Yes I timed it.

After yesterday’s national debut of SiCKO, 1,000 nurses from the California Nurses Association and across the country rose as one, roared, and continued roaring for 8 full minutes.  I had goosebumps and tears in my eyes at the same time, and so did everyone else in the theater.

It was an emotional conclusion to a historic day: the campaign kick off for an extraordinary month of health care activism that aims to cure our nation of the health insurance corporations who are doing so much damage to all of us. 

The media, nurses and doctors, Moore, and healthcare activists gathered together because this—-this-—is our opportunity to finally change the healthcare system in this country.  We’ll recap what happened and plans going forward below…

Cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED Healthcare–thanks to SiCKO.

I won’t review the film here—nyceve, among others, has already done a better job than I could.

But this film is a masterpiece—and one told from the nurses’ point of view.  Those of us who aren’t RNs tend to think of the healthcare crisis in terms of numbers: infant mortality, deaths of uninsured, murder by insurance, record insurance industry profits, etc.  Nurses, however, are on the front lines fighting the “denial of care” industry (alias: private insurance corporations) and are used to seeing the tragic stories SiCKO uncovers.

That’s why yesterday was so exciting for them.  CNN, CNBC, USA Today, AP, The Wall St. Journal were all there, doing live stand-ups, shouting out questions, finally giving the silent genocide that is our healthcare system the attention it deserves.  Already Moore has changed everything—and we need to keep that change rolling. 

The day opened with a press conference with California Speaker Fabian Nunez.  Nunez is the perfect candidate to see the film: he has taken tens of thousands of dollars from the insurance corporations, and is carrying their water with bills to expand their customer base (and customer abuse).  He is emblematic of weak-kneed politicians across the country who won’t do the right thing—and who must be forced to. 

Michael Moore then went under the dome of the California Senate, and gave a rip-roaring defense of him film.  “I believe these insurance companies are an illegal racket and should be forced out of business.”  High drama.

From there Moore proceeded to rally the troops of 1,000 nurses and doctors outside, who gave him a hero’s welcome.  Finally, a media star who uses his celebrity to make a difference!

The nurses escorted him to the film’s screening in a sea of red scrubs, an image that appeared on the front pages of papers across California.  During the film, nurses alternated between laughing and crying, shock, horror and hope as the story of their battles was unfolded on the big screen.

There was much discussion afterwards about how to help this movie have the maximum impact.  Moore stressed that we must have a great opening week so that more theaters across the country will pick it up.  He also gave everyone blanket permission to call up local theaters, say they are close personal friends of his, and ask for help in setting up a discussion or handing out literature.  If you’re unsure if you can talk to the audience as they leave this film in tears ready for action, use this rule of thumb: it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.

And of course—calling all nurses, doctors, and other healthcare professionals.  We need you to join the “Scrubs for SiCKO” campaign.  Sign up with us, we’ll send you literature to hand out opening night June 29th.  Bring a buddy, and help solve this healthcare crisis by advocating for guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model.

Please post additional suggestions on how to maximize SiCKO’s impact in the comments.

And now, let’s check out the SiCKO coverage from yesterday:

Great San Francisco Chronicle article here.

Fun stuff from CNN.

Here’s a nice Huffington Post.

And the AP did their usual good work.

To join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), visit with GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee. 

The day after America’s nursing movement announced its plans to use the tragedy and horror of SiCKO to spur people to action, the attacks are already beginning.

Fortunately, for you, me, and most people the attacks are best described as unintentionally hilarious.  What moviemaker doesn’t want crazy anti-patient Web sites pumping our press releases about their product?

Cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED Healthcare–thanks to SiCKO.

You might have seen the plans: An unprecedented coalition of over a dozen activist nurse organizations will serve as the co-hosts of SiCKO, sponsoring screenings and premiers around the country, all of which will culminate on opening night, June 29th, when 3,000 RNs, doctors and other healthcare providers will fan out to every opening night around the country to talk with the audiences about how to transform their emotions into change.  Many of them will be in red scrubs–keep an eye out.  We have one goal: guaranteed healthcare now.

