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Join Web Briefing on Health Care Town Halls
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Tonight, you can get facts about health care reform, find out what you can do and get the inside story from a U.S. House member who has confronted the disruptive crowds at town halls around the country.
Join a special Web briefing at 9 p.m. EDT with Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), Richard Kirsch, national campaign director for Health Care for America Now! (HCAN!), Edie Falco, actor and health care reform advocate, and Dan Heck, a Working America and HCAN! canvasser who talks daily to working families about health care reform.
The call is designed to give you tips on how to get the facts out about health care reform, spread the word and help activists prevent town hall hijackings. Earlier this month, extremist zealots disrupted one of Doggett’s town halls, but he has since held several orderly and peaceful meetings and will share his experiences and lessons.
Click here to register and you can submit a question here or via Twitter, just tweet a message to @HCAN.
Many of the opponents who are packing these town halls do not want to participate in a dialogue—they are there to purposely disrupt and derail the events so no discussion takes place. They don’t want the facts shown about how beneficial the proposed health care reform will be to millions of Americans. As Art Levine reports on Huffington Post:
according to a memo describing a GOP “tea-party” conference call last week for right-wing activists, right-wingers are still determined to thwart health-care reform by any means necessary; it’s a “war” they intend to win….The right-wingers made clear there was no room for compromise in their “war.”
Here’s a quick look and links at some recent town hall developments.
Last week, we told you how Rep. Steve Kagen’s (D-Wis.) Green Bay town hall was repeatedly disrupted by shouts the Green Bay Press-Gazette described as “incomprehensible.” One of the screamers told the local NBC affiliate she was “just a mom…not affiliated with any political party.” But NBC 26 reporter Kristoffer Engebretson dug a bit deeper and found that “just a mom” was a GOP operative who worked for Kagen’s election opponent John Gard, as well as the Republican Party of Wisconsin and the Republican National Committee.
Last week, Rep. John Dingell’s (D-Mich.) town hall meeting in Romulus featured a man who pushed his wheelchair-bound son to the podium and yelled at Dingell, “Your health care plan is going to take health care away from my son and kill him.”
When Dingell tried to reassure the man that wouldn’t happen, he yelled “liar” over and over until he was escorted out by police. Read more here from Gdunn at Daily Kos.
As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) wrote in USA Today:
An ugly campaign is underway not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue….
These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views, but of the facts themselves.
This kind of rabid attack plan is why union, community and health care activists need to make their voices heard, as did union members in Chelmsford, Mass.
Throughout the congressional recess, the AFL-CIO union movement is working with allies to ensure big turnouts for town hall and community forums with House and Senate lawmakers. Click here to find a town hall meeting in your area and see HCAN’s list of all August meetings here.
The Alliance for Retired Americans also is mobilizing to recruit members to attend town hall meetings with lawmakers and plans a series of events highlighting the need for real health care reform.
Working America canvassers will be out in neighborhoods across the country talking to families about health care reform.
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is a letter to the editor sent to the Topeka, KC, Pittsburgh Ks, Wichita, Lawrence, Time, Newsweek, The Nation and several Kansas weekly publications:
Dear Editor:
Every year, over twenty thousand Americans suffer and die because they cannot afford health care. Every two months we kill as many Americans as the terrorists killed on 9/11.
Time magazine [8/3/09, p.38] reports “ …American babies under age 1 die each year… at a rate three times as high as in Singapore, which has the world’s best infant survival—long considered a key indicator of a nation’s overall level of health. In fact, the U.S.–ranked No. 30 in 2005—lags behind almost every industrialized nation, behind Cuba, Hungary and Poland.”
The economic blood we poured into Iraq after 9/11, would have paid for two years of 100% health care for every man, woman and child in America!.
If fire, crime or nuclear missiles threatened Americans, we would pay any cost necessary to protect our citizens. That is what governments do.
Then why do we spend more than any industrialized nation in the world for less effective health care that leaves a large percentage of Americans with no health care at all, many of whom will suffer and die?
Here are the sad reasons: (1) American drug and insurance companies charge their customers billions more than they pay to health care providers who, in turn, charge their patients substantially more than their counterparts in other nations. (2) the drug and insurance companies pay millions to (some, not all) legislators to insure that their billions will continue to flow. (3) the same drug and insurance companies spend millions more of our money, attempting to stop universal care with false ads that claim universal care will cost their present customers more, and send them for treatment at the end of a line behind a lot of poor people.
In fact, when government actuarials spread the risk over the larger universal health care population, premiums will cost less, not more. And preventative care will reduce premiums even more. All of us, and our children’s children, will pay less, for longer and healthier lives–forever.
The drug and insurance companies say: “Keep government out of the health care business. Private enterprise is cheaper and better.”
Baloney! When your house is on fire, the government fireman puts it out, whether you have paid your taxes or not. But free enterprise sells life and health to the highest bidder. Citizens with higher incomes bid up the price. Citizens, who cannot pay the price, suffer and die—unless government steps in. Sound familiar?
Fortunately most experts realize that our present system is doomed and will self-destruct by the end of 2010. The American Medical Association, AARP, national nurse and hospital organizations, have joined President Obama’s relentless effort for a bill with a public coverage option. President Obama sets hard deadlines because every member of congress who delays even one day to posture on TV, and “just can’t decide”–kills hundreds of Americans! Write and tell them! Our letters, emails, phone calls and votes, are the last charge of the life-brigade. If we fail, 20,000 Americans will die before Independence Day, July 4, 2010!
Claude Lee, Topeka KS
My blog name is my Father’s name, MAC LEE, former International Representative, UAW-AFL-CIO
For a socialist perspective on the “health care reform” issue, the WSWS article provides some different insights:
What is behind the opposition to the Obama healthcare plan?
12 August 2009
Patrick Martin
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/pers-a12.shtml
President Obama’s proposed restructuring of the US healthcare system has come under ferocious attack over the past week. Right-wing activists, in many cases organized by groups affiliated with the Republican Party or financed by sections of the healthcare industry, turned out at town hall meetings to shout down Democratic congressmen or Obama aides. There have been death threats and some actual violence.
The right-wing attack combines hysterical distortion of the provisions of the Obama plan (frequently, and falsely, branded as “socialized medicine”) with an appeal to the concerns of wide layers of the American population who sense, quite correctly, that the healthcare restructuring being promoted in Washington will come at their expense and will benefit only the big corporate interests.”
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Obama and the congressional Democrats have sought to use the frenzied outpourings of his right-wing critics to discredit all opposition to the measures that the administration is pursuing to cut social benefit programs like Medicare and impose even greater burdens on American working people.
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Nothing that emerges from the machinations of big business politicians and corporate lobbyists in Washington can serve the needs of working people. Medical care must be made available to every American citizen and resident, provided for at state expense as a basic human right. This requires the nationalization of the insurance companies, the drug companies, and all the other healthcare profiteers, and the establishment of a system of socialized medicine provided free to all who need it.