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Senate Health Care Bill: Moving in the Right Direction |
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Today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) officially released the Senate’s version of health care reform legislation, a major step toward the health care reform bill America has been waiting for. The first vote to begin debate on this historic bill could happen as soon as Saturday.
It’s an improved bill from the one passed by the Senate Finance Committee last month. It still falls short of an ideal bill but, like the one passed by the U.S. House earlier this month, it greatly increases coverage, helps make health insurance more affordable and includes a public health insurance option to compete with insurance companies.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says Reid has shown courage and leadership in bringing a good bill to the full Senate. Trumka says the bill is a step in the right direction, because it would cover 31 million people, control costs, include a public option and cut $127 billion from the deficit in the first decade. Trumka notes that unfortunately, while many of the bill’s financing mechanisms are fair, it is still partially funded through a tax on health benefits.
We commend Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for bringing forward a health care bill that moves us closer to the historic goal of health care for America—high quality, affordable health care for all in our rich nation. The Senate leadership bill takes the strongest steps yet to bring down costs. But the bill is not perfect. It retains a version of the excise tax from the Senate Finance Committee bill. We continue to believe that a tax on working families’ benefits is the wrong way to finance health care and we will work hard to eliminate this provision as the bill heads to the floor.
You can read the bill here or at Open Congress. Read the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the bill here.
There still are some procedural hurdles toward passing this bill. To even begin debate in the Senate, 60 votes are needed for cloture—the initial procedural vote that allows a real vote to happen—on a “motion to proceed.” Contact your senators here and tell them you think we deserve a fair debate on health care reform.
Here’s more news from the fight for health care:
- The AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff, writing at the Huffington Post, says the Senate’s health care bill moves us “towards a just America” and promises union members will keep up the grassroots pressure.
- The Senate bill would have a number of immediate benefits, including beginning to close the “donut hole” gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage, preventing insurers from rescinding coverage when customers gets sick, stopping insurers from putting arbitrary lifetime limits on coverage, tax credits to small businesses to help them provide coverage, extending coverage for young people under parents’ insurance through age 26 and immediate assistance to uninsured people and early retirees.
- Ed Coyle, president of the Alliance for Retired Americans, praised Reid and other senators for moving in the right direction on health care.
- Mike Lux at Open Left looks at the process ahead in the Senate.
- J.P. Green looks at what the bill will do, and when, if it passes.
- Wonk Room compares the details of the Senate bill to the House bill and looks at how the new Senate bill stacks up against other proposals.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by aflcio: Senate Health Care Bill: Moving in the Right Direction. FIrst vote could happen as soon as Saturday. http://bit.ly/Aj54c #hcr…
the afl cio is selling its members out. obamacare will cost the american people trilllions of dollars. the afl-cio has turned into a socialist organization. obama is a lowlife turncoat
I still don’t read where the insurance companies will lower premium costs, Pharma will lower medication costs, and is appalling only 31 out 47 million uninsured get covered. Is this reform?
Published on Friday, November 20, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Health Care, Essential to Democracy
by Katie Robbins & Andy Coates
Two weekends ago, after the bait and switch of a vote on single-payer for a vote on an anti-abortion amendment, we felt wizened to the possibility of unknown threats in the legislative churn on health reform. As insurance and pharmaceutical companies, Catholic bishops, and the right wing throw in dollars, lobbyists, and pressure for no votes on the final bill, it is clear we who are in the business of protecting and improving our rights to access to health care, including abortion, must remain vigilant and ready to challenge these threats.
First, a little history is in order. In mid-July Rep. Kucinich passed in the Education and Labor Committee an amendment to the House bill for health insurance reform that would make single-payer easier to enact at the state level. On July 31st Rep. Weiner and 6 other members of Energy and Commerce Committee brought to committee an amendment to that would substitute the text of HR 676, the national single-payer bill, for the House bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered a floor vote on single payer — if Rep. Weiner would withdraw the amendment from committee.
Single-payer advocates embraced these efforts wholeheartedly. And we counted upon our champions in the House of Representatives to stand with us.
Vigorous activity ensued, a fourteen week campaign involving millions of people in phone calls, petitions, forums, local protests and vigils, emails and faxes, op-eds and letters-to-the-editor and personal visits. There were conscientious objectors. 158 single-payer supporters were arrested performing acts of civil disobedience, peaceful sit-ins to register their outrage in the offices of health insurance companies and Congress across the nation.
As the grassroots clamor rose, Reps. Weiner and Kucinich sought to surf the wave. The crescendo grew and grew, until one day before the House vote on health insurance reform.
And then — poof! — single payer was back off the table.
Rep. Kucinich’s state-based amendment was out of the bill, “dead as a doornail.” And Speaker Pelosi explained that the substitute amendment couldn’t possibly have a debate and vote, for if it did, amendments to restrict health care for women and undocumented immigrant workers would also get to the floor. Congressional leaders suddenly opined that a losing vote for a single-payer amendment would be “tantamount to driving the movement off a cliff.” Even the President weighed in to discourage a vote on single payer. Rep. Weiner withdrew the amendment.