Well today we have this:

Robert Helms, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute told Cybercast News Service {said}…”what is sicko about both the California Nurses Association statement and the Michael Moore movie is the low level of understanding of our health care system that both reveal.

It is hilarious to me that the think tank who provided the intellectual architecture of a failed presidency would claim that nurses don’t understand the healthcare system.  I mean…it’s who nurses are.  Right?

Mr. Helms, however, seems a little shaky:

“Instead of destroying our system and copying the failed systems in Europe and Canada, we should attempt to reform both U.S. tax policy and Medicare and Medicaid payment policies so that consumers and providers have stronger incentives to compete on the basis of quality and cost effectiveness,”

So now he is bravely standing in opposition to nurses, Europe, Canada…the three horsepersons of the socialized medicine apocalypse.  For the record, Europe and Canada both have superior healthcare systems. 

I give Mr. Helms credit for understanding something: his corporate bosses have reason to be worried.  SiCKO will change everything.  The debate will become, “How are we going to deal with those out-of-control insurance companies?”  And of course, we will have energized nurses, doctors, healthcare activisits, and patients from around the country working to answer that question with guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model….like in Canada, Europe, and the rest of the industrialized world.

Finally, the silly Cato Institute gets their chance to try to tee off and whack the nurses.  Michael Tanner swings and misses:

“The public is not going to see both sides of it when they see this movie, so I think it’s going to be effective from their point-of-view,” he told Cybercast News Service. “It’s designed to tug at the heart strings, not have a serious public policy debate.”

Tanner noted that we are likely to see other health care providers praising the movie.

“There is a great deal of interest in universal health insurance among some providers. It guarantees someone to provide their product,” said Tanner. “I’ve never known businesses yet that aren’t happy to have the government pay for what they sell.”

Those darn nurses again!  They’re out there working for more healthcare for people.  It’s a conspiracy!

Thanks for the pub guys.

And everyone else: go sign up to help on June 29th.  Be one of the red scrubs–whether you’re a nurse, doctor, patient, friend, family, or healthcare activist.  We need you to help capture this incredible historical moment and change healthcare history.  Details to come…

Bring your red scrubs to SiCKO’s opening night and help the nurses turn this movie masterpiece into a social movement—this pop culture into political change.

The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee is acting as co-host of the opening night of SiCKO at 3,000 theaters around the country.  We are working with an unprecedented national coalition of nurse and doctor and health care activist groups to ensure SiCKO has a long-term impact on our nation’s healthcare system and politics. It’s an incredible opportunity for patient advocates and it’s only missing one element: you.  What are you doing the evening of Friday June 29th?

Here’s the plan:  Friday night, June 29th, we aim to have a registered nurse, doctor, patient, or other patient advocate at every SiCKO opening night around the country.  They’ll be there to greet the audience, hand out flyers as they leave, perhaps testify to the tragedies witnessed on the front lines of America’s healthcare meltdown.  Most of all, they’ll be there to convince the moviegoers that we can make change happen starting now. Please go here to sign up.

Plan on wearing red scrubs that night if you have them.  If not, wear red, and as the event draws near, we’ll send you links to download “red scrub” buttons, fans, and handouts.  Once the movie schedule is announced, we’ll send you everything you need.  All you have to do is round up a couple buddies and, when possible, buy your tickets online.

This call for 3,000 SiCKO patient advocates for June 29th is the first activity in a national campaign that includes screenings, premiers, marches, protests, legislative briefings, and press conferences around the country. The fun kicks off in California June 12, when Moore will give a special legislative briefing to the California Senate before being escorted by 1,000 registered nurses to an exclusive screening of SiCKO for healthcare providers and activists. 

Why SiCKO?  Because it puts on the big screen what nurses see every day: a healthcare industry that has abandoned its caring mission in favor of the pursuit of profit at any cost.  For the first time, patients and caregivers have a voice, and we need to use it to demand an end to these abusive healthcare corporations.  SiCKO changes everything.

