( – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

Does passage of a bill that funnels millions of additional Americans into the private insurance system, and the decision of House leaders to shut down debate on one single payer amendment and scuttle another, mean the end of the years of efforts by single payer activists to win the most comprehensive reform of all?

Does it mean the end of SB 810, even once Governor Schwarzenegger has wandered off the stage?

For the nation’s nurses and the many grassroots activists, the answer is clearly no.  And we’ve got work to do.

In discussions and organizing, now occurring coast to coast, including a strategy conference this weekend in St. Louis hosted by Healthcare-NOW, many are charting a new course that turns next to the U.S. Senate, to the Senate-House Conference Committee, and then to state capitols from Sacramento to Harrisburg where vibrant single payer movements and campaigns continue to grow.

Most single payer advocates acknowledge some important reforms in the House bill, especially the expansion of Medicaid to millions of low income adults, increased regulation of the insurance industry, expanded public health funding for community programs for low income families, and a more progressive tax plan than the onerous tax on middle income health benefits proposed in the Senate.

But those who dismiss the weaknesses, coupled with the overhyped rhetoric comparing the bill to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s or passage of Social Security and Medicare, should be wary of the backlash when millions of Americans continue to face health insecurity and potential bankruptcy as their healthcare costs rise largely unabated and continue to experience denials of medical treatment insurance companies don’t want to pay for.  

As California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro has written

Social Security and Medicare were both federal programs guaranteeing respectively pensions and health care for our nation’s seniors, paid for and administered by the federal government with public oversight and public accountability

By contrast, the main provision of the House bill, and its Senate counterpart, is to expand health care coverage by requiring everyone to “have insurance” — mostly buying private insurance (since the public option is open to so few). Ultimately whether some want to admit it or not, a massive bailout worth tens of billions of dollars to the insurance industry.

Further, while Social Security and Medicare were both significant expansions of public protection, the House bill actually reduces public protection for a substantial segment of the population, women, with its unconscionable rollback of reproductive rights in the anti-abortion amendment.

To that end, tempering some of the triumphalism would be advisable. Equally unfathomable is the threat by some liberal groups to target single payer proponents Dennis Kucinich and Eric Massa who voted against the anti-choice amendment as well as the full bill. (Massa, in particular, was elected with active support from the single payer community and took a principled stand in a swing district.)

Those who start down this road would do well to remember the nurses, physicians, and thousands of single payer grassroots activists who have carried the flame of genuine healthcare reform for years, and will certainly continue to make their voices heard, especially as employers continue to shift skyrocketing healthcare costs to workers and out-of-pocket costs eat up, by some accounts, 15 percent to 19 percent of family incomes.  

One of those suggesting that work must continue, even prior to the vote, was House Whip James Clyburn who told the Associated Press November 5:  

“I didn’t want anyone to think that if you don’t get everything you want in this health care bill right now, that’s the end of the game. What we need to do is lay a foundation. Get passed what we can pass that will have a meaningful impact on people’s lives – not put too many of our people in jeopardy – and then build upon it later. It’s a long road.”

For single payer proponents, the construction on that long road begins in the Senate now where Sen. Bernie Sanders plans to introduce single payer language. As he said on Vermont Public Radio this week:

“I believe that a single payer system is the most effective way to provide comprehensive, universal, cost-effective health care. … (Without single payer) that ain’t going to happen. The health insurance industry and the drug companies are too powerful.”

Sanders is also proposing a federal exemption of legal barriers for states that opt to establish single payer systems, similar to the Kucinich amendment that was stripped out of the House bill by House leaders in the hours leading up to its final vote.

The reason for the amendment, Sanders notes:

“So that if states like Vermont or California or Pennsylvania – states that are strong in a single payer movement – want to move in that direction that they will be able to do so. And I think … what you will probably end up seeing is we will move toward a Medicare for all program when one state does it and does it well. And other states say, ‘You know what? That looks like the most cost effective, fairest way to provide quality care to all people.'”

You can help. Contact your Senator, (202) 224-312, and urge them to join Sanders in supporting this important amendment. That’s what a lot of us will be working on next.

