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Time for Universal Care
Very few people in the United States remember the Great Depression. And to our discredit, we don't spend much media time hearing from those seniors. Most of us have to learn the details from history books or even novels on the subject.
Put "The Grapes of Wrath" back on your reading list. Even if you read it back in high school, you'll find it eerily poignant reading it again. Especially the early chapters where Steinbeck goes into great detail discussing the powerful banks, how much more important they are than people and how much sway they have over government officials.
Oddly enough, most of the scary conditions in the book already were in place before our own great depression hit this past fall. Millions homeless, hundreds of thousands of them our military veterans, people dying for want of medical attention, smart kids unable to pursue an education because the price tag has outstripped their earning potential: we've got it all.
The one remarkable thing about our times is that our economic collapse may have brought us to the tipping point. Our society and our individual consciences have long tolerated a certain amount of tragedy when it happens to somebody else. But now that the rest of us - from fat cats to the middle class - are losing wealth, homes and health insurance, it appears that everyone is headed for the Dumpster. Consequently, our economy, our society and our government are finally prepared to make corrective changes, hoping to avoid universal calamity.
Perhaps you watched the president's speech from Elkhart, Ind., on Feb. 9.
I have to watch; it's my job. And anyway, it's like a car wreck - except that this mess we're in right now was no accident. We picked a fight halfway around the world, hired no-bid contractors with money we borrowed from often unfriendly foreign countries and removed the safeguards from our financial system. All so we could lull ourselves into believing that we would become a more flourishing and robust nation by doing so.
With unrighteous hands we cracked the whip on "terrorism" and now the lash has recoiled and struck us in the back. And that backlash hurts.
The president told us that 598,000 U.S. jobs were lost in January. All these newly unemployed workers won't create homelessness or food insecurity or health care shortages in the U.S. They'll just swell the ranks of the millions already experiencing those nightmares.
That's when the tipping point appears. And it's the tipping point that the folks in charge want to avoid, no matter what.
So the president stood in Elkhart and enumerated the many ways the stimulus money would stave off further cataclysm, including millions and millions of dollars to pay COBRA bridge health insurance premiums for the workers who recently lost their jobs.
U.S. taxpayers, many of them from the same pool as the nearly 50 million Americans currently without health insurance, will be borrowing money from their grandchildren - after first indebting them to China - to pay insurance premiums.
And it's not because a half-million more people without health insurance matter one fig when put up against 100 times that many who already live in fear of illness or injury.
And it's not that the insurance companies and drug companies and all the rest of the for-profit medical establishment don't want to lose the revenue the recently laid-off generated as workers.
And it's not even that insurance companies who sell COBRA make so many campaign contributions that they can pretty much tell Congress what to do.
No, it's because our bloated, costly exclusionary and at times deadly health care financing system is teetering at the brink and may tip over.
It's because this year, as he has for many years, Michigan Rep. John Conyers has introduced HR 676, which already has garnered nearly 50 co-sponsors - a bill that restructures our health care system much like the rest of the civilized world and guarantees health care for all Americans.
And it's because poll after poll, like the October 2008 ABC News poll, shows that two-thirds of Americans support changing our current system to a universal system.
Call Congress and the White House. Tell them to pass HR 676. The tipping point has come.
- Posted in
21 Comments so far
Show AllI wish the Americans good luck with this. Lord knows, those who desire a single pay universal basic health care system are up against a formidable opponent(s). Dogma and the mistaken belief basic universal health care is socialism errr....make that communism.....is a discussion point which will not go away quietly.
AND we should give universal health coverage to the whole wide world! Think of all the sick and dying who absolutely NEED insurance. Shall I pray the insurance gods favor us!
Yes, it is everyone's responsibility to make sure everyone is covered. Don't tell me you people are going to be sick and just think oh America this and America that, we are humans on this earth damn it and I want true UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE (echos)
Pat,
Great article. Like you, I've been spending time educating myself about what really happened during the Great Depression. Just finished Nick Taylor's great book on the WPA, and Kenneth S. Davis' volume (one of five on FDR) on the New Deal.