Yet the next day the Speaker allowed the anti-abortion amendment to the floor, where it passed and was added to the bill. In the end, the only progressive Democrats to vote against the House bill, abortion ban and all, were Reps. Kucinich and Massa, both single-payer supporters.
The people expected universal health care, and the House of Representatives delivered an anti-abortion bill.
Worse, the Democratic Party traded away fundamental women’s rights for a Massachusetts-style mandate, a law to criminalize the uninsured and subsidize unaffordable private insurance premiums with tax money, something we know already will not reduce costs and will not cover everyone, will not lessen disparities and will not improve the health of the nation.
It is astounding to think the Democratic Party has made a bid for the United States to join a few shameful nations that severely restrict women’s access to abortion. Earlier this year we watched, with great dismay, when Mr. Obama chose not to strike the Hyde Amendment from his federal budget proposal. The President has now gone farther, re-affirming the prohibition of federal funding for abortion as a “principle.”
Reproductive rights cannot be bargained away for any reason. Autonomy over our bodies is essential to health care and to democracy.
No nation on earth can call itself a democracy without equal and full access to health care. No nation on earth can call itself a democracy without allowing full personal autonomy over all health decisions, including abortion. These values are severely threatened under the proposed legislation. It is time for protest.
As single payer advocates, we firmly believe that health care decisions must be made between the provider and the patient, with full protection of privacy. Women must be able to access abortion if determined necessary — by either the patient or the doctor.
We call upon the President and the Congress to start from scratch and ask you to join us. Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce a single payer bill in the United States Senate in the coming weeks. Demand that your Senator vote for this bill. In addition, join the National Organization for Women, strong single-payer advocates, in organizing days of action in DC and Pennsylvania to protest the Stupak-Pitts amendment.
The solution to the health care crisis must provide personal freedom from a dysfunctional and unsustainable system that ties health care to the employer and to the spouse. When Medicare was enacted, it reduced poverty in those over 65 by 60%. By this measure, a universal, single-payer system would also provide economic freedom, by raising over 22 million people out of poverty, while providing each of us with full and necessary access to health care. Nothing less will do.
Katie Robbins is National Organizer of Healthcare-NOW! Andy Coates, MD, is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program.
By “right” direction may we assume you mean in the direction of neoconservative free market profiteers?
It sure hasn’t moved in an ethical, humane direction. Each backward step of retreat from what is needed was accompanied by further “concessions”. And oh my, there have been plenty of those!
First came the flawed public option concept as concocted by economist Jacob Hacker. That was abandoned and the next rallying cry was a “robust” public option. Then it was just a “public option”. Along the way the Senate tossed in a tax on medical benefits. (When McCain mentioned a tax during the presidential campaign, the Democrats jumped all over him.) Now some of the suits and ties in labor have signaled their tacit acquiescence to the tax “depending on what else is in the bill”.
Here is a question that deserves an answer from each and every one of you: When did you give the hierarchy the ok to retreat?
We’re in this mess today for two reasons:
1) The Federation began its retreat on day one
2) We’ve allowed tea baggers to misconstrue national health care and sell it as some kind of evil government plot. Their talking points were created by outfits like Liberty Lobby. LL bills itself as a “Christian litigation firm”. In reality they are fire and brimstone of Sundays and stooges for corporate greed the rest of the week. One sad aspect to all this is that the tea baggers have been duped into supporting a position that is detrimental to them and their families. Such is the nature of extremist propaganda.
The way out of the quagmire is for us to take control. We must wrest control from coiffed and manicured pie cards, and we must let Congress know that we’re willing to take action.
Don’t look to the GOP for help. The crowd is D.C. are like a convention of sociopaths.
The Democrats will only be prodded if they fear losing at the ballot box.
Our power is, and always has been , our ability to withhold our labor until justice is won.
Are laboring people going to be out-organized by wayward tea baggers? If so, kiss your health care goodbye. The crap under consideration in Congress greatly benefits insurance companies, the drug cartel, and corporate hospitals. It disadvantages the working class.
Tell the elected officials in your union to support nothing less than single payer. And rev up the ranks to take action to win it. The outcome would be both ethical and humane.
Should Single-Payer Activists Back Down?
by Mischa Gaus | Fri, 11/20/2009 - 11:46am
Despite many expressions of support and much advocacy for a single-payer health plan, it hasn’t captivated the country in the lengthy health care debate nor moved a bill through Congress. The onus is on single-payer supporters to “take a step back,” an AFL staffer argued.
AFL-CIO health care policy staffer Nick Unger held court at a Tuesday discussion in New York that asked “what happened to HR 676?”, the single-payer bill.
He did a fair job of putting the panel’s single-payer supporters on the defensive at the event, organized by the Metro New York Labor Communications Council.
