The Big Insurance corporations have been on quite a spending spree lately, throwing money around like there’s no tomorrow (and for them, there shouldn’t be.) Their recent purchases include: AARP, banks, and leading Democratic political consultants-which should make you worry.  This nation isengaged in a fundamental debate over the future of healthcare, and the one group that nobody is listening to is patients.  Let’s a take a look at what they’re up to…

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

Purchase 1: AARP; Cost: $1.5 Billion

For the last 50 years, AARP has existed to sell insurance policies to seniors.  They took a much more partisan turn when Bill Novelli, a Republican insider with ties to George Bush, took over the organization.  Now AARP is on the move to strengthen their ties with insurance corporations-and to strengthen those corporations in return.  First we learn that they have a new plan to make$1.5 billion in royalties  by selling Medicare Advantage plans to seniors.  Yes that’s a “B” and yes those are care dollars they’re skimming.  Now, compromised by this treasure, word comes that AARP is supporting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan to force every Californian to buy private health insurance.  Why wouldn’t they?  They get a cut. And patients pay the price. Sigh.

Purchase 2: Banks and Credit cards; Cost: none.
Blue Cross is starting a bank for its customers and Cerner is about to offer a credit card.  Is it just me–or is this idea completely terrifying?  Half of all medical bankruptcies are due to medical debt, and now Blue Cross wants people to bank there?  So they can just reach into your account and take what they need?  People are already incredibly dependent on their insurers, and this will make them more so.  (PS-Blue Cross just settled a suit with 900,000 doctors claiming it defrauded them; but I’m sure they’ll be a perfectly trustworthy bank.)

Purchase 3: Democratic political operatives; cost: cheap
One of the reasons that politicians are so timid on healthcare is because most of the Washington insiders who work on campaigns take money from heathcare corporations on the side.  Latest example?  Dewey Square Group, who helped run John Kerry’s and other campaigns, now have the insurance industry trade group as a major client.  They’re using their clout to strongarm Democratic politicians into supporting “Medicare Advantage,” which gives insurers an 11% bonus for offering Medicare. 

While our healthcare debate is raging, all this means that the insurance corporations are steadily amassing more money, power, and influence.  There’s only one thing they’re scared of: you.

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.

(Sad, huh? “The insurance industry is the enemy of most everything we do today” –Harry Reid – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

One more bitter irony of the destroyed American healthcare system-Mexican immigrants come to the US, only to see their health deterioriate because they can’t get healthcare (among other reasons).  Fortunately the Mexican government is investigating how to fix that.  Elsewhere in the fight for guaranteed healthcare, Ezra Klein gives us pointers from around the globe, the Massachusetts corporate insurance plan is failing, New Orleans has no mental health infrastructure, and we take a look at happenings inside hospitals.

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

File this under “tragic” and “surreal”: it’s a health hazard for Mexicans to immigrate to the US because we basically don’t have a healthcare system. 

Mexican immigrants — legal and illegal — generally arrive here healthy but see their health deteriorate within several years in large part because they lack access to health care while they are in the United States.

Public health crisis, moral crisis, call it what you will.  We import these workers then refuse to take care of them, meaning they receive better healthcare in the undeveloped nation they were born in.  So the government of Mexico-an impoverished nation-is looking for ways to extend THEIR guaranteed healthcare system to people working in THIS country.  Wow.

Ezra Klein, an excellent writer at the American Prospect, also takes a global view in his latest piece.  Basically all the “guaranteed healthcare” or “single-payer” countries spend less for more.  I know we sometimes thinks its un-American to learn from other countries but perhaps we can on this important issue.

Whatever we do, we should reduce the wasteful influence of health insurance corporations over our medical delivery.  Massachusetts, however, is experimenting with an individual mandate model that does the opposite of that–and early results aren’t good.  Let’s see, the plans seem unaffordable for both patients and the state, older and sicker people are the only ones signing up threatening the long-term stability of the project, and patients are having problems with choice of care providers.  Oh, and while the article doesn’t mention this, we can assume that insurers are going to jack their rates up as soon as people sign up.  It is, however, good for the insurance companies.

Meanwhile, on a more serious note, we know that Seung Cho passed in and out of a dysfunctional mentel health system in Virginia.  If a potential Seung Cho is alive in New Orleans, he will find even fewer mental health resources there.

