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AFSCME’s Highway to Health Care Campaign Rolls into Little Rock
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Highway to Health Care, AFSCME’s summer tour of nearly two dozen cities, yesterday rolled into Little Rock, Ark., where more than 250 union, community, senior and health care activists rallied for health care reform, sent messages to their lawmakers and shared a little barbeque.
Speaking in front of the rock & roll inspired tour bus and mobile communications center, Alan Hughes, president of the Arkansas AFL-CIO, said it’s time for the voices for working families to be heard over the screeching, extremist opponents who’ve been grabbing health care headlines, with outrageous lies and aggressive tactics.
(Click here to read how unions are mobilizing to restore real debate in health care town hall meetings.)
Hughes also said health reform must ensure there is competition for the for-profit insurance industry to help bring down costs and provide affordable coverage.
We need an option where everybody’s got health care. If you listen to your senators and congressmen, every one of them says, “Yeah, everybody ought to have health care; no one should be uncovered; it should be affordable.” But they’ve got to hear from you. Let’s get Arkansans and everybody in this country health care we can have that’s affordable, accessible and dependable.
In a recent column on Huffington Post, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee writes that it’s time to separate the “lies from the truth” about health care reform.
The opponents of health care reform are pulling out all the stops to kill the reform that millions of Americans need to improve our health care. They’re spreading falsehoods and creating chaos. They know what they are doing. All of us need to work together to break through the lies and shouts and slurs. We need to make sure that our friends and neighbors know the truth and can separate the lies from the facts about health insurance reform.
Reporting from the Highway to Health Care bus, AFSCME’s Blaine Rummel writes:
Stop after stop, people want to know what health care reform means for average people like them. The answer is simple—it means a lot. It means putting middle-class Americans before the insurance companies. It means lowering health care costs. And it means ending discrimination against Americans with pre-existing conditions.
You can follow the Highway to Health Care Tour on FaceBook and Twitter.
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(In the short article linked below is hopefully a small first step towards a break with the corporate controlled and corrupt Democratic Party.)
(The “health care reform” of Obama, with or without any “public option”, must be rejected in favor of “single-payer” universal health care. Only by cutting out the for-profit parasites will the needs of all working people be covered. At the same time, the costs of a U.S. “single-payer” health plan would greatly reduce. This is the experience when compared to other European countries with a national or socialized health system.)
Here is the link to the article:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/18-13
Published on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 by Huffington Post
Labor Warns Dems: We’ll Sit Out Election If You Oppose Public Plan
by Sam Stein
One of the country’s most prominent union officials is warning that big labor may pull its support from Democrats who don’t fight for a government-run insurance plan.
In an interview with the Huffington Post on Saturday, Richard Trumka, the secretary-treasurer and likely next president of the AFL-CIO, said his federation is drawing a line in the sand when it comes to a public option in the health care bill. Lawmakers who don’t support the provision, he said, shouldn’t take anything for granted.
….
Trumka’s warning shots come at a time that the AFL-CIO is charting out a more aggressive campaign to target lawmakers who, as one official put it, “take labor’s help but don’t vote for labor’s interests.” Part of that process is to hold out the prospect of electoral consequences.”
…