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Congress Hears Demands for Health Care Reform in Town Hall Meetings |
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| Sen. Arlen Specter says health care is a right. |
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| “Nothing is more important to me than ensuring that President Obama passes health care reform.” |
Members of Congress met in town hall sessions Thursday with constituents who were on Capitol Hill to rally and demand health care reform. Read dispatches from some of the meetings.
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Ohio Weighs In
After the rally, more than 250 activists from Ohio met at the Columbus Club at Union Station to plan for an afternoon of lobbying and hear from members of Congress about health care reform.
The session was introduced by Tim Burga of the Ohio AFL-CIO, who decried the “free market run amok” in the current health care system and affirmed that we must have a serious public health insurance option.
He introduced Hattie Wilkins, who made one of the most moving speeches of the event. Her situation illustrates the deep problems working families have with the way the current system operates. Hattie is a member of the United Steelworkers (USW) union who worked for 35 years for Brentwood Originals, a pillow factory in Youngstown, Ohio. The USW struck Brentwood Originals in 2008, and more than three-quarters of the workforce has been laid off. She was fired because of her strong support for the union, Hattie said. She has been collecting $887 a month in unemployment since then. She has COBRA coverage, and now pays $275 per month—31 percent of earnings from unemployment—for her health insurance. She pays another $450 per month for her mortgage payment, leaving her only $162 each month for food, utilities, transportation and all her other expenses. Now her unemployment payments are ending and she doesn’t know what she is going to do.
At 58 years of age, Hattie is searching for another job at places like McDonald’s but has to compete with applicants much younger than she is. She gave us her cell phone number, though she wasn’t sure how much longer she would have it. Hattie came to Washington, D.C., to participate in the rally and make sure her elected representatives heard her voice on this critical issue.
The Latest on Pennsylvania Town Hall
Sen. Specter has arrived, and compliments the crowd on its tenacity and commitment. Specter says he agrees that health care is a right and believes health care legislation will pass and will include a public option component. Of course, in a room full of union members, the Employee Free Choice Act came up. Specter says he is working hard to find an answer for early union certification and gaining first contracts.
Pennsylvania Update
The folks at Capitol City Brewing Co. are waiting for Sen. Arlen Specter to arrive. We hear reports he’s been at the White House.
From the North Carolina Meeting
Sen. Kay Hagan just arrived. She says the fight for health care reform is the “most important thing going on in our country.” Everyone in America must have health care coverage, she says, and patients with pre-existing conditions should be able to get health insurance.
About a public health insurance option plan, Hagan says some critics are getting caught up in nuance about language used in the debate. “I don’t care what you call it as long as it provides affordability accessibility and covers pre-existing conditions,” she says. We’d heard earlier reports that her staff told union leaders Hagan believes if health care reform passes, it will include a public option. The senator herself did not specifically say she supports the public option.
I think the key is if you have health insurance, you keep it. We don’t want to dismantle what exists.
More Pennsylvania Town Hall
Rep. Sestak arrived and talked about his daughter’s brain tumor and his health care plan to help keep her alive. Everybody deserves health care for themselves and their families, as well, he said. Sestak says his support for health care reform is “payback” to the country that provided health care for him and his family when he was in the Navy.
Everybody must be covered under health care reform, according to Sestak, and a public health insurance plan must be an option.
Nothing is more important to me than ensuring that President Obama passes health care reform.
Pennsylvania Town Hall
Hundreds of union members from Pennsylvania have packed a hall just a block from the U.S. Capitol to hear from their elected officials on the status of real health care reform. As they wait for Sen. Arlen Specter (D) and Rep. Joe Sestak (D) to appear, the chanting is in full force:
Congress, This is our demand. The option of a public plan.
What do we want? HEALTH CARE!
When do we want it? NOW!
Congress, This is our demand, the option of a public plan!
We are waiting for Specter and Sestak so we can spring that on them.
Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (D) did not attend. A staff member is delivering her talking points.