In fact, I'm on a quest to provide some historical context to much of the revisionism coming from the right. Every Monday, I'm putting up a post on a historical figure or event (with an emphasis on important but forgotten elements of our past, like FDR's legacy). I call it History Maker Mondays and you'll find these at my blog. (http://findingwords.blogspot.com/)
In the work I do, I see the unemployed and displaced everyday. Working out of one of Maine's CareerCenters, we've taken to providing coffee and light snacks, because so many of the clients are facing severe economic distress. Being from Maine, you obviously know the dire circumstances facing many of our citizens, and this is being multiplied across the country.
Of course, none of this stops our "friends" on the right from spreading their lies and misinformation, much of it via our public airwaves, also owned by those of us who self-identify as something other than conservative.
"The tipping point has come." - All I can say to that is amen. It's about time.
Far too many variations of so-called 'universal health care'. If it isn't 'single payer' it will not do the job. The big problem with most 'universal' plans, they still go thru insurance plans. That is the 30% administrative cost ripoff. Single payer is a national plan similar to medicare with NO insurance companies involved bleeding the system.
A friend of mine lives in Seattle and will shortly be losing her job at one of those banks that went under and was purchased by another.
She looked into COBRA and determined she will be paying close to 400.00 a month in order to remain insured health wise.
This will be in addition to no income other then UI benefits and a Mortgage to pay. She is trying to decide whether she could "Go without" for a few months until she finds another job but also worried it can take a long time to find another job.
Under Obama's plan she will be FORCED to continue to buy insuance no doubt depleting what savings she has. If the Government has to move in and subisidize her under his plan, then profits go directly to insurance companies and not to health care. With hundreds of thousands losing their jobs each month there is no way the Obama plan will SAVE money.
It is ludicrous to believe insurance companies, losing their shirts on the stock market, will COMPETE for customers by offering ever lower rates .
It is a DUMB Plan.
This MUST be apparent to Obama .
Obama, in general, appears to take the one small step at a time approach - not bold enough. Refer his approach to the financial crisis.
He knows that the current system and his plan is not going to work over the long run. He *knows* that the only workable plans fall in the single-pool-multi-provider category. I don't think he has the guts to take on Congress and the special interests.
The stimulus bill just signed yesterday has a provision to reimburse healthcare expenses for the unemployed to the tune of 65%. This means your friend would get a refund of $260 on her Cobra expenses. Believe me, this is $260 more than a McCain administration would have given.
This article is not about Obama's plan.Did you guys miss this: "Michigan Rep. John Conyers has introduced HR 676, which already has garnered nearly 50 co-sponsors - a bill that restructures our health care system much like the rest of the civilized world and guarantees health care for all Americans."?
http://conyers.house.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Issues.Home&Issue_id=063b74a4-19b9-b4b1-126b-f67f60e05f8c
My wife and I tried to convince Herseth, Thune, and Johnson to support single payer but they flat out refuse and are in fact trying to spread propaganda about it somehow destroying more jobs. Thune is even going so far as to say that "if you wan't terrorists to have access to healthcare, then go right ahead and support hr 676 !" Unfortunately, even as there has been some growing support for single payer, my state is still filled with very hostile anti-healthcare fundies. I'm sorry that my state is filled with such shitty pols.
Terrance Mitchell
Redfield, South Dakota
Terrorists can still get health-care right now in the current system. They just have to show up at the emergency room.
Well actually, 93 cosponsors, of which my Congressman, Peter De Fazio is NOT one. He favors some sort of mixed insurance industry/public plan. As a retired nurse, I for one do not favor one penny to the insurance industry (watch SiCKO to see why). In addition to wasting a third of our health care dollars, we are abetting an industry that has no qualms about killing for profit. Not that they use a gun, they just withhold care. Is there that much difference?