Finally, a new study proves that when hospitals cut the number of nurses, patients die-and an editorial points out that when counties slash the public health budget, patients also die.  The nurses in Cook County fighting for the public health system there are American heroes!

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.

(I hope so! – promoted by atdleft)

The fight for guaranteed healthcare made an important advance yesterday as the California legislature prepared to send Governor Schwarzenegger a “Medicare for All” or “SinglePayer healthcare” bill.  He vetoed it last year-but will he have the guts to do so again?? Meanwhile a new study finds Canada’s healthcare better than the U.S.’s an only 42 percent the cost, the drug lobby keeps ripping us off, and the insurance industry wants to attack Hillary Clinton no matter what health plan she supports.

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

State Sen. Sheila Kuehl is a healthcare activist and the only person in the country who has passed a guaranteed healthcare bill through a state legislature.  Her bill, SB 840, the California Universal Healthcare Act uses single-payer financing, and has been projected to save the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year while covering every single person in the state.

Sounds good to me especially as the California Nurses Association is the bill’s lead sponsor.

While Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill last year, everything has changed this year, from the national healthcare debate to his desire to challenge Barbara Boxer for her Senate seat in 2010.  Wouldn’t it be weird if he ran as the person signed Guaranteed Healthcare into law?  Of course his plan right now is forced insurance-force people to sign up with private insurers, and fine them if they don’t.  Terrible. 

The good news is Schwarzenegger can’t even find a sponsor for his bill-while Kuehl just passed her bill through the Health Committee and sent it to the Senate floor for a vote!

There’s an excellent chance it will pass through both houses and give Schwarzenegger a very difficult choice.  Leading up to that, the bill does face a clear threat from a few Democratic politicians who want to compromise principles for expediency-fixing a gushing wound with a band-aid, then calling a press conference to brag about it.  In the words of Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the CA Nurses: “Whose life doesn’t count?

Those politicians should read the new study that came out yesterday, finding that Canada’s healthcare system is superior to America’s at only 42 percent of the cost.  That means we’re wasting about 1.2 trillion care dollars annually on nothing!  And, if Canada really has a 5 percent lower death rate in hospitals, our messed-up healthcare system is killing tens of thousands of people a year unnecessarily.  Many people talk about the private insurance racket as “Murder by Spreadsheet”-isn’t this “Genocide by Spreadsheet?”

Meanwhile, the for-profit healthcare corporations continue to roll in the bucks, as companies just got their Senate friends to prohibit Medicare from negotiating drug discounts.  More care dollars wasted.

And, finally, the insurance industry is already sharpening its claws against Candidate Clinton.  I hope she realizes they’ll come after her no matter what she does, and support a plan to get rid of their waste and abuse…like SB 840 or John Conyers’ federal bill HR 676.

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.

(Insurance companies are a blight on the health care system. And Blue Cross makes cherry picking an art. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

The coming health battle royale in California reminds us what we should have remembered from 1993: insurance corporations will kick, claw, and deceive to stop any healthcare reforms.  This time, it’s Blue Cross out to sink Arnold’s healthcare plan-they like that every single citizen is required to sign up for healthcare, but don’t like that their profits would be capped at 15%.  Why have a 15% profit margin, when you can have a 27%? 

Meanwhile, guaranteed healthcare, with “Medicare for All” or single-payer financing, gets re-introduced in the Golden State, a Brooklyn hospital is suing the insurance companies for conspiracy, the “employer mandate” to provide insurance is dead, and FINALLY the business press is starting to notice the economic catastrophe that is our healthcare sector.  That’s your updates from the fight for guaranteed healthcare-details below the fold…

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

The insurance companies sank Hillarycare-even though it carved out a continuing role for their profits-and they’re about to do the same thing to Schwarzencare.