Unger argued that the House bill passed November 7 is a tremendous victory: the legislation includes a significant new government program and a big tax on the rich—accomplished in the face of merciless opposition and a poisonous political climate.
He noted that history and single-payer supporters remember LBJ kindly, but forget that in creating Medicare in 1965 he secured Dixiecrats’ support by allowing state control of Medicaid—the low-income health care program—thus allowing Southern states to maintain segregated facilities.
Unger’s lesson here, apparently, is that out of deeply flawed legislative compromise, real social progress is made.
Did the “public option” that squeaked through the House represent an advance toward a truly universal program? (Leave aside for the moment the Senate compromises to come.)
Jane Slaughter points out in the new edition of Labor Notes (soon to arrive— sign up here to get yours) that some labor leaders supported the public option based on original estimates that up to half the working-age population would enroll. But the version in the final House bill is estimated to cover only about 2 percent of the non-elderly.
Unger, needling single-payer advocates who feel the need to “plant a vision flag,” drilled home his thesis. Even though polls say a majority of the country supports Medicare-for-all-style universal health care, even though important groups like Physicians for a National Health Program are backing it, even though the AFL-CIO itself can unanimously endorse the single-payer “social insurance” model at its September convention—those expressions of support and advocacy have not captivated the country in the lengthy health care debate nor moved a bill through Congress.
Thus the onus is on single-payer supporters to “take a step back toward the people,” Unger aruges, and “make sure the next time we all step forward together.”
Janine Jackson of the media watchdog group FAIR responded that calling legislation that emerges from D.C. the expressed will of “the people” is a little rich.
Others might go further, arguing that going up against corporations and their lobbies that spend $1.4 million a day to defeat your agenda requires the opposite of carefully plotted compromises with the drug-makers and the insurance honchos.
But why didn’t labor leaders embrace single payer as their opening bargaining position, even if they thought it doomed to fail?
We didn’t get any closer to hearing an answer from those in the know at the AFL-CIO. (The speakers had the 3×5 approach to accepting questions.)
Whether they back single payer or something less, panelists agreed on one thing Tuesday—labor can’t allow Democrats to go down to defeat at the midterm elections, and have to defend Obama. “There’s nobody better out there,” said Bill Henning, CWA Local 1180 vice president.
Published on Monday, November 23, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Before You Carve that Turkey: All In for Bernie Sanders
by Donna Smith
Those millions of us who support a Medicare for All, single-payer, reform for the healthcare crisis in this nation have some work to do over the next few days. Senators are on their way to their home states for the one-week Thanksgiving recess - and they need a little up close and personal constituent attention before dinnertime on Thursday.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is a stalwart supporter of doing the right thing for his state, our healthcare system and this nation - and he has said repeatedly that moving toward a just and economically sound system is possible through Medicare for All, single-payer. In the purest sense of giving patients control over their own healthcare, single-payer gives us all control over our choice of providers - and it gives our healthcare professionals the freedom they need to advise us on the basis of health rather than payment source.
So, even though the current Senate bill is not what we want - Senator Sanders will offer an amendment that would be a substitute for that bill and is mirrored on S. 703, The American Health Security Act.
We need to make it clear before our Senators are immersed in their own holiday events and then in traveling back to Washington, DC, that we want them to support Senator Sanders’ amendment.
Call today, call tomorrow and keep calling until the home offices of the Senators close for the holidays - and many will stay open until Wednesday at noon. Tell the staff you want to talk turkey about the Senate effort.
Time is drawing short for our Senators to hear from us. Debate will begin on November 30 on the current Senate bill. Senator Sanders needs support. He has already told us that he does not expect a win on his amendment. But we are all laying groundwork for this nation to move in the right direction before long - we know that the current bills do not “bend the cost curve” enough and we know they certainly do not bend the death or bankruptcy curve nearly enough to make the bills what this nation needs.
Additionally, we want the legislation to contain language that will allow states that opt in to a single-payer system to be able to do so with the appropriate waivers from federal legal provisions which might otherwise present obstacles to doing so.
So, the ask of our Senators - each and every one, liberal, centrist or conservative - is two-fold and urgent:
1. Vote with and for Sanders’ S. 703 substitute amendment; and
2. Support state single-payer enabling language in the final bill.
Calls to DC won’t be effective this week. We can all return to that effort next week. Thanksgiving week calls must go to your Senators’ offices in your state. Look them up here, using your zip code: http://www.votesmart.org/
Tell friends, neighbors and relatives. This year, talk a little turkey about healthcare. Ask folks how thankful they would be to have healthcare as a basic human right for their neighbors and for themselves. And then help them look up their Senators’ contact information and tell them how easy it really is to call and log your concerns and your expectations for an affirmative vote for the Sanders’ amendment.
Oh, and don’t forget to thank one another for caring enough to join in the struggle. It matters. Everybody in, nobody out. Thank you all for believing that together we can change this, because we can.
Donna Smith is a community organizer for the California Nurses Association and National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.