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Tuesday was national call in day for groups representing about 20 miilion people who support HR 676, John Conyers single-payer plan. It is still not too late to call, so do so tomorrow and tell them you want HR. 676. Google the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care to find the link to the alliance that includes Propressive Democrats of America (PDA), California Nurses Association CNA), Physicians for a National Health Program(PNHP), and Health-Care Now (not to be confused with the incrementalist group Health Care for American Now which has some unions in it and is selling out to the insurance industry).
Recently, the progressive unions have begun to organize for HR 676 (at least the ones who know that single-payer is the only way to go) and met in early January in St. Louis. The movement is building sign up with PDA's Health Care not Warfare program and start working education and lobbying.
CNA just finished at landmark econometric study that shows that if implemented, HR 676 is a stimulus package in itself. It would create 2.6 million jobs and save hundreds of billions of dollars that could be used for infrastructure and a green energy grid, anything but lining the pockets of the heatlh insurance industry. This is the fight we must take to Congress and the Corporations and we must win if we are to seize control of our democracy.
Join anyone of the groups above. They have just spent this week lobbying reps since they are back in their home districts. Get on board and be ready for the next call-in and day and lobby week.
In Solidarity,
Mike, Progressive Democrats of America
The last Congess had 93 co-sponsors. This one only has some 40 or more. Many are lily-livered and will be rallying around Obama's plan. Obama use to support single-paeyr when a legislator in Illinois. He knows what it is. The Dems need to quit being weak and show some leadership, and this is the issue that would have Americans thanking them for generations to come.
If your Congress person signed in the last Congress, get them to sign on in this one too. If they haven't, call and ask them why.
Bill Walz
Yes. Yes. Yes. Everyone who believes this needs to say it over and over and over. Get everyone you know to contact Obama and Congress. Start petitions. It is time the people take this one over to make it clear that nothing less than a single-payer universal system is acceptable. It's time the country that invented "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as the reason for government's existence, declared we want to join the rest of the world where life is protected in liberty from for-profit interests who don't care if you die, and the only pursuit of happiness they are concerned with is their own. Get behind Rep. Conyers and HR676. This is a human rights issue. It also is the only way American business can get back on its feet. The burden of providing healthcare must be lifted from business and placed where it belongs, with the government, who will also have the wherewithall to contain costs through managing the biggest group policy ever - The American people.
I'd better stop reading this because Obama's chickening out on single payer sickens me, and I can't afford that, as I have shitty health care coverage!
We will not likely move to a different system of 'health care' until there is a significant contraction in health insurance profit and high profit treatments. Like the banks (which will likely wind up being nationalized), there will be a cry for help (from those gouging entities) once profits start to dramatically fall. Possibly then, and only then, will we get anything close to a single payer system. I believe things need to get much 'worse' before they get better.
My tipping point is long past. One small error in your piece: "millions and millions of dollars to pay COBRA bridge health insurance premiums" I believe should read BILLIONS. What Obama and the Democrats suggest is that our healthcare crisis can be cured by giving a bigger subsidy to the insurance companies. If you drill down into Obama's plan, it is even worse than that. The technology hoopla is about creating a more efficient vise grip on the profitability of not delivering care.
I made what amounts to a death pact with my husband this morning. We are giving up on our absurd coverage with its 7500 per person deductible and agreeing that if we get sick, we die. All I ask is that they have the decency to stop calling this corporate exploitation of our lives "care." We pay the equivalent of an Iraq War every year, and caring for the sick has nothing to do with it. The banker-insurance-defense-"care" junta helped elect Obama and he just delivered a $275B thank you.
COBRA care was dropped from the stimulus package....
It's obvious that the "health care insurance" bubble(racket) is bursting.
It's a no brain-er, universal single payer(medicare for all),is long over due.
I didn't realize that when a bill is reintroduced in Congress, cosponsors need to sign on all over again. Maybe it's time to reintroduce the Iraq/Afghanistan invasion resolutions.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson