SEARCH
Today’s the Day to Make Your Voice Heard on Health Care |
|
 |
|
Thousands of union members, community activists and health care advocates from across the country will converge on Capitol Hill today to demand that Congress pass health care reform legislation that provides quality health care for all.
Today’s rally and lobby day sponsored by Health Care for America Now! (HCAN) is expected to be the largest-ever health care reform rally. It’s taking place from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Upper Senate Park.
The rally will provide a much-needed voice on Capitol Hill for millions of families that are uninsured, under-insured and fed up with being at the mercy of insurance companies. Participants will call for real change in health care, including a public health insurance option for workers and families who either have private insurance or no coverage at all.
Results of the 2009 Health Care for America Survey (sponsored by the AFL-CIO and Working America) clearly show that America’s working families are suffering under a system that does not protect their health or their financial security. Of the more than 23,000 respondents in the survey, more than half say they can’t get the health care they need at a price they can afford.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker says the rally shows the momentum and enthusiasm behind health care reform:
We are closer than ever to getting the health care reform we need. We cannot let the voices of opposition and the naysayers stifle the will of the people in order to maintain a system that only benefits private corporations. We must use this momentum to finally create a health care system that ends the delays and denials and provides health care for everyone.
If you can’t make the rally today, stay tuned here—we’ll be reporting live using Twitter.
Click here for more rally information from HCAN and text “HEALTH” to 94553 to receive updates on fast-moving health care reform activities throughout the summer.
7 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
– An imaginary conversation with my family doctor on the difficulty of paying for national insurance –
Me: $1.2 million is the average income for top 1 percentile households — 2006 figure. You must have made at least a couple of million last year, right? I mean you are a doctor – and you are with Columbia Presbyterian?
Doctor Levine: “[Laughs].”
Me: You mean that the 15% of GDP that slipped out of the pockets of bottom 90 percentile earners into the buckets of top 1 percentile earners over the past few decades slipped right past you doctors?
Doctor Levine: “[Smiles ruefully].”
Me: Still, with 135% other modern economies’ per capita GDP America should no trouble at all devoting 15% of GDP [.15 X 1.35 = .2025] to health care these days, right (note parallel 15% of income shifting to pockets of folks who make lots more than doctors)? Unless we have wildly gutted much of our workforce’s pay – something like 30% of families living below the poverty line.
In real life the poverty line for a family of three — assuming they have to pay for their own health premiums – is about $45,000 (not the unreal $20,000 government calculation based on three times the price of an emergency diet – family premiums exceed $12,000!). If you look at the Census, median family income is about $62,000 — leaving the real minimum needs line at about 37 percentile – if nobody in that 37 percentile had paid health. Knock off 7 points (guesstimate) for families on the top end of the 37 percentile with paid insurance (not those on the bottom with Medicaid) and we can reckon – it turns out very reliably — about 30% of American families below minimum needs without government helps like food stamps.
Sounds like a quarter of the country must be earning less than the minimum wage or something equally crazy, right? Actually a quarter of the workforce is earning less than the minimum wage – if we are talking Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 minimum wage of $10/hr [$1.60/hr adjusted] – back when average income was half today’s. (FYI, tech improvement, like how much better today’s Timex is, generally not counted in inflation numbers.)
Doctor Levine: “How did this happen; why can’t we straighten it out?”
We can straighten it out — any time we want to – doesn’t happen anywhere else in the first-world: institute the same labor market structure that is in place in about every last modern economy (and many not so modern like Argentina and Indonesia): sector-wide labor agreements – where everybody with the same job description in the same locale works under the same collective bargained terms with all the different firms – legislation required. [Note: check out French-Canadian “lite” version.]
Medical Doctor (not psychiatrist) Levine: What is holding back our big wig progressives from pushing such badly needed, obviously efficacious labor market changes?
Me: Something I call “pack check.” Males instinctively check in with what everybody else is thinking on any economic or political – or metaphorical “hunting pack” — issue. And as long as they stay fix-focused on what everybody else is thinking it can seem impossible to them make any headway in any entirely new policy direction: so many different people require so many different approaches – and who ever was converted by our most reasonable (we thought) arguments in the past. Impostavazoo!
Sociobiology time: chasing wild pigs (what human males evolved doing) required a kind of perfect awareness of what every other hunting pack member was doing (pigs, as anyone who owns one can tell you, are not stupid). Without awareness of the need to break free from this innate focus-on-everybody-else focus at least for short breaks, all the economic male geeks in all the world may never consider any significantly new solution to the lop-side bargaining power in the American labor market – or anything else – no matter how obviously practical, no matter how desperately (!) needed.
