the major cause of today’s health care crisis, the Los Angeles event has become the focus of the state-wide campaign, and will be promoted and supported by many groups including the League of Women Voters, California Alliance for Retired Americans, California Physicians’ Alliance, Older Women’s League, American Medical Student Association, California Council of Churches and many other political, health advocacy and community groups.
Organized labor’s support is lead by the California School Employees Association (CSEA), California Federation of Teachers, California Nurses Association, California Teachers Association (now all co-sponsors of SB 840). The United Teachers Los Angeles, Calfornia Faculty Association, California Faculty Association and the Labor Task Force for SB840 will all be supporting the rally.
The Great LA Health Care Rally Steering Committee is co-chaired by Jim Hilfenhaus (Laborers’ Local 300), Jose Morales (CSEA) and George Savage (HCA/OCN).
The lack of health insurance is now associated with increased rates of stroke and death, researchers have concluded in a study published in the April 2007 issue of the Journal of the Society of General Internal Medicine.
SiCKO is scaring the pants off the health care establishment and the right wing, and rightly so. This movie tells the ugly truth about the current American health care system and from here, it looks like the first deadly shot in what is going to be a nasty war of “We, The People” against the obscenely profitable health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Michael, on behalf of the American People, and the 18,000 who needlessly die each year for lack of health care, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MAKING THIS FILM.
Excerpt:
“What kind of a society are we when we can’t even render aid to someone who’s in their own blood and vomit on the floor and you’re mopping around them? It’s a kind of morality tale of a society gone cold.”
THIS STORY should be shown to every legislator, every person who says
“America has the best health care system in the world”.
:( Sigh
With over 46 million uninsured, why can’t the government step in and sell us affordable health insurance policies?
It should be illegal to allow these private insurance companies put our very lives and property at risk because we may need medical care.
Where are the people who have slipped through the cracks supposed to get care?!?!???
Our system is insane and DANGEROUS!
(1) A Second Opinion: Rescuing America’s Health Care by Dr. Arnold Relman
“The U.S. healthcare system is failing. It is run like a business, increasingly focused on generating income for insurers and providers rather than providing care for patients. It is supported by investors and private markets seeking to grow revenue and resist regulation, thus contributing to higher costs and lessened public accountability. Meanwhile, forty-six million Americans are without insurance. Health care expenditures are rising at a rate of 7 percent a year, three times the rate of inflation.”
“Dr. Arnold Relman is one of the most respected physicians and healthcare advocates in our country. This book, based on sixty years’ experience in medicine, is a clarion call not just to politicans and patients but to the medical profession to evolve a new structure for healthcare, based on voluntary private contracts between individuals and not-for-profit, multi-specialty groups of physicians. Physicians would be paid mainly by salaries and would submit no bills for their services. All health care facilities would be not-for-profit. The savings from reduced administrative overhead and the elimination of billing fraud would be enormous. Healthcare may be our greatest national problem, but the provocative, sensible arguments in this book will provide a catalyst for change.”
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(2) Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—and the People Who Pay the Price by Jonathan Cohn
See our previous post here.
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(3) Health Care Meltdown: Confronting the Myths and Fixing Our Failing System by Robert H. Lebow
“It is no secret that health care in the United States is managed by a confusing welter of institutions, regulations, corporations and government agencies. Paperwork is rampant at every level, and much time and money are wasted while millions of people go without needed medical attention. For this “system” the U.S. spends about twice as much per capita as most developed countries.”
“In this book Dr. Bob LeBow tackles this monumental issue with clarity and forthrightness. His prescription for our health care quagmire is a national health program which includes universal coverage, as is the case in every other industrialized country.”
(note: above descriptions excerpted from Amazon.com)
It’s a Chronic Condition
Our current health-care debate is rooted in the 1930s.