Health care reform that guarantees quality, affordable health care reform must be passed.
We must ensure that patients’ choices are protected.
Maryland Town Hall
Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Rep. John Sarbanes and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer speak to hundreds of Maryland workers and all support public option.
Rep. Blumenauer at Town Hall on Small Business
At a town hall focused on small business issues this morning at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) advocated a public insurance option plan, guaranteed coverage and a “pay or play” system that would require businesses to provide health care coverage for their employees or pay into a fund. These reforms would level the playing field and reduce cost burdens on small businesses, he said.
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I’d like to share a letter to the editor explaining my stance.
UNIONS DO NOT NEED GOVERNMENT TO DEMONSTRATE HEALTHCARE REFORM. IF WE DO IT RIGHT, IN THE END, THEY WILL NEED US AGAIN! Here is the letter:
True Healthcare reform entails more than reforming healthcare. Absent campaign finance and bankruptcy reform, any “plan” would just enhance the current draconian, oligarchic system that neither political party has any intention of changing.
Single payer healthcare advocates were outright uninvited to the recent Healthcare Roundtable “discussions“ headed by Democrat, at least that’s what he calls himself, Max Baucus. But The Heritage Foundation? Front row seats! When the “single payers” came anyway, the Democrats had them thrown out and arrested. Shouldn’t we be the ones Twittering Iranians?
The AFL-CIO got a ticket too. Why did they stay seated with The Heritage Foundation, and not with the doctors and nurses who were kicked out and detained? How many of the thousands of healthcare providers that held a rally the following day to protest the arrests were fellow union members? I am not in favor of a single payer system. This is about violating the first amendment rights of single payer supporters from start to finish. Union bosses used our dues and votes to elect this farces.
And how conservative can “Conservatives for Patients Rights” be if their spokesperson, Rick Scott, was fired from the world’s largest healthcare chain for submitting millions in bogus “big government” Medicare and Medicaid claims? He also got a $10 million severance and $300 million in stock with his pink slip.
If we want to be the best, then let’s be the best. I love The Source for World’s Rankings at http://www.aneki.com. We got 19th place in healthcare, not first. Top ranking countries have one common denominator: several private, not for profit, yet still fiercely competitive providers.
My family owns a small business. We should be praised for choosing to pay union scale and benefits; for taking that responsibility off the taxpayers, not punished. Our competitors pay illegal immigrants or peanuts. They then turn around and use that freed up capital to lobby Congress into subsidizing the healthcare, food, education and housing of their workforces and their families. Yet, it’s my family being labeled the “communist/fascists/socialists?”
Healthcare reform is simple. Big 8 companies start not for profit subsidiaries, or they’re competing with a public option. Period. Healthcare lobbyists showered half a billion dollars on congress in 2008. That should be illegal. They can use that money to upstart their subsidiaries instead. All government employees, including Congress, can choose only from not for profit plans, ultimately saving taxpayers billions.
The healthcare industry currently runs exactly like OPEC, a bureaucratic cartel. Break that up, then sit back and watch what real free market competition looks like. Insurance companies make their money off premiums and the interest collected from them. They won’t want to give that up, even if not for profits cut those premiums in at least half, and don’t forget: not for profits don’t pay taxes.
For the forty percent of “capitalists” who want to pay double into a system that severely cuts into your own “capital” and denies you coverage? It’s a free country. But GM needed a bailout and ultimately went BK because healthcare benefits ruined them. And if United Auto Worker members knew the truth about how the Obama administration conducted GM‘s bankruptcy, and why the UAW got so much worthless GM stock, they would be rioting in the streets.
Healthcare has destroyed every industry in America, let them make the “concessions.” If you think government is running anything, even after a bailout or “reform,” you’re highly naive. Oligarchies don’t work that way.