With Max Baucus’ Senate Finance Committee continuing to shut out the voices of single payer advocates while rolling out the red carpet for the insurance giants and other health care corporations, five more were arrested today and dozens of other nurses stood before the committee in a dramatic silent protest.

Today’s action — the second in a week that led to 8 arrests — coincided with the anniversary of the birth of Nightingale. It also marked the kickoff of two days of actions by nurses from around the country who are pressing for a legislative agenda for quality nursing care and a single standard of quality care for all.

Here’s AP.  Here’s a link to a photo of the nurses being arrested.  The Wash Times covers it here and here’s Patricia Murphy.

Action!  Fax Mad Max and tell him single-payer deserves a voice in the debate!

All told, this is the most media coverage single-payer healthcare has received since SiCKO was released in 2007-ironic given that it comes from an attempt by Washington insiders to keep America’s caregivers out and stifle discussion of their healthcare plan.

“What a disgrace that RNs and physicians are shut out and arrested while the insurance industry is given a seat at the table. We would expect that from the Bush administration, not in the time the Obama administration,” said NNOC/CNA Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro. “The Baucus Committee can arrest nurses, but they can not silence the voices of RNs who will continue to speak from their hearts on behalf of their patients who want and deserve real reform.”

Standing up in the audience and speaking before she was arrested, Sue Cannon RN, said, “don’t guarantee drug profits, guarantee health care. We’re entrusted to care for our patients, and we can’t do that without single payer, guaranteed healthcare. We need no more Blue Crosses and double crosses.”

“In honor of Florence Nightingale, patients need access to healthcare. We need to protect our patients, we need single payer now,” said NNOC/CNA Board member DeAnn McEwen, RN.

Also raising their voices and accepting arrest were Steve Fenichel and Judy Dasovich, two physician members of the Physicians for a National Health Program, and  Jerry Call of PNHP and Health Care Now.

Some 40 other RNs staged a silent protest — standing before the committee in red nursing scrubs and turning their backs to show signs reading “Nurses and Patients First. Stop AHIP. Pass Single Payer.” AHIP, America’s Health Insurance Plans, is the private insurance industry lobby arm that is given a regular voice by the Baucus Committee, which is in the forefront of discussion on a health plan.

The protests, before a sea of reporters and cameras marked a continuing escalation of voices of protest —  last week eight were arrested — in an ongoing spectacle in which the committee has bent over backwards to accommodate the insurers, the drug companies, the coalitions representing America’s largest corporate interests, even the rightwing Heritage Foundation and conservative think tanks. All while excluding the doctors and nurses who favor single payer and have the most direct, hands on experience with our failed insurance based healthcare system.

Noting the shut out, Call said to the committee, “60 percent of the chairs at the table should be for single payer advocates because 60 percent of the people want single payer” reform.

That’s a system in which choice of doctor and other providers is guaranteed, with comprehensive benefits, real cost controls, and an end to insurance industry denials of care.

And more pix here.

After years of shredding our public health infrastructure and ill advised minimal preparations for the next great global pandemic, the spreading swine flu threat is at last making clear the very real calamity that could be just around the corner. If not today, surely from the next epidemic.

The Obama administration’s call on Congress Tuesday to allocate $1.5 billion for combating the virus is a start, but only a start. The RNs of the National Nurses Organizing Committee and California Nurses Association (NNOC/CNA) believe that far more is needed in federal action, in regulatory crackdown on insurance practices that potentially inhibit those who are infected from seeking help, and in global coordination.

From SARS to avian flu to the swine influenza, the only question has not been if, but when.

Three years ago, during the advent of an avian flu outbreak, in an article by Conn Hallinan and Carl Bloice in the national magazine of the National Nurses Organizing Committee, we warned that the “firewalls for stopping the next great pandemic are getting thinner.”

If the swine flu or the next pandemic has only the fatality of the 1918-1919 global influenza pandemic — 2.7 percent — it would have a catastrophic effect. That pandemic killed 675,000 Americans and anywhere from 50 to 100 million people at a time when the world’s population was less than a third what it is today, and when populations were far more isolated.

Obviously, there have been medical advances in the past 90 years. But on many other levels, conditions remain as precarious as ever.

In the U.S., public health services are often first on the chopping block when budgets are tight — such as the now evidently foolhardy decision of politicians to slash $870 million from the President’s economic stimulus bill that was allotted to fight pandemics.

And many politicians compete to see who can transfer more resources from the public setting into the pockets of private healthcare corporations — often while harvesting hefty campaign contributions from those same companies.

The result is a virtual decimation of many community clinics, especially in rural and medically underserved communities, and a starving of badly needed funds for public hospitals and services.

Over the past eight years especially, we’ve also seen a rash of hospital and emergency room closures, reductions in available hospital beds, and the type of equipment needed to fight pandemics. For example, in 2005, we noted, there were only 105,000 mechanical ventilators, between 75,000 and 80,000 of which are in constant use. Ventilators are particularly important if a pandemic takes on the characteristics of the 1918-1919 flu in which a major killer was acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Hospital and bed closures are all too often driven by the insatiable lust of healthcare industry corporations for greater profit that can be secured by relocating in wealthier communities or re-allocating resources to more profitable services, such as boutique clinics and surgery centers. Such is curse of our absurd reliance on the privatization of healthcare.

An immediate shift in priorities and thinking is needed, if not for swine flu, for the coming plague. Here’s the first call to action by the national nurses movement (link is a .pdf):

• Recruit and mobilize teams of scientists to create the appropriate effective vaccine for the virus.  

• Cease and desist any reductions in public health programs at federal, state and local levels. Lift any freezes on public health funding currently in place.

• Implement a moratorium on any closures of emergency rooms, layoffs of direct healthcare personnel, and reductions of hospital beds.

• Allocate funding for recruitment and retention of school nurses, public health nurses.

• Expand the network of community clinics, especially in medically underserved areas.

• Add thousands of additional ventilators/respirators, which are critically needed in the event of epidemics.

• Assure the availability of protective equipment for all healthcare personnel.

• Require all insurance companies to suspend or waive all out-of-pocket expenses, including co-pays, deductibles, or co-insurance that discourage individuals from seeking preventive care for early signs of infection.

On the international level, it’s apparent that the World Health Organization is overwhelmed. A global infrastructure similar to what is being discussed for the economic crisis should be formed and sanctioned, at least by the G20.  International cooperation and most importantly, transparency of data from all sources, health care facilities, governments, and individuals, is essential to identify the virus and track its patterns.  The global health community must have the authority to require systematic, uniformly collected information to be reported on influenza cases in order to start formulating an effective vaccine.

Within the U.S., we should learn the lessons of the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, one of which was the enormous mitigating effect on mortality of adequate nursing care. We need to rededicate our nation to expanding the supply of nurses and safe patient care in our hospitals and clinics, which is a central component of the healthcare safety net that is especially vital at times of public health crises.

Finally, in order to promote containment and convention, we must eliminate the greed-driven barriers to care based on ability to pay.

Recent reports have emphasized the growing number of Americans who are skipping routine medical screenings, exams, and general preventive care due to the skyrocketing co-pays, deductibles, and other use charges imposed by insurance companies.

Price gouging by the healthcare industry has already put tens of millions of families in healthcare jeopardy, especially in an economic crisis. At a time when untold numbers are already exposed to a dangerous virus, we need to be removing any barriers to medical care that would exacerbate the spread of contagion. We can not afford to wait.

The updated CNA/NNOC swine flu page is here.

Dissent magazine has a fascinating article by Marie Gottschalk on current efforts to achieve healthcare reform in the United States http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1166. SEIU President Andy Stern and the business-friendly approach that failed here in California gets some well-deserved criticism:

“So far, Stern has garnered a disproportionate amount of media and popular attention. His business-friendly stance on health care reform, which stresses how the U.S. health care system is fundamentally hurting the country’s economic competitiveness, helps explain why. But his economic competitiveness argument is not convincing and could undermine efforts to forge a successful coalition or movement on behalf of affordable, high-quality care for all.”

The author argues that wooing business leaders in order to build momentum for healthcare reform is a backwards-thinking approach, and one that has failed before. For example, the labor movement tried to bring business leaders to the table in the early 1990s. The Clinton healthcare plan fell apart not only due to a lack of grassroots support, but also after multimillion-dollar attacks came from those same business leaders. The author also shows that healthcare costs are not hurting the U.S. business community’s ability to compete with overseas companies.

One example: European and Japanese firms bear higher indirect costs, because of higher corporate taxes. Those extra costs generally exceed what even the most generous American businesses spend on coverage for their employees. Another example: corporate spending on healthcare, as a percentage of after-tax corporate profits, declined steadily in the U.S. between 1986 and 2004 (except for the three years from 1998 to 2001).

Gottschalk’s bottom line: “The economic competitiveness framework obscures the fact that employers and insurers have been remarkably successful at shifting health care costs onto employees, their families, and other individuals through higher co-pays, higher deductibles, restrictions on coverage, and other measures,” and the focus needs to be placed squarely on the damaging economic consequences for individuals and households who are bearing the greatest burden of rising healthcare costs, not on employers.

The reality is that only by building a bottom-up movement will we win healthcare reform—and only after we make it clear that change is important because it’s the right thing to do for everyone. Arguing that we need reform in order to protect corporate profits is the wrong way to go. It is the right of every person in this country to have access to quality, affordable healthcare. This moral rationale for reform must maintain center stage, linked to an economic rationale focused on reducing costs for working families, and delivering higher-quality healthcare more efficiently—by providing better integrated, more appropriate services, and reducing insurance company administrative overhead, marketing costs, and profit.

My union, United Healthcare Workers-West, fights for real healthcare reform based on these principles and our personal experiences with this perverted system. We oppose phony reform, like what Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed for California last year. Badly misreading the situation here in the state, Andy Stern supported a reform package that yielded far too much ground to Schwarzenegger’s proposals. That plan proved unacceptable to the rest of the labor movement and the State Senate, and would have been rejected by voters had it gone to the ballot.

In an extraordinary convention just concluding in Puerto Rico, here’s what you didn’t hear from Andy Stern’s paid PR blitz.  SEIU was under siege throughout by protest encampments of the popular Puerto Rican Teachers’ Union, responding to SEIU’s raid of the island’s largest  union– during a strike to improve horrific educational conditions.  

Inside the convention, to the detriment of the overall labor movement,  Stern successfully squashed  the internal dissent by SEIU’s democracy activists, thereby further concentrating power in himself.  The CEO model.

And in an extraordinary development, Stern announced that  SEIU is basically doing away with labor reps in favor of outsourced call centers…which makes sense, in that if you sign no-strike promises to your employer, why would you need to mobilize your members?  

There’s more!  SEIU is continuing its war against state and national RN unions by now picking up John McCain’s frame of attacking “government-run healthcare” as their latest salvo against the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (AFL-CIO).  If anyone doubted SEIU’s willingness to sell out genuine healthcare reform in a second, there it is.

Details below…

Juan Gonzalez and Democracy Now note that SEIU is trying to colonize the independent Puerto Rican teachers’ union in the midst of a historic  strike-and hope to do the same to other Latin American unions.  Solidardad no mas?  Read the background here or watch the video here about why SEIU was facing a protest encampment by Puerto Rican teachers .  Gonzalez:

I think that the key thing here is that the teachers’ union is the largest and most militant union in Puerto Rico and has always been, and the efforts of SEIU earlier this year when the teachers were in the middle of a major battle and a strike with the government to step in, in essence, and to try to take over or raid the leadership of the union, has created enormous reverberations throughout the labor movement in the United States, as well as in Latin America. I think, in fact, one of the most interesting things was that Stern and Dennis Rivera announced before the convention started that they are going to begin a new effort from Puerto Rico throughout Latin America to build ties between the SEIU to build global unions. So, in essence, what SEIU is trying to do by gaining control of the teachers’ union and, in effect, the Puerto Rican labor movement is to then branch out into the rest of Latin America. Now, they insist that they’re not going to do it in a way that will hurt the autonomy or the democracy of those unions, but the record has so far-has not been too good in that way. …. But the fact that SEIU would have such a demonstration at its national convention shows that the contradictions are growing there.

