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'Weiner’s Amendment Breathes 45,000 Lives into HR3200'
Wow. Things are getting pretty tense out in the trenches where we’ve all seen Wall Street bailouts and bulging unemployment while Congress inches forward on the healthcare reform debate. Millions of us have lost jobs, homes, retirement savings and access to healthcare benefits. And if many in the for-profit health insurance industry have their way, we’ll face an industry bailout for them too – unless we act together, act loudly, act fast and follow the action items Mike shared with us all this week.
Support HR3200 with the Weiner amendment, that’s what Mike told us all. But wait. Does that mean Mike is asking us to support whatever the end product is of the current legislative effort? No. None of us know that result yet. There will be time enough to weigh in on the final product later but for now we’re all critical to what that final product is or is not. We still matter.
Getting to the heart of extending (and improving) Medicare coverage for all in America is only possible through one amendment currently under consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York will offer what is essentially the text of John Conyers’ and Dennis Kucinich’s single-payer bill, HR676, as what is called a substitute amendment when the House debates its current bill, HR3200, on the floor within the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime, the deaths of our fellow citizens due to the lack of access to healthcare continue. 45,000 deaths in America every single year as the debate rolls on. If we are to stop the death march of the for-profit medical-industrial complex led by the for-profit insurance giants in this nation, we must support those in Congress who hear the drumbeat of healthcare justice and who are advocating for us all.
It’s often hard to follow this legislative process and some are ready to throw in the towel on this Congress before the work is done. But the reality is that the rough and tumble work of blending the bills first from individual committees in both chambers of Congress and then tossing in any amendments passed during floor debates still affords us all the first real chance in 44 years to pass healthcare for all into law.
Rep. Weiner is our champion in the House right now, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont is our Senate hero. Both of these brave and determined American lawmakers will offer amendments in their respective chambers to replace other reform bills with single-payer legislation. Both the Weiner and the Sanders amendments are substitute amendments. Substitute amendments offer an entire alternative to the existing text of bills under consideration. The for-profit insurance purchase mandates proposed can still be replaced with the real extension of the basic human right of healthcare. The single-payer substitute amendments can make that right into our American reality.
That’s why when Mike tells us in his list of actions we can take right now that we need to support HR3200 in the House with the Weiner amendment. The Weiner amendment is our road to extending the basic human right of healthcare to all. We all wish the formal bill under consideration right now was HR676. We’ve all fought for it, lobbied for it, written and called supporting it … but the reality is that we won’t get true Medicare for all out of the People’s House any other way but through the Weiner amendment to HR3200.
And in the Senate, we will not get anywhere close to providing healthcare to all without Senator Sanders’ amendment.
President Obama told us again recently, “I want to cover everybody. Now, the truth is unless you have what’s called a single-payer system in which everyone’s automatically covered, you’re probably not going to reach every single individual.”
Rep. Weiner was on a conference call just last night with the activists of the Progressive Democrats of America. He said that his amendment is currently being “scored” by the Congressional Budget Office. The score assigned will measure the amendment’s impact on the federal budget. The results of that score will be out sometime soon. Then it will be up to Speaker Nancy Pelosi to honor her commitment to Rep. Weiner to bring his substitute amendment to full debate on the floor of the House when HR3200 is under consideration. Rep. Weiner says that will be happening sometime in the next few weeks – maybe as early as the first week in November. He also said more Congressional members are learning more about the economic and moral benefits of his amendment. We need to support that work.
President Obama wants both chambers debating their bills at the same time. But the Senate effort may be a bit more complicated as staffers tell us there may be as many as 1,000 amendments offered to the Senate healthcare reform bill after its two committees finish merging their efforts. Then we’ll know what Senator Sanders decides to offer in his amendment and a better time frame for our support of his effort there. Stay tuned.
So time is of the essence. We must act now in support of the Weiner amendment or we’ll need to be taking different actions soon – and we’ll keep you posted on the Mike & Friends blog about how things are going.