And that’s why we have a chance to change healthcare politics in this nation.  The insurance industry and drug companies are already worried.  All we need now is for you to help us make SiCKO’s opening night a truly transformative event.  There has never been a national moment like these simultaneous 3,000 screenings.  This is our chance to change the world.  Let’s take it.

And in the meantime, we encourage you to take a look at some of the bills that would guaranteed healthcare for all Americans on the single-payer model-—John Conyers’ HR 676 in California and Sheila Kuehl’s SB 840 in California.

( – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee is going to be hosting premiers for SiCKO across the country next June.  We’re so excited that I’ve read every single review published.  The consensus: book the Oscar suite, it’s a masterpiece.  More importantly, the reviewers are stressing the non-partisan nature of the film and saying it will appeal to R’s and D’s; are treating health corporations as the pariahs they should be; and are examining the possibilities for action, organizing and change that this film contains. The film is already changing our national debate about healthcare and re-aligning healthcare politics—and it doesn’t open FOR A MONTH.

The lone dissenter? Rupert Murdoch’s Times o’ London. 

Let’s take a look after the flip…

Cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED Healthcare.

Time sums it up: Sicko is Socko.

Hardly anyone would deny that…the HMOs and pharmaceutical companies have made billions while Americans have health care below the standard of other industrialized countries, and pay more for it. (Even the flacks for HMOs acknowledge that the system needs reform.) Or that patients are routinely denied procedures they should be entitled to. “You’re not slipping through the cracks,” a claims adjuster, since reformed, tells Moore. “They made the crack and are sweeping you toward it.”

Moore isn’t the first to say that the health care system is sick – that it’s riddled with inequities and iniquities…he’s the one who does it the noisiest, with the highest entertainment value, mixing muckraking with showmanship, Ida Tarbell with P.T. Barnum. … As both harangue and movie tragicomedy, Sicko is socko.

While hardly anyone would deny what the  healthcare corporations have done to their patients, people aren’t shouting it from the rooftops…or big screen.  Until now.

FOX News (!) notes:

Filmmaker Michael Moore’s brilliant and uplifting new documentary, “Sicko,” deals with the failings of the U.S. healthcare system, both real and perceived. But this time around, the controversial documentarian seems to be letting the subject matter do the talking, and in the process shows a new maturity.

Unlike many of his previous films (“Roger and Me,” “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9-11”), “Sicko” works because in this one there are no confrontations. Moore smartly lets very articulate average Americans tell their personal horror stories at the hands of insurance companies. The film never talks down or baits the audience.
“This film is a call to action,” Moore said at a press conference on Saturday. “It’s also not a partisan film.”

The Hollywood Reporter finds Moore in the mainstream

This is the movie where Michael Moore gets a few Michael Moore haters off his back. “Sicko” posits an uncontroversial, if not incontrovertible, proposition: The health care system in the U.S. is sick. Even a right-wing Republican, when denied care by his HMO or stuck with an astronomical bill, is going to agree. Disagreement may come over the prescription Dr. Moore suggests.  But he makes so much damn sense in his arguments that the discussion could be civilized except for the heat coming from the health care industry, with billions of dollars in profits at stake, and certain politicians whose pockets are lined with industry campaign donations.

And Salon thinks the insurance corps have very few friends left:

there is no mistaking the passion and political intelligence at work in “Sicko.” It’s both a more finely calibrated film and one with more far-reaching consequences than any he’s made before. Moore is trying to rouse Americans to action on an issue most of us agree about, at least superficially. You may know people who will still defend the Iraq war (although they’re less and less eager to talk about it). But who do you know who will defend the current method of healthcare delivery, administered by insurance companies whose central task is to minimize cost and maximize shareholder return? Americans of many different political stripes would probably share Moore’s conclusions at the press conference: “It’s wrong and it’s immoral. We have to take the profit motive out of healthcare. It’s as simple as that.”

Variety thinks the movie rocks and only Rupert Murdoch’s fallen rag, the Times of London, doesn’t like the movie, arguing that “Moore can’t resist…revelling in the absurd.”

