Are Industry Lobbyists Raising Our Health Care Premiums?
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While the Senate Finance Committee is slogging through more than 530 amendments to Sen. Max Baucus’ flawed health care reform bill, more than 2,700 lobbyists are working overtime to protect the private health insurance industry and other health care corporations.
Protecting their health industry clients means blocking a public health insurance plan option, derailing strong health care cost controls and gutting tough new health care rules that would put people before profits.
In trying to kill the public option, insurance industry lobbyists are thumbing their nose at the American public, who strongly support a public option. A New York Times/CBS poll released today found that 65 percent of respondents want a public health care option, while only 26 percent oppose such a plan.
States May Lead the Way on Health Care Reform
This is a cross-post from the Daily Kos blog.
In Canada, it took the dogged determination of one province, Saskatchewan, and a visionary leader, Tommy Douglas, to pave the path to a national health care system, which they call Medicare.
For all the detractors of the Canadian system in the studios of Fox News and the board rooms of right wing think tanks, consider this one note: In 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation conducted a national poll to select the greatest Canadian of all time. The winner in a landslide—Tommy Douglas.
In Rare Move, NLRB Takes Hospitals To Court
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is asking a federal court to force Fremont-Rideout Health Group to recognize the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) as the representative of RNs at two of its hospitals and return to the bargaining table to negotiate in good faith.
For three years, management has worked to thwart the nurses’ choice to join a union and bargain collectively at hospitals and clinics in Yuba City and Marysville, north of Sacramento.
The NLRB court filing, known as a “10(j) petition,” is rarely used, except in cases the board considers to be the most egregious violations of federal labor law, according to the union.