When Blue Cross sells health insurance to someone who isn’t covered at work, the company typically makes a 27 percent profit. By the time salaries and other administrative costs are accounted for, only half the money the company collects in premiums from that person goes for medical care.
Those figures may help explain why Blue Cross – the insurance provider for roughly one in four people in the state who have health coverage, and with political heft in the Capitol to match – so far is the only major insurer opposing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s universal health care plan.
…. Schwarzenegger’s plan could sharply curtail Blue Cross’ industry-leading margins in a few key ways. Among the state’s largest insurers, it would have by far the hardest time complying with a requirement that 85 percent of premium dollars go toward medical care. Blue Cross devotes significantly less than that – from 51 percent to 79 percent, depending on the type of insurance plan – according to financial data filed with state regulators.

Don’t get me wrong-Schwarzencare is terrible; it requires everyone to sign up for junk insurance, and nurses hate it because the insurers are a blight on our industry.  Nonetheless, Blue Cross shows their true colors by turning down that bargain because a 15% profit margin isn’t enough for them.

Most tellingly, look at how Blue Cross is gearing up to fight the insurance reform planks that John Edwards among other have proposed:

The governor also wants to ban the practice of “cherry picking” young, healthy people least likely to go to the doctor, while denying coverage to others with even minor ailments.
That policy is legal – and not unique to Blue Cross – but the company’s success at limiting exposure to big medical bills has helped it rack up fatter profits than the state’s other top insurers.
“The idea that you have to sell health insurance to any comer is antithetical to their business model,” said Peter Harbage, a health care expert at the non-partisan New America Foundation who has advised the governor. “It’s not how they make money.”

If we’re going to get any kind of healthcare reform, we will have to take on the insurance companies that are corrupting the system.  It makes smart political sense to go after them head-on, rather than trying to protect them and give them the cover to continue blocking reform.  It won’t be easy though:

During the two-year legislative session ending in December, the company spent nearly $2.5 million to lobby lawmakers and regulators, records show – nearly $800,000 more than Kaiser Permanente, which ranked second among health insurers. The $1.4 million that Blue Cross spread around to lawmakers and political causes was also easily tops among insurers.
The company also donates generously to community organizations – $2.7 million last year – helping to foster good will in halls of power. 

• Meanwhile, there’s great news from California.  A plan for true guaranteed healthcare is up again.  Sen. Sheila Kuehl’s SB 840 is the only “single-payer” or “Medicare for All” plan ever to pass a legislature.  It works: everyone in, nobody, patients are guaranteed care, and the state saves hundreds of millions of dollars.  Arnold vetoed it before-will he have the guts to veto it again?

In the words of the heroic Sen. Kuehl:

“It’s amazing how much money you save by not wasting it on insurance companies,” she said.

You hear that Blue Cross?

Elsewhere in our national battle for Guaranteed Healthcare:

• A Brooklyn hospital is suing the insurance companies for conspiracy.  Finally.  One example:

In one example… says a woman admitted in October 2006 for a malignant brain tumor was denied coverage for eight days of treatment based on standards used for treating infectious disease. 

• States can no longer require employers to provide healthcare.  Our two remaining options for healthcare reform: mandating individuals purchase insurance, or  guaranteed healthcare with SinglePayer financing.

• The business media is starting to freak out over the damage healthcare is doing to our economy. Finally.

With all U.S. manufacturers fighting to maintain profit margins-and increasingly competing with companies from countries that don’t have an employer-paid health insurance model-is it time for significant change in this area?

• Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan is failing.

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.

As healthcare activists, here’s one thing we hear all the time: “of course SinglePayer is the only way to fix healthcare; but the country’s not ready for it yet; let’s go slow, instead.” Meaning the country’s ready for failed reforms and an even more powerful insurance industry?.  Commentator Maggie Mahar looks at this argument, notes its parallels with the passage of Medicare, and argues that we actually are ready for SinglePayer reform now.  Meanwhile, we find labor’s advocacy for SinglePayer increasing, while Robert Samuelson, Mitt Romney, and Arnold Schwarzenegger continue their work enriching the healthcare corporations.