When you’re looking at American healthcare, if you’re not revelling in the absurd, you’re just not trying hard enough.

See you in line June 29!

To join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), visit with GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can help the fight by sharing your story about surviving the healthcare industry here.

(CNA joining the AFL-CIO over the SEIU or staying unaffiliated is a big deal. – promoted by juls)

Synergy = Momentum!  Yesterday the 75,000 members of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee joined the AFL-CIO.  No big deal you think?  Wrong.  The 325,000 RNs now consolidated in the labor movement have become a corps of committed activists for guaranteed healthcare on  the single-payer model.  Don’t underestimate them-especially as SiCKO continues to roil the national debate over healthcare.

Cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED Healthcare.

It’s been a long time coming:

Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the 75,000-member nurses’ union, said that after a century as an independent union, the nurses joined the AFL-CIO because of what they see as unprecedented momentum for comprehensive health-care reform. She said her union opposed any reforms that would leave private insurers as the system’s gatekeepers and chose the AFL-CIO because of its vote this year to support a single-payer system under which one entity would finance all health care.

“You can’t achieve a national health care system without the labor movement. It’s never happened in any country,” said DeMoro, whose union has members outside California through its national group, the National Nurses Organizing Committee. The move gives the AFL-CIO 325,000 registered nurses as members.

Don’t underestimate that.  The voice of America’s working people is joining the fight for the single-payer model of healthcare.  This means millions of activists for single-payer, it means that politicians on the payroll of the insurance industry will know they’re crosswise with working people, it means that the single-payer solution moves into the mainstream as the only proposal that has a solid constituency pushing for it.  Even Mitt Romney, by contrast, seems to be running from his Massachusetts mess.  Read the AFL-CIO blog here.

The timing could not be better, as SiCKO continues its amazing impact on the American psyche-before it’s even being released.  Is there another movie that’s had a greater impact a month before it debuts?

Conservatives are in a t-i-z-z-y.  (My favorite line, from a right-wing activist in this article: “what is sicko about both the California Nurses Association statement and the Michael Moore movie is the low level of understanding of our health care system that both reveal.”  So bitter.)

Google news finds 3,126 articles already written.  Keywords there include “Moore fever,” “rock star,” “revolutionary,” and “hottest ticket in Cannes.”

The New York Times declares that SiCKO has already given us a new set of talking points for healthcare…and quotes economist Uwe Reinhardt saying, “My point is we are on the verge of a populist reaction to the health system. The American people are on the point of being fed up.”

Just what this social movement needed!

PS–SiCKO movie posters here.

To join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), visit with GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can help the fight by sharing your story about surviving the healthcare industry [http://www.guarantee….]

(Ain’t that the truth? – promoted by atdleft)

I guess it’s true there are lies, dang lies, and Wall St. Journal editorials.  Now they’re aiming at the healthcare debate-which might be good news if it means they’re worried about progress.  The Journal looks at the demise of Illinois’ terrible healthcare plan and sees the death of universal healthcare and of healthcare guaranteed with single-payer financing.  Both not true.  We’ll look at what they say and why-and point out a couple of much more honest assessments after the flip…

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED Healthcare.

And they start….

“Universal” government health care has once again returned as a political cause, with many Democrats believing it’s the key to White House victory in 2008. They might want to study last week’s news from Illinois, where Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich’s tax increase to finance health care became the political rout of the year.

First of all, let’s realize why Blagojevich needed a tax cut: because his lame plan is built on increasing public subsidies to the same private, for-profit insurance companies that are destroying healthcare in this country.

By contrast, guaranteeing healthcare with the single-payer model that has succeeded in every other country would save us hundreds of millions of dollars a year.  So Blogojevich screwed up here by following the herd of other politicians. 

That said, you won’t find the Journal crusading against insurance industry bloat, denial of care, and malfeasance, will you?  Instead they’re hoping to Hillarycare this issue: attack politicians who cut deals with the insurance industry, and hope to kill all healthcare reform along the way. 