Human males are not so much pig headed as we are “pig-chase” headed.
Doctor Levine: “[Makes excuse; finally escapes].”
FOR DATA LINKS IN MESSAGE GO TO:
http://ontodayspage.blogspot.com/2009/06/imaginary-conversation-with-my-family.html
I’m one of the fortunate ones. I am retired from a union job. I have excellent health coverage. FULL coverage. I pay NO premium. And I’m more than a little concerned about what this ‘reform’ might mean to me personally. Now maybe that’s selfish but to be honest it would put a burden on my finances to have to pay a premium for my health insurance. And yes, I’ve heard Obama say if I already have coverage and I like it I can keep it. But I already worry every time the contract negotiations start that currently govern my coverage. Some companies dropped their retirees prescription coverage thanks to george bush’s nightmare drug plan for seniors. Who’s to say the same thing won’t happen to reitrees health insurance if the government decides to offer their own health insurance plan?
My own doctor has had to start turning away Medicare patiants because servicing them COSTS his practice money. As it stands, he can see patients all day long and is not only losing against infalation, but may find himself going out of business. Two of his colleagues have already bailed on their pratices leaving only him to cover the needs of far too many people in the rural area I live in. If he fails, he will have to let two full time employees go too. I find it hard to believe I think I actually get to keep more money every year with my job than he does with his. (I have a Union protected job!) I think my health care benefits are even better than his empoyees’ benefits. Something is wrong with this picture.
It’s not that I get too much. It is that much of America get’s far too little.
Ask yourself this: If Medicare is paying almost 40% less than when Bush was first elected to office, and doctors are quitting the business or turning medicare patiants away, how can those middle-men, who sell medicare plans be making money? I think it’s by not providing care to patiants and not paying doctors a liveable share.
I watch “NCIS” a lot. One thing they do right is “follow the money” to catch the bad guys. Just follow the money and you will find who is guilty in the health care industry too.
I think we all need the same health care plan our U.S. Senators, Representatives and the President get.
Great omment. but I would go further, we will never get a single payer plan until the elected officials ar not beholden to the corporations that pay big bribes. Acttually these are called campaign contributions paid by lobbyists to various members of the congress to help them win elections. In this way, they are assured that they will get the best government that their money cn buy. Bankers, Health Insuers, Pharmaceutical firms, wall Streeters, etc. It is difficult not to push your biggest donors plans. Even if you know that a single payer (the government with our tax money) is the best. the most cost efficient, the fairest, Instead at least thirty cents of each dollar of health care goes directly to the health Insurane companies. (Not to the docs, not to the hospitals, not to the patients).
The national AFL-CIO and those national unions that determine policy has messed up huge. Your refusal to support Medical for All, or even to spell out and support a strong “public option” may have missed a real chance for fixing health care. This despite the fact that the great majority of our members, state and local federations and local unions, as well as 72% of the general population, support a federally-run, Medicare-like health care plan. Whether out of some wrong-headed notion that we cannot go beyond whatever the President is offering or a fear that we will lose our precious parochial union plans, or because we too have been influenced by the drug and health care corporations, we may have missed the near-perfect alignment of forces that could have brought the US finally up to the level of the rest of the industrialized nations. Shame on you! For your information, I am not some lone “dissident”. I am on the North Shore E. Board, as well as on the Boards of the local Musicians union, the Retire Council and Senior Voice.
Warning, Warning to all the members of Congress and to all the MEDIA Talking Heads, WE the American people DEMAND a Universal Health Care Plan NOW.
This plan MUST be signed into Law this YEAR. It must contain a PUBLIC OPTION which ALL Americans may choose if so desired. The currently uninsured who can afford to pay for coverage should pay at rates equal to the financial contributions in real terms for similar insured wage earners who participate in group coverage. Those who cannot afford to pay such as disabled Unemployed , etc. should be provided Health Care Coverage free of charge.
Those employers who currently pay health care for their employees must be required to contribute the same amout to the public plan for every employee who may choose that option And as a result not be penalized by Health Insurance Companies for lower enrolment in their plans.
Also those who manage Retiree Health insurance plans will be required to contribute like amounts toward the Public Option for all the Retirees who choose that option and likewise not be penalized by insurance companies for lower enrolment.
Any Plan that is approved must contain these basic provisions.
Let it be know in no uncertain terms We will NOT settle of anything less…
llegalsGoHome: Don’t get too cocky with that “I’m one of the fortunate ones…” This is what the crisis is all about. Rising costs, profits over patient care, companies dropping health care for their employees and especially retirees. It’s not all about you, it’s everyone in America. As for that screen name: it sucks!