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Health Care—We Can’t Wait
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The nation has “an historic opportunity” to reform health care and bring down the spiraling costs that are driving families to the brink of—and too often into—bankruptcies, forcing employers to drop worker coverage and threatening the federal budget.
In a Point of View guest column at the AFL-CIO website, Richard Kirsch, national campaign director of Health Care for America Now! (HCAN), writes:
It’s not only President Obama who is on board for real health reform. All five committees in Congress that work on health care are right now joining together to write health reform bills. And 194 members of Congress have signed on with Health Care for America Now’s principles for real reform.
Hirsch says the need for health care reform is urgent and can’t wait.
- The majority of all family bankruptcies in America today are due to health care costs.
- Health insurance premiums have risen more than 1,000 percent since 1993, the year the insurance industry first killed health care reform.
- Wages, meanwhile, have lagged far, far behind.
- Soaring health care costs have led many businesses to drop or scale back health care benefits, leaving employees at the mercy of insurance companies.
Hirsch, who has been working for grassroots health reform for more than 20 years, says these rising health care costs “are unsustainable”
and threaten to bring down not only our federal budget or individual families, but our entire economy. As President Obama says, we must bring down this nation’s health care costs, and that means we must reform our health care system. We cannot wait.
There are four corners to health care reform, says Hirsch. First, allow consumers the choice of keeping the health care plan they now have or selecting a public insurance option. Establish new rules for private insurers, including covering pre-existing conditions.
Coverage must be affordable and government, business and individuals will share responsibility for providing health insurance. Health care reform must ensure that all communities and groups, especially those currently underserved, have equal access to health care. Says Hirsch:
Now is the time to pass these reforms, to give all of us the care we need, and to bring down costs so health care doesn’t overwhelm our personal bank accounts or our entire economy.
Join Hirsch and thousands of other health care, union and community activists June 25 in Washington, D.C., for the largest-ever rally for health care reform. Go to www.HealthCare09.org for more information.
Click here to read Hirsch’s guest column, “Health Care—We Can’t Wait.”
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9 Comments
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“Soaring health care costs have led many businesses to drop or scale back health care benefits, leaving employees at the mercy of insurance companies.”
The health care “reform” of Obama does not address the fundamental problem intrinsic to for-profit privatized health care. That problem, instrinsic under capitalism, is to maximize profit. Thus we have this admission:
“Health insurance premiums have risen more than 1,000 percent since 1993, the year the insurance industry first killed health care reform.”
Insurance premiums have risen because the insurance companies want to maximize profit. Drug companies have pushed the profit margins on drugs massively. Hospitals charge huge fees for every little procedure to cover their skyrocketing costs. (Thus many non-profit hospitals, and money-losing hospitals are closed,etc.) But also doctors have had to forever increase charges to maintain their practise, to cover the mal-practise insurance coverage, even to maintain their standard of living (most expensive cars, million dollar homes, etc.) for which many doctors entered medicine for the purpose of becoming millionaires.
The lobby for health care “reform” scream forever they will not accept regulation, will not accept price controls, will not accept any “interferance” with their “right” to maximize profit.
Thus ANY measure based on allowing profit-maximization will mean the defeat of the very purposes of any meaninful health care reform.
Only “single-payer” universal health care can meet the needs of working people to maintain their health and that of their families.
It is especially tragic that the AFL-CIO continues to support the corporate controlled Obama administration in refusing to support “single-payer”. Indeed, if the AFL-CIO would “draw the line” and insist about on “single-payer” it might be the decisive difference.
For a more eloquent discussion of the “single payer” advantages please note these two articles from the CommonDreams web site:
(Link to full article:)
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/16-4
Published on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
‘Public Option’ Pales Next to Single Payer
by Nicholas Skala
The following remarks were delivered to a closed-door meeting the Congressional Progressive Caucus on June 4, 2009:
Today the Congressional Progressive Caucus faces a choice. That choice is whether Members should maintain their unflinching support for single-payer, or to accede to intense political pressure to support the plan currently being developed in Congress under the direction of President Obama: a mandate for Americans to purchase an insurance plan from a massive new regulatory “exchange,” with one plan potentially being a “public option.”
The difference between these choices could not be more stark: single-payer has at its core the elimination of U.S.-style private insurance, using huge administrative savings and inherent cost control mechanisms to provide comprehensive, sustainable universal coverage.
The “public option” preserves all of the systemic defects inherent in reliance on a patchwork of private insurance companies to finance health care, a system which has been a miserable failure both in providing health coverage and controlling costs.
…..
==========================================
Published on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Blowing Our Chance for Real Health Care Reform
by Dave Lindorff
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/16-3
If you want to fix the disaster that is called the American healthcare system, the first thing to do is to clearly point out what its major failings are, and there are two of these.
The first is cost ….
The second is access…
Any reform of this atrocious “system” must address these two major failings or it is no reform at all.
And that’s where all the various versions of Obamacare fall flat.
……
(Use the link above to real the full article.)
Now is the moment for the labor movement to mount an enormous march on Washington, D.C. for Single-Payer! Not wait for the democrats to water everything down and inevitably cave in, to big pharma, the insurance companies, the HMOs, and Wall Street who fund their reelection campaigns and who never cease to desire more and more profit off our illnesses and incapacities, many of which are caused on the job. The Democrats are one of the two parties of big business in this country – we need a party of our own, a party of ordinary working people, not millionaires. We need a Workers Party and we need Single-Payer medicaid/medicare for all. We need national health care not national health insurance for profit to fat cats who’ve grown rich from our pain and misery and struggle to survive and take care of our loved ones. We need to take profit out of health care once and for all but no illusions in the Republicrats and the Demopublicans to make that happen!
UNIVERSAL SINGLE PAYER. The insurance industry is one of the reasons we are in this mess. They will not be a solution. Health care should be funded in the same manner that we fund fire and police protection!! Access to health care is a basic human right.
I agree that the insurance industry is one of the reasons we have this mess. Time to do something about them and Wall Street in general.
I am a supporter of single payer as well. Time for the elected fearless leaders to know we will remember them at election time if they do not pass a good healthcare bill.
Everyone needs to be at the health Care Rally in DC on June 25!
Get a group together and have a voice. If you need a bus call The BusBank- They have union drivers available in most metros. Do not be left behind. The number is 866-428-7226 x6164 ask for Koffi!
Unfortuynately, of Obama’s three stated goals of reform two of them–choice and cost controls–can’t be reconciled. As long as the insurance market is divided up among 1,300 different plans, there will be an enormous amount of needless bureaucracy and waste built into the system. Adding a public option to the mix does nothing to change that.
We all want to choose our health caqre providers. Given a choice, most of us would prefer not to deal with insurance companies at all.
I want the same health plan my Congressman has and at the same cost.What’s good for them will most certainly be better than anything any of us have now.
Don’t buy into the HCAN propaganda. avacc79 The rally is HCAN’s baby so be wary of their agenda. Single payer advocates, MAKE SURE YOU ARE HEARD!! HCAN is pushing the “public” option that Congress is working on, employer based crap that alot of companies are now dropping like Jerry says above. Unfortunate John Sweeney is a HCAN proponent.