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Working Families Cast Votes for Health Care Reform |
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A post-election poll by Lake Research partners found that 82 percent of voters said health care was extremely or very important in deciding for whom to cast their vote as president. Reducing the cost of health care beat out other issues such as gas and food prices, jobs, retirement security and other financial concerns.
By a margin of 24 points—55 percent to 31 percent—voters said President-elect Barack Obama is better able to handle the nation’s health crisis than Sen. John McCain. When they cast their ballots, 60 percent of voters who said they were worried about health care chose Obama, with 38 percent going for McCain.
Even as families are deeply worried about soaring health care costs, just days after the election the nation’s for-profit hospitals reported a record $47 billion in profits for 2007.
The American Hospital Association says the $47 billion was the largest single-year increase in profits since 1993. The association also reports that hospital expenses grew slower than revenue for the fifth year in a row.
Expenses may be slowing and profits growing for hospitals, but as a recent Families USA survey found, health insurance expenses for working families are soaring, far outpacing their incomes. The state-by-state survey, Premiums vs. Paychecks, shows that health insurance premiums grew as much eight times faster than paychecks.
For example:
- Ohio: Health care premiums rose 76.4 percent and wages 8.94 percent.
- Pennsylvania: Health care premiums rose 86.2 percent and wages 13.4 percent.
- Wisconsin: Health care premiums rose 73.9 percent and wages 15.5 percent.
- Minnesota: Health care premiums rose 73.8 percent and wages 17.1 percent.
Reforming health care will be a priority for the new Obama administration. During the campaign, Obama offered a plan that would enable families to keep their existing health care coverage if they are satisfied with it
His plan builds on today’s primary sources of health care: workplace-based plans and public programs, including Medicare. A central feature of his plan includes a new national health plan providing the same health care choices available to members of Congress and a robust public plan option. This new national plan will offer group coverage to all—workers whose employers do not provide health care, those who are not working and don’t have health care, small businesses and the self-employed.The new national plan can lower health care costs through its purchasing power and reduced administrative expenses.
Obama would also prevent insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. By extending coverage to more people, encouraging preventive care and updating health care technology, Obama’s plan would lower costs for working families. Lower health care costs will take a lot of pressure off families getting squeezed in this economy.
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As a strong supporter of the Obama-Biden ticket; as a person who donated to the Obama Campaign; as one who made phone calls, and who worked with our local Democratic Party on behalf of Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates, I nonetheless disagree with his health care proposal.
Any plan that leaves the for-profit medical-industrial complex in place is doomed to fail. President-elect Obama’s plan leaves the for-profit medical-industrial complex in place.
We’ve suffered under four decades of incremental tinkering with our health care system, and look where it has gotten us. (Note: If you’re happy paying the premiums you’re paying, if you’re satisfied with the additional deductibles and co-payments you are charged, if you’re okay with insurance company bureaucracy that you have to wade through in order to receive medical treatment, if you get all the access to health care that you need, if your employer wants to keep paying whatever premiums your employer pays on your behalf, read no further. Evidently you’re amongst the 10% of the people in our nation who are insulated from the burden of rising health care costs, and you’re a person who gets all the treatment you want.)
“Health care costs are being treated as if they were largely an economic problem, but they are not. To be solved, they will have to be treated as an ethical problem.” - Lester Thurow
Poll after poll shows that an overwhelming percentage (66%) of the public supports privately-delivered, publicly-financed health care that would cover everyone for all medically-necessary treatment.. In other words, they support a universal Medicare-type health care delivery system . 60% of the physicians who were polled likewise support such a system.
Those are huge numbers! But the numbers go even higher when more specifics are provided. As an example, when HR 676 – the United States National Health Insurance Act (a.k.a “New and Improved Medicare for All”) is explained in detail, support for that proposed legislation goes through the roof.
It is with both consternation and disappointment that I view the AFL-CIO’s Health Care for America Now (HCAN) incremental tinkering proposal.
The HCAN proposal leaves the for-profit medical-industrial complex in place.
It is bewildering to me that “organized labor” would adopt insufficient, incremental tinkering as a plan of action. Nonetheless, that’s exactly what HCAN does! Whatever happened to the concept of “an injury to one is an injury to all”?
The truth of the matter is that workers in organized labor do not support the limitations contained in the HCAN proposal. Over 450 labor groups and nearly 40 State Labor Councils have endorsed HR 676. Alas, it appears that the AFL-CIO hierarchy is either ignoring its constituency, or else it has no idea of what rank and file union members want and need!
Nay-saying apologists for tinkering-as-usual will argue that HR 676 is not achievable. If such a mindset guided labor’s early pioneers, how in the world could we have achieved hiring halls, or health care, or pensions, or vacations, or the eight hour day, or workplace safety?
Labor needs a renaissance, a return to its roots. Labor leaders need to get on board. We need to rekindle the spirit encapsulated in the slogan, “to help any worker in distress”.
Those of us in organized labor have democratic forums in which to advocate for health care justice. If leadership is slow to respond, those leaders must be put on notice: “The membership calls the shots. You take orders. We’re telling you to do everything possible to see to it that HR 676 is enacted”
That’s the way a democratic organization is supposed to run.