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

-In a rebuke to the “yes…but” crowd of people who admit SinglePayer is the only way to fix healthcare BUT think it’s not time yet, author Maggie Mahar writes of the striking parallels with the campaign for Medicare:

Ultimately, President Johnson succeeded by pulling doctors into his tent {for Medicare}. This could be done today–polls show that roughly 50% of U.S. physicians favor national health insurance. But public support was key.
And today, public support is building, especially among aging baby-boomers.
If you are forty and healthy, you may not feel the change in the zeitgeist. But today, boomers over 50 are beginning to face serious health problems. They talk about healthcare with an intensity that they once reserved for real estate. …
To build public support for radical health care reform we also need to train our sights on those on those who are making excessive profits in our money-driven health care system. A good campaign needs a good enemy-and the for-profit health care industry fits the bill perfectly.
Even Obama has suggested (however cautiously) that we should being to question the profitability of U.S. healthcare: “Another, more controversial area we need to look at is how much of our health care spending is going toward the record-breaking profits earned by the drug and health care industry,” he noted in January. “It’s perfectly understandable for a corporation to try and make a profit, but when those profits are soaring higher and higher each year while millions lose their coverage and premiums skyrocket, we have a responsibility to ask why.”
That Obama would dare to make such a remark shows how the mood of the country is changing. 

–PNHP activist Don McCanne joins Maggie Mahar at TPM Book Club and lays out a compelling case for why only SinglePayer will actually work.

-Labor continues to rally around HR 676, John Conyers’ SinglePayer bill, as the 100,000 members of the New York Capitol Area Labor Federation endorse the bill.  This makes SinglePayer the only real healthcare plan with a constituency (except that health insurers love mandated insurance), and ensures that Democratic Presidential candidates will have to grapple with this as some point.  They’re joined by The two largest healthcare unions in California, who are both working for SinglePayer.

–Meanwhile, discredited grump Robert Samuelson brilliantly figures out who’s causing the healthcare crisis: old people! 
He writes:

In our careless self-absorption, we are committing a political and economic crime against our children and perhaps — when they awaken to their victimization — even ourselves.

No mention of the mercenary insurance corporations bleeding us dry?  Bizarre.

–Employers continue to drop health coverage, pushing more risk onto individuals.

–And finally, even Mitt Romney seems ashamed of his healthcare plan mandating people sign up with private insurers.  Why aren’t other politicians embarrassed to copy it?  Arnold Schwarzenegger is not only copying it-but dreaming of the penalties he’ll impose if people don’t sign up.

If you want to join the fight for single-payer healthcare, sign up with SinglePayer.com, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can share your story about surviving the healthcare industry here, and start contacting media here.

Real People Denied Real Healthcare is a new, online series of videos featuring patients telling their stories of abuse and mistreatment at the hands of a health insurance industry that makes money by denying care-not providing it.  While Bonnie Drew, who is featured in the latest webisode of Real People Denied Real Heatlhcare, suffers from a lack of quality medical care, the health insurance giants are rolling out new credit cards so patients will be able to pay 30% interest, hospital managers are making millions, and 11-year-old asthmatic loser her healthcare for being adopted.  No wonder activists around the country continue their push for SinglePayer healthcare for all Americans.

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

Bonnie Drew  thought she had health care-but when she got sick, she learned the bitter distinction between health insurance and healthcare.  Health insurance doesn’t guarantee you healthcare.

Watch Bonnie Drew’s heartbreaking story (and follow the links if you want to tell your own story).

Contrast her pain with what’s happening at the health insurance companies.  They are having such a good time bankrupting Americans that they are going to start introducing their own credit cards…with interest as high as 30%.

That’s right, you miss a payment (say you get a huge medical bill…or you’re sick) and you get charged 30% interest.

30% interest.

Aetna’s Healthy Living card, offered through Visa, has a 0 percent introductory annual percentage rate for the first 12 billing cycles, after which the standard APR financing rate is 9.9 percent for Platinum accounts and 15.99 percent for Preferred accounts. For late payments, the rate is 29.99 percent….

“Our intent in this is in providing our members a tool that we can use to help to fund their growing out-of-pocket expenses,” said Gene Cronin, senior product management specialist for Aetna. 

Wow, Gene, how helpful of Aetna to provide “members” with this “tool,” which by the way will remind them that even though YOU’RE the insurance company, THEY better be paying the health bills, oh and you’ll get to skim your interest off the top.

Meanwhile, hospital managers are making millions of dollars in pay and an 11-year-old asthmatic loses her health insurance for getting adopted.