By Mary Carmichael
Newsweek
April 16, 2007 issue - Jonathan Cohn has studied health care for more than a decade, and in that time he’s heard hundreds of grim talespeople who skimp on doctors’ visits and skip medications so they can make the rent; patients who died because, as he writes in his new book, they “literally could not afford” to fall ill. That book, “Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care CrisisAnd the People Who Pay the Price,” focuses in heart-rending detail on nine of those stories, the kind of which may well find their way into stump speeches in 2008. But it also brings a fresher perspective to the health-care debate, thanks to a second, more surprising source: Depression-era documents that tell nearly identical stories. Then, too, ailing people went without care as politicians and physicians sparred over its spiraling costs. “It’s frightening how parallel the situations are,” Cohn says in an interview. But America isn’t necessarily doomed to repeat its history, as long as there’s still time to learn from it.
Cohn begins his saga around 1910, a time, at least in the medical world, of hope. Doctors had pioneered anesthesia and antiseptics, transforming hospitals “from places where people were lucky to survive to places where people expected to be cured,…”
Oct. 20, 2007: Admin. Note: NEWSWEEK PULLED THIS ARTICLE OFF THEIR SITE!
More at Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17995779/site/newsweek/
Global Choice Health Care gives people options to get lower-priced health care out of the country.
Sad. In my wildest dreams, I never thought American health care would be reduced to this.
“HMOs are all about middlemen raking off dollars from both sides. They have no function except to enrich themselves. Their only role in the health care system is to prevent both health and care.”
Watch the OneCareNow Video to understand single payer insurance (21 minutes).
Short on time? View the 3 minute version.
Good op/ed by California Senator Sheila Kuehl (D-23)
HEALTH CARE IS BREAKING OUR HEARTS
“Let’s be honest. What we’ve been doing about health care in this country just isn’t working.”
“Over the last decade, our health-care “system” has become trapped in a continuous downward spiral: declining patient-care quality, unaffordable yearly jumps in premiums and reduced benefits. Insurance companies report record profits while salaries for primary-care doctors are largely frozen and hospital emergency rooms operate in the red. Every year we pay more, get less, and insurance companies make off with the difference. Our past efforts at reform are like a failed relationship that we can’t seem to let go. We give up more and more in the hope that something will change.
(snip snip)
“Real universal health care is demonstrably possible. SB 840 (the California Universal Healthcare Act), a bill I am carrying in the California Legislature, covers every California resident with comprehensive, affordable health benefits, and contains the growth of health-care spending while improving quality. Most importantly, it gives patients total choice of their doctors and hospital.”
MORE AT The Sacramento News & Review
For more information on SB 840 (California Universal Health Care Act),
visit OneCareNow.org
Corporate power fuels political corruption. With Clean Elections, citizens can take back America to stop the corporate/political revolving door.
Until we can get Clean Elections in every state, we have to choose between two major parties, The Repugs who support “Big Insurance” and “Big Drugs” and The Democrats who are willing to go to the mat for health care reform. With all the corruption in the current administration, there’s no doubt we need to get a Democrat in the White House.
“The Republicans raise $10 million every month from corporate interests and lobbyists. The Democratic Party will never be able to compete in the traditional ways with a party that has abandoned the people and taken selling access and influence to a new level.
But we can do it if half a million people are giving $20 a month to change the way our political process works.”
(or one million people are giving $10/mo; two million giving just $5/mo).
California Political Desk
April 4, 2007
San Francisco, CA – Mayor Newsom announced Thursday that it had received a three-year $73.1 million award from the State Department of Health Services for the City’s Health Access Program (HAP). The funding, which was made available under the State’s Health Care Coverage Initiative, will be apportioned annually over three years. The funding will help implement the City’s innovative plan to provide universal healthcare access for San Francisco’s uninsured. Funding will be used to provide a comprehensive set of health services to HAP participants.
Information on the Health Access Program can be obtained from www.sfhap.org
Source here
April 2, 2007 - - A recent Harvard study showed the median health-care costs for various age groups: $463 for men ages 18-44; $1,266 for women that same age; $1,849 for men ages 45-64; and $2,871 for women ages 45 to 64.
The research is being published in the April issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Read the entire article here.