The good news is that plans built on increasing insurance company revenues will never work and will leave America eager for genuine solutions to the problem.  So it’s going to be much harder for the Journal to stall genuine reform again.

But a funny thing happened on this road to Canadian health care. The state’s more rational Democrats revolted, arguing it would drive businesses out of Illinois.

Ah, the big lie.

Frankly we could stand to learn a little something from Canada, as their people lead longer, healthier lives than we do in a demonstrably better and chaeaper healthcare system.

But this plan isn’t Canada.  It’s much more of the same: throw more money at the insurers and hope to do it in a decisive way.

The Journal knows that’s true but they got greedy. First they wanted to kill all healthcare reform, now they’re trying to kill the guaranteed healthcare or “single-payer” proposals specifically, by pretending that is what is being rejected.  It’s a non-sequiter.

But what’s bizarre is that businesses are fleeing the U.S. because we saddle them with such a huge competitive disadvantage.  Any employer would rather operate in Canada and never have to worry about worker healthcare than operate in the U.S. and watch insurance premiums gobble up all the profits.

Why aren’t our business leaders jumping up and down to get everyone covered with a simple, straightforward system?  They’re losing gobs money to increasing premiums…but they don’t seem to care.  Why not?  Lack of courage?  Lack of insight?  Herd mentality?  Something else?  It’s one of the great mysteries of this debate

As for national Democrats, Presidential candidate John Edwards has already proposed a huge tax increase to pay for national health care. At least he’s honest about what such promises require, but we doubt it will help his Presidential prospects. Illinois Senator Barack Obama has been silent on his Governor’s tax implosion, but someone should get him on the record. And Hillary Clinton, well, we can’t wait to see how “universal” her promises will be.

And here’s the game.  The Journal is also preparing for 2009, and trying to shut down healthcare reform.

Those of us who care about the issue need to be organizing now, so that when George Bush is finally replaced we have the political heft to force our new President to act boldly and decisively about healthcare.  This struggle will be won or lost by what we do over the next year and a half-not IN a year and a half. 

For a refreshing breath of healthy fresh air, check out this column about Illinois from the Physicians for a National Health Program, and this column about Massachusetts from Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association.

To join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), sign up with GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can help the fight by sharing your story about surviving the healthcare industry here.

(Horray for people power! : ) – promoted by atdleft)

Over 1,000 nurses and patients marched on the California State Capitol today to demand guaranteed healthcare, at an event sponsored by the National Nurse Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association. 

This is why we’re going to have genuine healthcare reform: because we have a beloved, engaged constituency pushing for it.  What do the insurers have? A bunch of mercenary lobbyists.  We’re linking to some pictures here…take a look.

Why are we calling it guaranteed healthcare?  Because today, no matter what insurance  you have, you can be denied care for any reason.  No other nation in the world has their healthcare set up this way, and neither should ours.  State Senator Sheila Kuehl has proposed SB840,  a guaranteed healthcare bill with single-payer financing: patients choose a private caregiver who is paid from a non-profit, statewide fund.  And here’s what a health care hero looks like:

We also debuted a new Web site at this rally, devoted to one simple thing: letting people upload videos telling the story of their mis-treatment at the hands of the healthcare insurance industry.  We all know it’s a crisis-but we need to see the faces behind the crisis to be moved to action.  Go visit GauranteedHealthcare.org and upload your story.

Oh…and those “individual” and “employer mandate” plans pushed from Massachusetts to California?  A Trojan horse for the insurance industry…and more cruel denials of care.

(In more important events in Sacramento… – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

Tomorrow is a historic day.  Just as we read of another life ruined by insurance…see below…nurses and patients are mobilizing for what will be the largest rally in American history for guaranteed healthcare.  A historic day–and you can read more about it below…

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED Healthcare.

Again, Blue Shield ruins a life:

A 2001 car accident that left Steven Hailey badly injured was the beginning of his continuing medical and financial calamity.