Stories like these remind us why we have a movement for guaranteed healthcare in this country.  Writer Michael Corcoran thinks this movement has “the wind at our backs,” while a California consumer activist reminds us to make sure we’re really working for patients, and a California nurse points out that Walter Reed is symbolic of the Bush Administration’s disdain for all patients. 

If you want to join the fight for single-payer healthcare, sign up with SinglePayer.com, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can share your story about surviving the healthcare industry here, and start contacting media here.

(Hmmm… Interesting… – promoted by atdleft)

While most Americans are demanding fundamental changes in our healthcare system, some politicians propose doing it gradually, incrementally, in a series of baby steps.  To nurses, and caregivers, this raises an obvious question–whose life doesn’t count?–as Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director of the California Nurses Association, asks us to consider  today.  Elsewhere, SinglePayer reform is on the march in California and Ohio, Obama’s audience wants to know his plan, bowling alleys are more important than hospitals and Bush’s Secretary of Health and Human Services has lost his mind.

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

We know that the current health care crisis is, well, a crisis of life and death proportions notes Rose Ann DeMoro:

Every year, lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths, the equivalent of six times the number who died in the September 11 attacks.
Among those without insurance, lung cancer patients are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment; heart attack victims are less likely to receive angioplasty; people without pneumonia are less likely to receive X-rays or consultations; and people with colorectal cancer are 70% more likely to die within three years than people with health coverage.
The uninsured receive less preventive care, are diagnosed at more advanced disease stages, and receive less therapeutic care (drugs and surgical interventions). Not only do they incur greater pain and suffering down the road, they also face increased cost, at a time when medical bills already account for half of all personal bankruptcies and one third of credit card debt.

And that’s why gradualism is dangerous.  Whose life doesn’t count?

Gradualism – extending health coverage to some – is the mantra of the day, fawned over by some politicians and advocacy groups alike. The appearance of “bi-partisanship” or the staging of “strange bedfellows” is often the only purpose of grand pronouncements of support for universal health care. Whether the proposals actually solves the health care crisis is irrelevant or secondary to the hype.
The greater danger, we’re told, is doing nothing.
But what are we getting done?
Virtually all the gradual reforms being touted would reinforce a multi-tiered health care system with as many standards of care as there are dollars to purchase them, and further lock us into a private insurance-based model that holds our health hostage to the HMOs and big insurance companies for years to come.

Healthcare hero, and California State Senator, Sheila Kuehl is going to put the solution to the crisis on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk later this year.  He vetoed it once, but this time it will be more difficult.  Kuehl writes:

Real universal health care is demonstrably possible. SB 840 (the California Universal Healthcare Act), a bill I am carrying in the California Legislature, covers every California resident with comprehensive, affordable health benefits, and contains the growth of health-care spending while improving quality. Most importantly, it gives patients total choice of their doctors and hospital.
It works by consolidating the money we–employers, families and government–currently spend on health care. Everyone pays something in and everyone gets coverage–just one affordable premium–without co-pays or deductibles. This allows us to reduce the costs of administering our fragmented system from 30 percent of every health-care dollar down to 5 percent, a savings of $20 billion in the first year. 

California’s nurses are traveling up and down the state fighting for this SinglePayer proposal, while a group in Ohio is aiming to put a similar model on the ballot in 2009.

Elsewhere, presidential candidate Barack Obama is under some heat to release his healthcare plans.  Please Mr. Obama-be sure to deal with the parasitic health insurance companies that are bankrupting our care system and our nation, and to consider the idea that some version of SinglePayer is the only system that’s ever worked in a developed nation.  Same goes for the rest of you candidates…

Meanwhile, Bush’s Secretary of Health and Human Services seems either criminally insane or dangerously out-of-touch with the magnitude of our healthcare crisis, a bowling alley gets millions from the federal government while a near-by VA hospital is shuttered, and an astounding 85% of Alaskans think they’re paying too much for prescription drugs. 

The people are ready to take on the healthcare corporations-now where’s the leadership?

If you want to join the fight for single-payer healthcare, sign up with SinglePayer.com, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can share your story about surviving the healthcare industry here, and start contacting media here.

(More deadly wrongdoings by the insurance industry… Now why do we let these folks decide the fates of our lives? – promoted by atdleft)

Kimberly Tuzzi can’t afford dialysis; she might just die instead.  We meet her today, and look at why she and others like her can’t afford healthcare: because drug companies spend $25 million a month on lobbying, hospital execs earn $10 million a year, and insurance corporations give bonuses for kicking sick people off the rolls.  It’s no wonder that health experts and nurses are calling for a humane, SinglePayer system to fix our national healthcare disgrace.

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

The sad thing about Kim’s story is how common it must be:

Kimberly Tuzzi may simply tell the doctor to make her comfortable while her body shuts down.

The 39-year-old Scranton woman believes her juvenile diabetes has ravaged her kidneys. She cannot afford tests to find out for sure, let alone pay for dialysis treatments if they confirm her fears….

“I am either so sick somebody has to drive me to the doctor’s office or take me to an emergency room, or I wait for it to pass. That’s how I get my health care,” she said.

When you’re fighting for your health, the last thing you want is to also be taking a faceless, powerful corporate bureaucracy dedicated to denying you care.  Kim Tuzzi’s story is one of the many tragedies that together make up our healthcare crisis.

For example, just today we also read that kids aren’t getting vaccines because drug companies keep raising the prices and that even the well-off are afraid that healthcare costs will destroy their retirement.

What’s so wrong here?  Why can’t anyone afford healthcare anymore?

Let’s see: the big drug companies are spending about $25 million per month lobbying…you’re paying for this in higher drug prices. 

And hospital chains are paying the CEOs ten million dollars a year…you’re paying for their boathouse.

You’re also paying bonuses to insurance bureaucrats who kick sick people off the rolls and helping fund “cost shifts” that are designed to ensure individuals not insurers pay for care. 

We’re wasting all this money on healthcare, and everybody’s getting a cut except for patients.  What are we gonna do?

There’s hope.  Read this:

“I am proposing the federal government as the single payer of health care in this country. Only the federal government has the ability to fund one large risk pool through a payroll deduction. As the single payer, the federal government could negotiate hospital and physician payments even more effectively than it does now with Medicare.

“A single pool of funds, collected and administered by the government, would expand Medicare and replace Medicaid, SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program), the VA health-care system, and private health insurance, including the health care aspect of Worker’s Compensation. … Also eliminated would be the tax credit – or subsidy – given to companies for providing health insurance to their employees. In other words, the current, inefficient patchwork of payment systems would disappear, to be replaced by one nationwide program available to every citizen.”

The writer was Robert Gumbiner, an M.D. and a pioneer of the controversial concept of managed care, which has been a vain attempt to reduce the soaring costs of the volatile for-profit health-care system. Gumbiner founded FHP, in California, one of the nation’s earliest and largest HMOs, which was swallowed up in a merger with PacifiCare 10 years ago.

And even something as traumatic as Hurricane Katrina can move along our national movement for SinglePayer healthcare and healthcare justice, as a Kentucky nurse eloquently writes in this article.

If you want to join the fight for single-payer healthcare, sign up with SinglePayer.com, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can share your story about surviving the healthcare industry here, and start contacting media here.

(Movin’ on up! – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

A re-invigorated national nurses labor movement considers SinglePayer healthcare to be the most important issue facing our country.  In todays’ SinglePayer update, nurses criticize Schwarzenegger’s attempt to increase health insurance industry profits, lead the fightback against Chicago’s devastating health cuts, and remain in the crosshairs of the Bush labor department.  Elsewhere in the movement for SinglePayer healthcare, Pennsylvania patients are going to have to deal with even-bigger healthcare insurance giants, the mouthpiece of corporate America pipes up for mandated insurance, and the Nation criticizes unions who get into bed with bad-boss Wal-Mart.

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

Nurses are ethically and professionally obligated to serve as patient advocates-a calling they take from the bedside to the statehouse.  Much of their bedside work goes unheralded, but as a national nurses labor movement has finally begun to emerge, their work at the statehouse is becoming ever more important.

In California, Kay McVay, President Emeritus of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association, calls Arnold Schwarzenegger to task for proposing a “second-best” health plan that would require the average patient to shell out an unaffordable one-fourth of their income-in premiums and deductibles ALONE.  Can you afford to subsidize the insurers?  McVay notes:

A recent New York Times-CBS poll shows 64 percent of Americans believe the government should guarantee health insurance for all; 55 percent identified it as the top domestic priority for Congress and the president. In California, 60 percent favor a publicly funded universal health care system, like {California’s}SB840 and Medicare, over the current system. The public is ahead of the politicians and policy wonks.