And we need to let President-elect Obama and Members of Congress know that we won’t settle for less than what is needed.
The United States needs HR 676, the United States National Health Insurance Act! Incremental tinkering will not bring us health care justice.
Get out your pencils and paper. Pick up your telephones Write or call your union’s leaders. Write or call your Members of Congress. Write or call President-elect Obama. Tell all of them we are tired of injustice! Tell them we demand HR 676!
“Of all the forms of injustice, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” - Martin Luther King, Jr
For more information go to Healthcare-Now.org
Doctors, citing mandate for change, call on Obama, Congress to ‘do the right thing’ on health reform 15,000 physicians urge enactment of single-payer system.
A group of over 15,000 U.S. physicians has called on President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress to “do the right thing” and enact a single-payer national health insurance plan, a system of public health care financing frequently characterized as “an improved Medicare for all.”
“Our country is hailing the remarkable and historic victory of Barack Obama and the mandate for change the electorate has awarded him,” said Dr. Quentin Young, national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program.
“In large measure Sen. Obama’s victory and the victories of his allies in the House and Senate were propelled by mounting public worries about health care,” he said. “Yet the prescription offered during the campaign by the president-elect and most Democratic policy makers - a hybrid of private health insurance plans and government subsidies - will not resolve the problems of our dangerously dysfunctional system.
“We’ve seen such hybrids repeatedly fail in state-based experiments over the past 20 years in Oregon, Minnesota, Washington and several other states, including Massachusetts, whose second go-round at incremental reform is already faltering,” Young said.
“The only effective cure for our health care woes is to establish a single, publicly financed system, one that removes the inefficient, wasteful, for-profit private health insurance industry from the picture,” he said. “Single payer has a proven track record of success - Medicare being just one example - and is the only medically and fiscally responsible course of action to take.”
“A solid majority of physicians endorse such an approach,” Young said. “An April 2008 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine shows 59 percent of U.S. physicians support national health insurance. Opinion polls show two-thirds of the public also supports such a remedy. Now, with strong political leadership, this reform is within reach.”
Young said the adoption of a single-payer health system can be a “major component of the new president’s economic rescue of Main Street.”
“We see no value in trying to bail out the private health insurance industry, an unsustainable system of financing care that has outlived its usefulness,” he said. “By contrast, a single-payer plan would provide direct and much-needed relief to millions of American households at a time of great economic hardship.”
“Only a single-payer system can achieve the goal of comprehensive and affordable care for all,” he said, noting that the estimated $350 billion administrative savings realized by replacing private insurers would be enough to cover all of the country’s uninsured and to end co-payments and deductibles for all Americans. “This would be the perfect way for President Obama to get the country back on track.”
“Patients would be able to go to the doctors and hospitals of their choice and not have to worry about being able to afford it,” he said, “and the single-payer system’s ability to do bulk purchasing, planning and global budgeting would rein in costs.”
Young noted that Obama has said more than once that he is a supporter of a single-payer universal health care program, and that if he were “starting from scratch,” he would favor adopting one. In 2003, Young said, then Illinois state Sen. Obama remarked that “first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”
Young remarked: “Tuesday’s election has made all of these conditions happen. In his first 100 days, President Obama has a window of opportunity to inspire the nation by championing the enactment of single-payer national health insurance under the slogan, ‘Everybody in, nobody out.’ Such a plan is embodied in the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, H.R. 676, introduced by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and co-sponsored by more than 90 others, more than any other health reform legislation.”
Young noted that at least five additional supporters of single-payer health reform were elected to Congress yesterday, including Senator-elect Tom Udall (D-N.M.), and that pro-single-payer ballot initiatives in 10 Massachusetts legislative districts “won by a landslide, on average receiving 73 percent of the vote.”
“Adopting a nationwide single-payer system will build on the great achievement of Medicare, further unify our people, strengthen our country’s economic competitiveness and assure President Obama’s legacy as an American hero,” Young said.
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Physicians for a National Health Program, a membership organization of over 15,000 physicians, supports a single-payer national health insurance program. To contact a physician-spokesperson in your area, call (312) 782-6006 or visit http://www.pnhp.org/stateactions.
HR 676 has been endorsed by 473 union organizations in 49 states including 117 Central Labor Councils and Area Labor Federations and 39 state AFL-CIO’s (KY, PA, CT, OH, DE, ND, WA, SC, WY, VT, FL, WI, WV, SD, NC, MO, MN, ME, AR, MD-DC, TX, IA, AZ, TN, OR, GA, OK, KS, CO, IN, AL, CA, AK, MI, MT, NE, NY, NV & MA).
Reforming health care will be a priority for the new Obama administration. During the campaign, Obama offered a plan that would enable families to keep their existing health care coverage if they are satisfied with it. Expenses may be slowing and profits growing for hospitals, but as a recent Families USA survey found, health insurance (http://www.ampminsure.org/health-insurance.html) expenses for working families are soaring, far outpacing their incomes. The state-by-state survey, Premiums vs. Paychecks, shows that health insurance premiums are growing as much five times faster than paychecks.