While Hailey was still recovering in his Cypress home and with medical bills topping $450,000, Blue Shield of California suddenly canceled his coverage. That forced the former self-employed machinist to wait so long for surgery to repair an injured urethra, he says in a lawsuit against Blue Shield, that his bladder stopped working. Since then, he has depended on an implanted catheter that drains his urine into a bag strapped to his body.

Now, Hailey says, he and his wife, Cindy, can’t afford the care he needs because Blue Shield began garnisheeing her wages to recoup more than $104,000 it had paid for Steven’s medical care before canceling him.

It’s not just Blue Shield.  It’s every insurance company, because our health system provides them financial incentives for denying care.  That’s backwards.  So we face the problem of patients being murdered by spreadsheet, with Blue Cross executives and agents acting as accomplices.

Hopefully this case will shake up Blue Shield:

Blue Shield says it would not have covered Steven in the first place had it known that his weight was 285 pounds, not the 240 listed on the application, or that he had been treated for headaches, hypertension and other conditions.

The Haileys say that Cindy made an honest mistake when she filled out the application and that state law bans the rescission of health coverage without evidence that the policyholder intentionally misrepresented his or her medical history. Blue Shield disagrees, saying the law allows it to cancel policies for any misrepresentation, even inadvertent ones.

Whatever the 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana decides could affect hundreds of suits challenging such cancellations as illegal and unfair.

There’s hope, of course, even as Washington snoozes away.

Check out “The Rabblerouser,” in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, a profile of CNA/NNOC leader Rose Ann DeMoro:

Actually, she’s executive producer of the budding RN movement, a modern-day Florence Nightingale, who’s administering to the front lines of nurses embattled by corporate medicine. As head of the committee and its sister union, the California Nurses Association (CNA), DeMoro has spent 20 years building that small union into a political powerhouse in California. Now she’s bringing her revolution to the rest of the country,

As direct-care RNs finally gain a voice in our policy and healthcare debates, they will be able to steer reform to benefit patients-not insurance companies and HMOs.

One thing we’re doing?  Kicking off our national summer of organizing with a massive rally tomorrow in Sacramento.  This is a historic moment–the largest rally for any specific healthcare plan in American history, and evidence of the built-in advantages that guaranteed healthcare has, including an organized constituency.

But it’s not going to happen without your help.  If you want to join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), sign up with GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can help the fight by sharing your story about surviving the healthcare industry here.

Being a Blue Cross patient sometimes sound like being a character in a horror movie.  The latest: a four-year old boy in California is born with a hole in his heart…as soon as Blue Cross finds out they cancel the family’s policy.  Cruel.  Read the whole story after the flip, along with an update on families forced into near-indentured servitude by medical bills, and good news in the fight for affordable prescription drugs and guaranteed healthcare.

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED Healthcare.

How can this be?

Four months after her first son, Jack, was born, Jessica Bath received a letter from her health insurance company, Blue Shield of California, saying she and Jack were no longer covered. Jack was born at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center on April 8, 2003, with a hole in his heart. Bath was counting on Blue Shield to pay for a scheduled surgery to repair it.
Suddenly, both she and Jack were uninsured.
“It was absolutely devastating for us,” Bath said. “How were we going to pay for his heart surgery?”
Blue Shield claimed it was canceling the Morro Bay resident’s policy because she had a medical condition, which she failed to disclose when she applied for the insurance. She and her lawyer contend the condition was insignificant and did not have anything to do with her son’s heart problem.

Just in case you’re inclined to believe Blue Cross’ side of the story:

Bath’s attorney, Ray Mattison of the San Luis Obispo firm Ernst and Mattison, said the case fits a pattern of similar lawsuits filed in Southern California accusing insurance companies of “post-claims” underwriting, meaning they search for reasons to cancel a policy after members file claims.

In March, the state regulators fined Blue Cross $1 million for routinely canceling policies of individuals who filed claims. They found that in all 90 cases investigated, the insurance company broke state law that allows rescission of a policy only if the insurer proves members intentionally withheld information when they applied for insurance.

The worst-case scenario was selling her home to pay for the surgery. But she discovered Jack’s condition qualified him for two public programs, California Children’s Services and Medi-Cal, which paid for the surgery.