When I speak to audiences around the country and some express concern or even discouragement about where the healthcare reform battle is right now, I remind us all that if we had taken a poll just two years ago asking how a Presidential race between John McCain and Barack Obama would finish, Obama would have won only Hawaii and Illinois. And if anyone had asked us just 14 months ago if we’d find three-quarters of a trillion dollars in a matter of days to hand over to the Wall Street giants with almost no questions asked, we’d all have thought it insane and impossible to believe. But we know what happened. We know change happens.
And we know we can fight together right now to support a better outcome in this healthcare reform battle. Everybody in, nobody out. The urgency was never fiercer than now. Take action.
This piece originally appeared on Mike & Friends Blog.- Posted in
107 Comments so far
Show AllPlease, just extend Medicare for everyone!
We pass the Weiner amendment and we move a lot closer to doing just that -- only improved and expanded.
Donna Smith, American SiCKO
It was my understanding that Rep. Weiner agreed not to do this in exchange for Pelosi promising a floor vote on HR 676 this year. Did she renege on that agreement? Or is he just going for it anyway?
And by the way, Anthony Weiner rocks!!!
Edit:
I seriously need to read articles more closely, nevermind.
I oppose HR3200 even with this amendment. This bill would need thousands more amendments and trimmings just to remotely resemble HR 676. Incremental health care reform? Oh please give me a break ! There isn't any incremental spending on tax cuts and wars. Weiner should be joining Dennis Kucinich on HR676 already and where's John Conyers?
The way this amendment works is that it will turn HR3200 into HR676, it'll just still be called HR3200.
Why does it have to take an amendment to turn HR3200 into HR676? If the Democrats had any spine, they would just drop HR3200 filled with thousands of pages of Big Insurance pork last I checked a month ago and switch to HR676. I'm keeping my fingers crossed on HR3200 still.
Because that's how legislation works. God bless America :-)
Don't forget politics that poisons every legislation it touches. I don't think God is blessing America. America is already the big butt of jokes when it comes to health care. I wished more politics could be taken out of legislating. :(
Well, it was half of a joke.
Our legislative process is bullshit because as you said, it's poisoned by lobbyist and corporate money and control.
But also, I was half serious because after all the money spent by the insurance companies, Weiner could end up wiping out the giveaways that were put into the bill, thanks to his substitution amendment :-)
Ah, you got me there. Speaking of lobbyists, I can't believe that business themselves aren't pushing for single payer or at least genuine health care for all. See my recent response to Donna about the grueling experience my company is facing with its insurance provider.
Probably a combination of factors such as short-sightedness, pressure from the probably conservative business associations your boss belongs to, and lack of time and resources to sort through all the misinformation out there.
Wall Street fears an empowered labor force. With universal healthcare coverage, workers are more free to take collective action against abusive employers.
And we all know how much corporations love their abuses.
q
Absolutely true. If people are not utterly dependent upon their employer for "affordable" health "insurance", they will put up with much less shit. The same would apply if we had a genuine safety net, or better yet, a guaranteed jobs program.
Yes--this is one of the main reasons: provider-tied medical insurance makes workers less likely to strike, because they would lose their medical benefits.
There is another, more global reason: many corporate types, even the ones burdened with medical-insurance costs, think: "If the government can take that business, they can take my business."
They are nervous about any large-scale government incursion into the private economy, even one that would benefit their businesses!
The reason that the Chamber of Commerce, business Big and Small, are opposing Single Payer is because of the glaring hole in the middle of HR676.
That bill outlaws a currently legal and profitable product. That amounts to a government "Taking" of property. There's no compensation for the 1300 companies that would be suddenly made into outlaws, and an extra 13 weeks of Unemployment checks for over one million whitecollar workers that are suddenly out on the street, in the middle of the worst unemployment since the Thirties, is not even a joke, it's pathetic.
Other company owners and officials see that Taking as being dangerous to their businesses. If an entire sector of the Insurance Industry can be taken, so can any other business.
