Here’s How the House’s Health Care Reform Would Help You
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With successful passage of a historic health care reform bill this weekend, experts are weighing in on the benefits that the bill would bring to working families.
Maggie Mahar, a longtime observer of health care policy, says the progress Congress has made on health care is “astounding” and the House bill would move millions of families to less expensive, more comprehensive health care coverage, protecting them from medical bankruptcy, lifetime coverage caps and other consequences of our current flawed system.
A study by MIT health care economist Jonathan Gruber suggests the changes in the House proposal will lower premiums by hundreds or even thousands of dollars for middle-class families who are looking to buy insurance.
Thank Your Representatives for Passing Health Care Reform
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Last night, 220 members of Congress showed they’re on the side of working families, not big insurance companies. They’ve earned our thanks for keeping their promises and passing landmark health care reform.
Our friends at Health Care for America Now (HCAN) have set up an easy tool where you can contact your member of Congress and thank him or her for voting “Yes” on H.R. 3962. We demanded this change with our votes and our voices, and House members stepped up to make it a reality.
H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, is the right way to cover more people and make the nation’s health care system work better for everyone. It includes a public health insurance option, provides assistance for middle-class families to get health care coverage and sets tough new rules for insurers, making sure no one can be denied care or be rejected from coverage because of pre-existing conditions.
Dingell Explains Decades-Long Quest for Health Reform, and Other News
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Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) has been fighting for health care reform for more than 50 years, and he’s seen the situation become even more dire over the past decade. In a great new op-ed, he explains the hard truths of our broken system and why we can’t wait any longer for health care reform:
This is not a time to give into fear….Reform is neither easy nor cheap, but the cost of inaction is far greater—in terms of lives lost, quality of life, and dollars. Make no mistake, if we don’t reduce costs we face certain economic disaster.
I will tell my fellow members, when you explain a vote like this one to the generations that live with the consequences of these decisions there is no poll, not even an election result, that can justify your decision. You will be asked about this vote until the day you die. Years from now, none of these things we put so much stock in now will matter. All anyone will want to know is: did you do the right thing when history called on you? It is time for health care reform. We can’t afford to wait. We can’t afford to think small. We can’t afford to fail.
Thanking Sen. Reid, and Other Health Care News
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A lot of people deserve credit and thanks for yesterday’s announcement that the Senate health care bill will include a public health insurance option—grassroots union members who made phone calls and wrote letters, senators who insisted on a public option, bloggers and community organizations. But it’s worth taking a moment to thank Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who as Senate majority leader, faced down Big Insurance and said a public option must be part of the bill.
Reid could have taken the easy way out and let a small minority of senators kill the public option favored by a majority of the Congress and a majority of the country. He didn’t. Health Care for America Now has a page where you can thank Reid for doing the right thing.
Hundreds Protest as Health Insurance Lobby Plots to Kill Reform
More than 500 union members and health care activists in Washington, D.C., this afternoon packed the sidewalks in front of and across the street from the meeting of the giant health insurance lobby group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), in support of health care reform.
AHIP, whose top honchos, including its head, Karen Ignagni, are meeting at the Capital Hilton to plot their assault against health care reform, refused to meet with any of the seven families who traveled here to tell how they were denied needed health care despite having insurance coverage.
Before marching to the Hilton, hundreds gathered at the AFL-CIO building, where AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka laid out the principles that must underlie any health care reform: a real public option to decrease costs for families and create competition, employer responsibility so companies like Wal-Mart are held accountable and no new taxes on workers’ benefits.
As Trumka said:
Health care reform isn’t to make insurance companies happy, it’s to make the American people healthy! Today we are going to make sure that they hear loud and clear what this fight is about. It’s about the families who will be with us at the Capital Hilton—the families who’ve suffered so much—not about the big insurance companies’ bottom line.
Rallies Set Across Nation to Protest Big Insurance
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Health care activists around the nation tomorrow will tell the huge private health insurance companies that are spending millions of dollars to derail health care reform:
“Big Insurance: We’re sick of it!”
In Philadelphia, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker will lead a rally and march from the steps of City Hall to CIGNA’s world headquarters to call on their executives to stop standing in the way of quality affordable health care for all.
Says Holt Baker:
Here’s the way we in labor see things—America is in a big fight over health care. The American people are on one side. Big Insurance is on the other side. Only one of us will win. We know if the insurance companies win, we all lose.
Other demonstrations are planned at the headquarters and local offices of Aetna, UnitedHealthcare and Wellpoint—including its subsidiary Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Check out our friends at Health Care for America Now (HCAN) to find an event near you. HCAN, the AFL-CIO, the Health Care for America Education Fund (HCAEF) and MoveOn are among the National Day of Action sponsors of events with the theme “Big Insurance: Sick of it!”
18,000 Union Members Took Part in More Than 400 Health Care Events in August
When Marianne Hoynes rolled her wheelchair into a town hall meeting in Red Bank, N.J., last week hosted by Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) to share her thoughts on health care reform, she says, “I didn’t expect to be heckled and booed.”
Hoynes sent us her story yesterday, along with a link to a You Tube video showing that some in the audience sneered and jeered as she explained her situation of trying to live with two incurable autoimmune diseases. At the meeting, she says:
America’s a completely different place to live in when you get sick. I live in fear everyday that I will lose my home….I’m afraid because the co-pay for one of my medications is $389 every two weeks. I’m afraid I might not be able to afford my property taxes and I will lose my home. Please hear this voice of the disabled and don’t let the insurance lobby win this fight. Please protect me from the extortion of the pharmaceutical industry. We all need reasonable health coverage to be a basic human right, not a privilege.
The loud and disruptive tactics and outrageous lies that marked so many of the early congressional health care forums can still be found. But a counteroffensive by the union movement, including AFSCME’s recently completed Highway to Health Care Reform, and our allies, notably Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and Organizing for America (OFA), show there is strong and broad support for fixing the nation’s broken health care system.
Unions and Our Allies Keep Health Care Debate Civil
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At town hall meetings, rallies and candlelight vigils, union members, health care activists and community allies are showing that the health care reform debate doesn’t belong to the loudest or most outrageous.
As a report form the Minnesota AFL-CIO says:
“The throng of union members who attended the recent town hall meeting that Rep. Tim Walz (D) held in Mankato know that their presence was crucial to keeping the debate thoughtful and respectful as right-wing fringe opponents of health care shouted and yelled in a weak attempt to disrupt the evening’s discussion.”
The 100 Minnesota union members were among the 800 or so residents who attended the Thursday town hall that filled a high school auditorium. According to news reports, the crowd was about evenly divided, but one group of opponents loudly booed and interrupted throughout the meeting. But, according to one participant, many left before the meeting was over.
Once they were gone, the air was lighter and people were able to calmly disagree with each other.
Union Health Care Activists Counter Screams with Civility
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In the past several days, loud, shouting and rowdy mobs have been disrupting congressional town hall meetings across the country. They’re organized by far-right and corporate backed anti-health care reform and anti-government groups. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka says there’s one main reason for the mob action.
“Major health care reform is closer than ever to passage and it is no secret that special interests want to weaken or block it.”
Trumka notes that the America’s politics are “passionate, heartfelt and often loud.”
But that is not what the corporate-funded mobs are engaging in when they show up to disrupt town halls held by members of Congress….Mob rule is not democracy. People have a democratic right to express themselves and our elected leaders have a right to hear from their constituents—not organized thugs whose sole purpose is to shut down the conversation and attempt to scare our leaders into inaction.
Remember: Today Is National Call-In Day for Health Care
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Remember: Today is National Call-in Day for Health Care. We all need to call our representatives in the U.S. House today and tell them to support the House health care reform bill, (H.R. 3200).
Call 1-877-264-4226 or e-mail or fax your lawmaker with the same message. Click here to find your representative and his or her contact information.
The House bill contains a public health insurance plan option and shared responsibility, including an employer “pay or play” requirement—and does not tax health care benefits working families receive through their jobs.
But get this: The AP is reporting today that the public option is in danger—making it even more necessary for us to tell Congress.
National Call-in Day is sponsored by Health Care for America Now! (HCAN) and supported by AFL-CIO unions, state federations, central labor councils, community allies and health care advocates.