It’s fortunate the baby got the surgery-but a crime that the public ends up paying the bill after the  Bath family spent years paying premiums to Blue Cross.  This is called cherry-picking, and it’s why all the reform plans built on private insurance will never work.

Larger questions: how can the Blue Cross executives sleep at night?  And why are we letting them do this to people?

The Baths probably will still have some medical bills to pay.  Let me introduce you to another woman to learn the effect medical bills can have on a family

Claudie Harris, 54, of Kansas City, Mo., knows about living on the edge. She owes about$5,000 toward her late husband’s medical bills. She’s paying it, slowly, from the salary she earns as a housekeeper at a facility for the mentally ill. But that leaves her a little short. So, to get by, she’s been taking payday loans, which are loans against her future earnings. “It’s easy money,” Harris says.

The fees are stiff-Harris usually pays $50 for a $250 loan. In two weeks, the loan falls due. If you can’t pay, it costs another fee to renew the debt for another two weeks. Pretty soon, the amount of interest could exceed the original loan, making it difficult to dig out: Harris’s receipts show an annual interest rate of 521 percent.

This is like indentured servitude.  She can keep working but can never be free.  All of the “individual mandate” plans proposed by politicians will continue to expose Americans to terrible financial burdens like this.

But there’s hope.  David Sirota writes today that the heartless healthcare corporations might be about to suffer a big defeat in Congress.  And a reporter in the “Insurance City,” Hartford, CT jumps on the bandwagon of guaranteed healthcare on the SinglePayer model after his incredibly frustrating run-in with an insurer.  Finally, a physician in New Hampshire lays out very clearly the reasons why we can and should enact fundamental healthcare reform to guarantee healthcare for everyone.

But it’s not going to happen without your help.  If you want to join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), sign up with GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can help the fight by sharing your story about surviving the healthcare industry here.

(How about a non-CDP diary 😉 – promoted by juls)

It’s time.

People in this country are suffering needlessly and literally dying in the streets because our healthcare system is completely broken.

And it won’t get fixed until we, the public, demand it.  Too many huge corporations are making too much money-and too many politicians are being bought off.  We need to demonstrate the transformative political power of people hurt by the healthcare crisis.

Please join the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association, and over 1000 nurse and patient activists at the Capitol in Sacramento California next Tuesday, May 8th at noon to demand that this country move to guaranteed healthcare.

We will be there to give a wake-up call to politicians around the nation and in California.  This march kicks off a furious summer of organizing, as nurses and healthcare activists around the country turn up the pressure on politicians.  We’re also launching www.GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a site dedicated to letting patients upload video and text stories about their abuse at the hands of insurance companies in order to build momentum for reform.  (It’s just a dummy site now.)

Nationally, despite the public’s repeated plea for healthcare reform, little is happening.  Perhaps nothing will until 2009, when America gets the keys to the White House back.  In order to influence change  we need to create our national healthcare movement NOW.  It’s not a movement just because a wide majority of Americans tell pollsters this is the most important issue to them-it becomes a movement when healthcare workers and patients and their friends and family hit the streets, calling out corrupt politicians and healthcare corporations. 

The situation is more urgent in California.  True-Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed a bill that will take us backwards by increasing the income and influence of insurance companies.  And, scarier, some of the Democrats in the legislature also seem ready to climb into bed with the insurance industry.  But the good news is that Sen. Sheila Kuehl passed a guaranteed healthcare bill, based on a SinglePayer or “Medicare for All” model, and she’s likely to pass it again.  The only way for Arnold to sign the bill is if he meets the overwhelming coalition of nurses and patients that damaged his reputation so badly in 2005-and this is how we make that happen.

And just in case you’re still not convinced…here’s an excellent opinion piece in today’s Chicago Sun-Times about the perils of for-profit insurance, written by the heroic activists at Physicians for a National Health Plan, and here’s a recent article about the widespread racial disparities in health.

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED Healthcare.  If you want to join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), sign up with GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can help the fight by sharing your story about surviving the healthcare industry here.