This particular flaw in this bill is fatal. That's why it was pushed off the table. Otherwise, Single Payer is fine, the rest of the bill is pretty good, but the fate of the Insurance Companies and their workforce is not handled properly and that kills it.
Remember that window plant in Chicago, Republic (?), where the workers occupied the factory, remember how we all cheered because they fought for their jobs? That was a couple hundred workers in one company. The Progressive movement has been built around workers and maintaining good jobs in decent conditions, et cetera. We can't turn our backs on one miilion people that are currently employed and pretend tha that doesn't matter. It does. It certainly matters to the people that would be losing their jobs.
That's the beauty of Public Option. It gets US started on building a Single Payer system within the framework of the Market and it has built-in advantages that eventually force the 4Ps to either bring their prices WAY down and cover everyone or get out of the business (either way works out for US). The endstate is Universal Healthcare. But the mechanism for getting the 4Ps out is Market Competition, the exact mantra that the Chamber of Commerce has been chanting forever, NOT some "socialist" takeover, thus depriving the Insurance Companies of their screaming point and removing the fear of Takings in the rest of the Business community.
Read up on the Takings issue. The Federalist Society and the Rocky Mountain Institute (among others), both of which are conservative Lawyers gangs with considerable clout, having supplied the Bushies with all of their judicial appointments from the Supremes on down, have been talking this up as a way to buck regulations and laws that effect peoples' use of their property, claiming that the Clean Water Act illegally "Takes" the owner's value away from his land by preventing, oh, say, stripmining in the Front Range. That's a rather abstract example (but one already in litigation), but outlawing 1300 companies that handle 1/6 of our economy and touch the lives of 250 million people would be a concrete example that everyone would get.
And you don't think those companies are going to go peacefully, do you? They will leave scorched earth behind, they will tie up the courts for the next fifteen years fighting this. They will sue for literally trillions of dollars in "Lost Profits" ( a concept I still can't believe is enshrined in Law), the briefs are already being prepared. For them, it's an existential fight, it's fight or die. And since they have huge amounts of money to hire an army of council with, they could conceivably bankrupt US in the process, certainly stall any launch of the new system, for decades.
That's why 676 is off the table.
And why this ammendment will go nowhere.
The intentions are good, but the mechanism is flawed.
Carla,
Weiner's amendment uses the language directly from HR676 -- unless Rep. Weiner totally changed something overnight from last evening to today.
HR3200's entire first section would have the HR676/Weiner amendment in place of the mandates and other nonsense there in HR3200 now. That's what the substitute amendment does -- replaces non single-payer reform with single-payer reform patterned on HR676.
Donna Smith, American SiCKO
Don't waste your time, Donna. Carla's just an insurance-industry drone posing as a left-wing purist to try to diminish support for this legislation - or any reform at all, for that matter.
It's nice to see you on this site, though. Keep up the good work.
q
Excuse me but I'm no insurance industry drone. HR3200 has faced serious opposition from single payer health care advocates from the start and with plenty of good reasons. The bill is thousands of pages filled with Big Insurance pork. Read it and weep.
I guess that you just missed the explanation of what a "substitute amendment" is.
Donna is right in the trenches of this conflict and supports this measure. Anthony Weiner has convincingly taken the single-payer argument to the mainstream media with irrefutable logic.
If afraid that your immediate negative reaction has given you away.
q
Please tell us why HR3200 even with the recent amendment is better than the real deal HR 676? What would you prefer, 1200+ pages of Big Insurance/Pharma giveaways and more death panels from them or a simple 30 page bill that guarantees health care as a right? This bill is already bad enough that even Sarah Palin was right ! HR3200 is nothing more than mandatory care for the most part and money will be robbed from Medicare just to pay for some of it. In the meantime, more taxes so that Big Insurance/Pharma can laugh its ways to the bank. Another big bailout but this time for the big monied elites of healthcare and medical industries. No wonder this country is the biggest butt of jokes when it comes to piss poor health care about to get worse ! :(
Jennifer,
Agree totally with you if HR3200 was the bill without Weiner's substitute. But with the Weiner substitute, much of the 1200 plus page mess is replaced by Weiner's HR676-model amendment.