Meanwhile, the Chicago machine continues its effort to protect their patronage jobs while cutting back healthcare.  Here is-no joke-the suggestion from the county’s health commissioner to immigrants: fly back to your home country and let your family care for you.  Chicago nurses are teaming up with immigrant rights activists to demand his resignation.  Read about it here and here.

The hospital industry and their allies in the White House have noticed this activism, and are gunning for nurses’ unions, attempting to divide and conquer RNs.  A new bill fights back against this tactic, which you might have first read about in coverage of a National Labor Relations Board decision known as Kentucky River.  Excellent coverage here by Nancy Scola.

Meanwhile our national healthcare nightmare drags on.  Pennsylvania customers will soon face an even more-behemoth insurance colossus attempting to deny them care.  Is this merger good for anyone?

Those same care-denying insurance corporations now have the the discredited Heritage Foundation pimping for them in Washington DC, and cheerleadering for the idea of forcing everyone to buy insurance from them.  Hmmmm…wonder where their funding comes from? 

Finally, The Nation criticizes labor groups who get into bed with Wal-Mart on the healthcare issue while ignoring the fact that Wal-Mart doesn’t care one bit about the health of their own employees.

If you want to join the fight for single-payer healthcare, sign up with SinglePayer.com, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can share your story about surviving the healthcare industry here, and start contacting media here.

(Another important update from the frontline…
When will we ever learn that this health care system is killing us? – promoted by atdleft)

Nathan Wilkes’ health insurance worked great-until his son was born with hemophilia.  Since then, he’s tasted the boot of a vindictive health insurance corporation angry that they’ve had to pay for the care they promise.  His employer’s premiums have gone up, his co-workers’ co-pays have gone up, and now they’re all avoiding going to the hospital.  Other carriers won’t touch him and his insurer put a million dollar annual cap on care-which Mr. Wilkes’ son Thomas will pass in a matter of months.  In his words, he’s become, “A canary in the coalmine of healthcare.”  His best option seems to be to divorce his wife so that she can be unemployed and eligible for Medicare.  His son is the face of our healthcare crisis. Today’s SinglePayer update also looks at nurses on the march in Texas, the fight for the soul of Louisiana’s healthcare system, and a new study showing healthcare “tax credits” don’t work.

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

Watch the heart-wrenching video:

This is how we organize our healthcare?  We put the insurance corporations in charge of it, when they have a legal obligation to care only about their own profits?

In the words of Mr. Wilkes:  “The only health proposal that doesn’t bankrupt families unfortunate enough to face a serious illness is a SinglePayer, national health plan.”

Mr. Wilkes’ story made him an advocate for single-payer healthcare, in the hopes that our care can be organized for the good of patients, not the profit of insurers.

Elsewhere, Texas nurses are on the march demanding support for a new law guaranteeing they only have to care for a safe number of patients at any given time.  The so-called safe RN-to-patient laws originated in California and are now up in legislatures across the country.

Meanwhile, a huge battle is raging over Louisiana healthcare.  Republican Senator David Vitter is leading the pushback against the Bush administration.  They want to take all the money that goes into the public health system, and instead use it to buy health insurance for one-third to one-half of the state’s uninsured population-who would likely find it hard to get to a hospital with the public system closed.  That clear?  Me neither. 

One problem with private insurance is that insurance corporations waste one-third of care dollars on overhead-as opposed to Medicare which only spends about 3% of care dollars on overhead.  Now we learn that “health coverage tax credits,” which are designed to get people to buy private insurance, ALSO waste one-third of THEIR care dollars.  So, one-third for the IRS, one-third for the insurer, one-third for patient care.  Do you think THAT is a good alternative to the SinglePayer systems working well around the world?  Me neither.

Finally, some great grass-roots coverage of the healthcare crisis in Connecticut.

If you want to join the fight for single-payer healthcare, sign up with SinglePayer.com, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can share your story about surviving the healthcare industry here, and start contacting media here.