Hundreds of people, nurses, doctors, medical students, grassroots activists, and California School Employees Association members gathered in downtown Los Angeles Monday to deliver an unequivocal message about the nature of the healthcare reform Americans so desperately need.
For those inside the tightly scripted White House Forum or anyone watching the live feed on line, that message was blacked out. Inside the pre-selected speakers kept within the accepted framework: we need reform, costs are out of control, Americans are hurting, and preventive care will solve all our problems ('fraid not). Unfortunately nothing proposed in the forum is likely to cure this crisis.
The “official forum” was so short on content, the Los Angeles Times was moved to note, that “the presentation was light on details. Universal coverage — health insurance for all Americans — was widely touted, but there was no discussion of how to achieve that goal.”
In other words, the public forums amount to little more than, “window dressing,” as the Times quoted Deborah Burger, co-president of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
Indeed all the real work is being done by a handful of Congress members. Even the White House is largely AWOL, writes Trudy Lieberman in the Columbia Journalism Review:
What they want is individual mandate — forcing everyone to buy private insurance, a massive bailout for the insurance industry.
What they don't want is anything that will disrupt their comfortable profit making machine, the real reason why discussion of single payer, as in the Medicare for all bill, HR 676, has been shut out of the debate.
The failure to include single payer as an option, despite its broad popular support among the American public, majority support among doctors and nurses, and an army of grassroots activists, means that all the pressure inside the hallowed halls of Congress is coming from the right. Not surprisingly, it means all the compromises and concessions will go to appease that crowd — the insurance industry and the right — as well. The result is that even the cherished goal of the liberal establishment, the more limited public plan alternative to private insurance, is greatly imperiled.
Fortunately, those on the outside are not going away.
“We know there is a conscious attempt to stifle our voices,” said CNA/NNOC co-president Geri Jenkins said at the Los Angeles rally. “As a nurse who still works at the beside I see up front and personal what this fractured and dysfunctional system has done to our patients and the public. We need to get for the for-profit insurance industry out of the delivery of care in this country, so we can have a just and equal system with a single standard of care that everyone is entitled to.”
While California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was inside trying to sell the nation on the type of reform he proposed in California which was rejected because of its call for forced insurance and its failure to rein in the insurance industry, the state's Lieutenant Gov. and former state insurance commissioner John Garamendi was outside with a very different message:
“As a former insurance commissioner, I know the insurance industry very well. They have but one purpose, the bottom line… They will manipulate the system so they do not have to pay” and spend one-third of every health care dollar on administrative costs “so they can deny claims and push people aside. It has to end, and it will end.”
How? “41 years ago we figured out how to solve this problem. Americans created a single payer, universal health care system that covers everyone who is over 65, allows you to choose your doctor and have a comprehensive benefit package. We know how to do it. All we have to do is take the 65, erase it, write in 0, and you send your premium to Medicare. That's change we can believe in and the change America needs.”
“We're here to send a message to the President” and the Congress “to put HR 676 on the table,”, said Reggie Cervantes, a 9/11 rescue worker whose own fight for healthcare was so well chronicled in Michael Moore's “SiCKO“. “I will not go silently into that good night.” Nor should any of us.
My favorite thing about the day was how very diverse a group we were – from doctors and nurses, to retired people to school janitors and bus drivers, we crossed a lot of lines. But all of us there because we understand that only real reform, creating a system with a single standard of care for all, can really work for America.