I would never support mandated purchase of the defective product that is for-profit, private health insuracne. Never. And I would never write in support of that.
Donna Smith, American SiCKO
Thanks again Donna. Now that you mentioned it, I will take this amendment to be the second biggest litmus test to see which pols regardless of party support health care for all and which don't.
I long for the days when Big Insurance will be forced to butt out. My company is already in a fight with its insurance provider for planning yet another price gouging scheme against its business customers. I take it you are aware of the overhead costs businesses are facing with Big Insurance. I joined with my boss and coworkers to try to make the provider explain its newest move but so far no answer. Small companies like the ones I work for face a real living hell while most large corporations are not quite as bad. Big Insurance never tires in persecuting small businesses and individuals who aren't rich. Oh well, more buckling under the pressure ! :(
Quickstepper is a right-wing neoliberal whose purpose here is to bait and demoralize left-wing critics of the Dumbocrat employees of Big Pharma and Big Insurance.
Nice try, troll, but we're on to you.
vanmungo and quickstepper both need to stop this name calling.
Quickstepper, opposing HR3200 does not automatically make them an insurance shill.
vanmungo, let's not attack personally but on the issues instead.
I think all of us on this site have had enough of witnessing a huge flame war between, well you know who. Whether you voted for Obama or Nader, we need to get back to the issues. Both of you have much more in common so why not focus on it, ok?
Marco Nanto--you need to find some way of spending your afternoons other than watching Dr. Phil.
I'll have to take some time to see through all of this. What upsets me is that this Congress could have started out with the simple HR676 bill instead of with the already bloated HR3200 bill which is thousands of pages last I checked. I need a weekend to sort this out. My husband and I shall check this out.
Great Carla... that's always a good idea. And I so wish they had started out with HR676 too. But this is our way to get there right now -- but only with the amendment passed. And that's going to be very hard work.
Donna Smith, American SiCKO
Weiner is one of the good guys and for once. Earlier, Kucinich pushed for an amendment to allow for allowing states more room on passing single payer health care. What Weiner is doing is similar I believe. Yes, keeping track of amendments can be as pain in the butt. I agree with you on preferring to put HR676 on the table instead. That would be a strong litmus test of who supports health care as a right.
Kucinich amendment still alive -- and already attached to the HR3200 bill. But if Weiner's amendment passes and single-payer is the new bill, there would be no need for states to have the waivers the Kucinich amendment provides.
We still strongly support retention of the Kucinich amendment. But we have to fight the Weiner amendment fight first.
It's all so confusing, eh?
Donna Smith, American SiCKO
Thanks Donna for the clarification. I myself have been working and buckling under a lot of pressure this month that I have been slipping in trying to keep up. I know you are dedicated to this issue so I can count on you to help us out. :)
Thanks for the update Donna Smith. I have wanted HR676 but haven't heard a word about it for a long time.
What I find most encouraging is that Medicare for All will finally be scored by the CBO.
I agree, I can't wait.
Re candrew57 October 23rd, 2009 10:29 am,
who claims "...Medicare for All will finally be scored by the CBO."
At long last!
But I wonder what deep dark hole the corporate media will find to bury the results.
My. My. My.
Wasn't the comment thread under yesterday's list of actions recommended by Michael Moore just full of accusations that he had betrayed single-payer supporters by supporting HR 3200? I seem to recall the expression "stabbed in the bacK" being used.
The extent to which these industry trolls pollute this board with their lies and distortions demonstrates the abject fear of the health-insurance industry that someone will expose their racket.
q
It's really bizarre that you stigmatize left-wing critics of equivocators like Moore as agents of the insurance industry.
Moore stridently supported Obama knowing full well that Obama was planning to crush single payer and press for a reactionary individual-mandate boondoggle for the private insurers. So, for that matter, did Donna Smith and the CNA.
Those people are belatedly seeing the light about the Democrats. Fine.
But we have to remain vigilant about them.