Once upon a time, labor unions were the ones who protected citizens from that oligarchy. What happened? The Democrats were never for any such thing until we made them be for it - and vote like they were - if they expected to get elected. How sad that today, we see our national union leadership even agreeing to sit at that table during Congresses latest dog and pony show over healthcare.
We’re powerless over Congress, but not over those running our unions. My husband has hardly been working, and hundreds of his colleagues aren’t working at all and haven’t for a long time. Not because of what they make an hour, it’s because of what their healthcare costs an hour.
I don’t want the government taking over my healthcare benefits, and any union member who does is out of their minds. Healthcare is the main mantra of labor unions, why aren’t we reforming our own? We don’t need the government to fix our healthcare- all we need is our national leaders back on our side and away from the “Democrats.”
Those union leaders should be sitting the Big 8 down and offering them my above plan. We may not be able to threaten any “government option,” but we can threaten to convert our members to not for profit healthcare plans. But that is not possible unless national bosses “““execute it. Aren’t they elected too?
The local leaders are with us already, but they cannot help us unless we help ourselves. That’s why unions were created in the first place. What do you think the American Medical Association is? It’s a UNION for doctors. They are kicking our behinds with their co-conspirators at the Big 3 and The Big 8 for two reasons. First, they stand up for themselves. The second, but foremost, is they wisely put their eggs in both Democrat and Republican baskets. But with their “greed is good” business practices - they will always have more money than us.
Unions have this once in a lifetime opportunity to show Americans what real “personal responsibility” looks like, what real healthcare reform looks like, how a private business is really supposed to run - all without any government intervention.
While it’s honorable to care about healthcare and workers rights for all Americans, the only way to make those things come true is by restoring it for ourselves. When people see the difference, they’ll buy what we’re selling. Neither party, state or federal, will help us because they are too busy helping themselves.
The biggest argument I get is that hospitals and doctors won’t contract with our not for profit plans. Sixty percent of doctors and nurses in this country want single payer healthcare, because like us, they care more about the big picture than they do about profits. If I was running the unions, unions will cease to endorse, fund or care about elections that don’t make a difference anyway . When the established healthcare system inevitably rejects us, we take that sixty percent of doctors and nurses and we open our own hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices - as close to our nemeses as possible, just like Wal-mart does.
The economy will continue on its downward, while the unions join forces with the tree huggers to build all new “green” hospitals and facilities, homes and all locals would provide free classes to properly train their members on green technology. If they want to play hard ball - we will build our own facilitates to take our healthcare plans.
I would also be placing a call to Chris Johnson in Austin, Texas. He is a registered pharmacist that left his $100,000 a year job to open MedSavers, a pharmacy that exists specifically to provide generic prescriptions to patients that are uninsured or underinsured. His prices are so fair, that even people who are covered shop at Medsavers because his total price is still cheaper than their co-pays!
Education, Auto, energy, trash collection, recycling, Big Box stores, organic farming - which I’d start a campaign promoting organic farming inventor, George Washington Carver, to African Americans to take their votes from the Democrats too. And you best believe we would hide all our earnings offshore to avoid taxes just like everyone else does. If the government even thinks about standing in our way to protect our competitors, unions will run, fund and elect candidates who will not. Southern states are the poorest in the nation. Why? Because they have no unions. They wouldn’t be anti-union after the unions pulled them out of poverty.
I write these letters and union members don’t seem to care or take any heed. Time is running out. We can’t afford to lobby Congress, but your dues cover the cost of lobbying the union bosses, and union meetings are free.
Can’t believe single wasn’t brought up, this article heavily edited?
True Democrat,
If you want to know why Single payer was never brought up - see my response. thanks
Geez, what’s Hattie complaining about. I mean hedge fund managers make tens of millions, insurance execs take home 100+ million dollars in a single year - what’s the problem? After all these are the people paying off our legislators to do their bidding, what else should we expect. Got the best lawmakers in DC money can buy - on both sides of the aisle. My philosophy - BBQ a banker, skewer a senator, render a representative - food, entertainment and fuel.