You, on the other hand, seem to be counseling complacency about the Democrats and Obama. But it is precisely the Democrats who are doing the dirty work of the private insurers and Big Pharma.
Your determination to fend off criticism of these skunks makes it clear that you are the one who is the health-industry troll.
Nice try, but we're on to you.
I'll be on you like a yellowjacket from now on.
Don't say you weren't warned.
OR...the congress could pass any piece of crap it likes, and Obama could attach a Signing Statement that he reads and understands this bill as Medical for All....
Worked for Bush
"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats
Donna, thanks for trying to clear up the previous article by MM. I was one of the people commenting on the fact that he urges us to support the wrong bill.
OK, I get what a substitute amendment is. That's what they used to get the Wall Street bailout package passed. God only knows what bill they replaced, but it had been passed through committee and all the other necessary steps to become a bill on the floor eligible to be voted on. They replaced the entire text of whatever bill it was with whatever they wanted to say about bailing out Wall St.
And now you're saying that after congress wastes an assload of time on this bill, HR3200, it could just be replaced by HR676? Actually, you said, "much of the 1200 plus page mess is replaced by Weiner's HR676-model amendment." How much? Which much?
But here's the real scary part: "Then it will be up to Speaker Nancy Pelosi to honor her commitment to Rep. Weiner to bring his substitute amendment to full debate on the floor of the House when HR3200 is under consideration." The words "Nancy Pelosi" and "honor" don't even belong in the same sentence.
I'll bet you a nickel right here and now that this "substitute amendment" of HR676 will not happen. Some deal will be struck, pressure will be applied, and even more language that is detrimental to the consumer and supportive of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies will get in, but HR 676 will be out.
And then they can say, what are you all whining about? DIDN'T YOU SUPPORT HR3200?
A couple of things. First, great job Congressman Weiner on fighting it through. Now, it's up to us to call our Congressmen and tell them to support the amendment. Second, we need to get to the bigger causes. More than being uninsured, there are 200,000 lives lost due to medical errors by the nurses, doctors, equipment, and modern medicine itself. I support single payer but the insurance companies aren't the only culprits.
"More than being uninsured, there are 200,000 lives lost due to medical errors by the nurses, doctors, equipment, and modern medicine itself. I support single payer but the insurance companies aren't the only culprits."
Government cannot take care of those casualties directly unlike taking on the insurance industries. Medical education needs to be reformed and then there are touchy nurses and doctors to deal with. It's a dog eat dog world full of money.
Sure it can. Remember the electronic health records stuff that the right-wingers made such a stink about a few months ago? That could save quite a few lives.
That's diversionary BS.
BY FAR the main source of runaway medical costs in this country is the extortionate pricing of private health insurance and the myriad redundant billing bureaucracies needed to reap the profits.
All the nattering about electronic record-keeping--along with other diversionary topics such as tort "reform"--are just intended to change the subject and deflect attention from the main culprit. In this dirversionary feint you are complicit.
I'm so sorry that I think a rather simple fix to save a few thousand lives is seen by you as "diversionary BS". More has to be done than implementing single-payer.
There is no authoritative evidence that computerizing medical records is a key to saving lives or money.
This issue gets promoted by right-wing neoliberals and their confederates in the mass media in order to avoid dealing with the main source of bloated medical costs--drug and insurance company profiteering.
You should do some reading and educate yourself. You might start with the following summary of a scholarly study by two prominent members of Physicians for a National Health Program:
"Electronic medical records (EMR) are unlikely to save much money according to a commentary by Harvard Medical School health policy experts Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler that appears in the September/October issue of the journal Health Affairs. The commentary debunks a Rand Corporation report appearing in the same issue that forecasts massive savings from EMR.
"The Rand report (which was financed by medical computing firms) is the latest of many recent claims that medical computing will save hundreds of billions of dollars in medical costs. Politicians across the political spectrum from Hillary Clinton to Newt Gingrich see in computing a painless solution to our nation’s health care crisis (additionally, Sen. Ted Kennedy has introduced federal legislation calling for the widespread adoption of EMR).
"The Himmelstein/Woolhandler commentary points out that computer vendors have been claiming that such savings were imminent for the past 30 years. Yet during that time thousands of hospital computer systems have been installed that “haven’t saved a nickel.” The commentary criticizes the Rand researchers for basing their forecast on little or no reliable data. Moreover the Rand forecast assumes that “interoperability” among disparate medical computing systems, which has yet to be achieved in practice, can be readily accomplished nationwide.
"Dr. Himmelstein, an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard and former Chief of Clinical Computing at Cambridge Hospital, commented: “We’ve made steady but slow progress in medical computing over the past three decades. But computers don’t offer the panacea that politicians hope for and computer firms are peddling. To mount a national program to do in every hospital that which has yet to be done in any hospital may benefit the computer vendors who paid for the Rand research, but it risks failure on a colossal scale.”
“Computers won’t solve the health care crisis. Since hospitals started computerizing, bureaucracy has multiplied and costs have risen faster than ever. Only national health insurance can streamline health care bureaucracy and save enough money to make universal coverage feasible. We need politicians to provide real leadership, not wait and hope for a technologic miracle.” according to Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard and prominent health policy researcher
Oy. I'm not saving it's a "key", I'm saying it's a simple fix that can help. To use myself as an example, my childhood primary care doctor has vanished and about 13 years of my health records with him. If they has been in a universally readable electronic format stored in a database where any of my future doctors could access them, it wouldn't be a problem.
You anecdotal personal evidence is worthless--the kind of thing offered by a person who is unaccustomed to rigorous thought and analysis. "My cancer got MUCH better after drinking chamomile tea every day." Your personal history has about as much value as that.
Any competent physician can take an oral history from you, do the necessary tests and examinations, and be up to speed on your condition. He/she would have to do that anyway, to verify what's in your medical records.
Why do you keep riding this corporate MSM hobby horse? Are you a rep for a software company?
There is ZERO evidence that the computerized records would save significant numbers of lives, either. The whole preoccupation with computerized medical records is just (a) a corporate/MSM propaganda tool to divert attention from insurance/drug industry profiteering as the main cause of soaring health-care costs, and (b) a sales tool for software/computer companies. In all, another corporate fraud.
Systematic, universal computerization of medical records might possibly have some benefits, but it is being way oversold, is far from a panacea for any of the ills of the current system, and is essentially a an MSM/neoliberal diversionary talking point that you have digested and are regurgitating here without any real study or information.
Why don't you read the Himmelstein/Woolhandler study before you go on spouting your diversionary MSM propaganda here. Here's the link:
http://pnhp.org/PDF_files/ElectronicMedicalRecords-HealthAffairs.pdf
You lost me there. Could you explain what you meant?
Sorry for not being more specific. The stimulus bill included provisions and funding to convert American's health records into an electronic database, so they can instantly be accessed by any doctor you're seeing. Something like this could easily fix mistakes involving drugs that may provoke a fatal reaction if taken together, for example. I was pointing out there are some other things the government can do to prevent more deaths, but of course, human error will remain.
http://www.hhs.gov/recovery/reports
/plans/hit_implementation.pdf
There is ZERO evidence that the computerized records would save significant numbers of lives. The whole preoccupation with computerized medical records is just (a) a corporate/MSM propaganda tool to divert attention from insurance/drug industry profiteering as the main cause of soaring health-care costs, and (b) a sales tool for software/computer companies. In all, another corporate fraud.
Systematic, universal computerization of medical records might possibly have some benefits, but it is being way oversold, is far from a panacea for any of the ills of the current system, and is essentially a an MSM/neoliberal diversionary talking point that you have digested and are regurgitating here without any real study or information.
Why don't you read the Himmelstein/Woolhandler study before you go on spouting your diversionary MSM propaganda here. Here's the link:
http://pnhp.org/PDF_files/ElectronicMedicalRecords-HealthAffairs.pdf
Yawn.