Gonzalez also notes the irony of SEIU pretending to carry the banner of labor reform, while consolidating power in one problematic leader.  

And the reality is that SEIU has increasingly become a more centralized union in the way it operates, and it is increasingly, in terms of some critics, doing anything it can to grow, in terms of making arrangements or deals with political leaders to be able to expand membership in different parts of the country. So I think that this is an important or watershed moment, because the SEIU is leading the supposed reform movement within organized labor, when now the leaders of the reform movement are being challenged over the nature of their reform. And I think that this is the opening salvo in what’s going to continue to be an ongoing battle.

Labor journalist Steve Early also covers the contradiction of Andy Stern holding a convention in Puerto Rico-exactly while trying to bust the Island’s largest and most-beloved union!

Using the “mobile picketing” skills well honed during a ten-day strike by thousands of teachers in February, the FMPR delegation marched right up to a police check-point–two hundred yards from the meeting hall-and burst right through. The flying wedge took  several casualties along the way, from flailing  police clubs and attempted collars. They then made a successful dash for the front door of the building, which is bigger than an airline terminal.

The ensuing picket-line-composed of fleet-footed survivors of the race to get in-had a feisty David vs. Goliath feel to it. For more than two hours, the teachers walked, chanted, sang union songs, distributed leaflets, and displayed a big FMPR banner under the soaring arches of the! convention center entrance. The FMPR message was “Stop Union Raids” — one that SEIU has fervently embraced back home but only when the California Nurses Association is “raiding” SEIU, in which case it should stop immediately….

Apparently the reform and democracy activists within SEIU were squashed by Andy Stern.  One reports:

While obviously they wanted to go out on a high note, this convention will always have a cloud hanging over it, memorable for its unparalleled security, its level of doublespeak, its stomping on free speech, and now its marred election process.

Meanwhile, SEIU actually told the New York Times that they are doing away with labor reps, the people who walk the halls of facilities and organize workers.  Instead?  Call centers.  “Please hold if you want to stand up to the boss.”  This is an extraordinary development, and one that undermines genuine worker power.

As 2,000 convention delegates gather in Puerto Rico, the Service Employees International Union is about to jettison a time-honored union tradition – having members go to their union representatives with their questions and grievances.  The delegates are expected to vote to have union members rely on call centers instead to handle their problems.

But some union leaders and members complain that the call centers would hurt the union and its members.  Sometimes you can’t get through to these centers,” said Eva Lozada, a home-care worker from Oakland, Calif. “It’s like talking to an A.T.M. This will be bad for the union.”

Hilariously, SEIU’s latest attack on the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee is the same one John McCain launches at Barack Obama: supporting “government-run healthcare”.

In a mailing to CNA/NNOC members this week, SEIU blasts CNA/NNOC for supporting a “government-run health care system.” McCain has used almost identical language to disparage Obama’s proposals for healthcare reform on an issue that will be a major focus of the fall campaign.

“By carelessly and cynically adopting the McCain language, SEIU is not only showing its contempt for the majority of Americans who have told pollsters that the government should guarantee healthcare for everyone as a solution to the healthcare crisis that has put so many of our families at risk.

“They are also giving aid, comfort, and ammunition to Sen. McCain whose own healthcare plan would be a disastrous continuation of the dismal and failed status quo,” said CNA/NNOC co-president Malinda Markowitz, RN….

To obtain sweetheart deals with employers, SEIU has “routinely sacrificed patients,” CNA/NNOC Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro noted. She cited, for example, an agreement with California nursing home operators under which SEIU agreed to back legislation impeding patients’ rights to sue over nursing home abuses and oppose reforms to require better staffing for patient safety. SEIU also joined with the New York hospital industry to endorse the closure of hospitals and nursing homes.

Another independent nurses union-New York Professional Nurses Union-calls on all RNs to resist SEIU, due to their terrible track record of representing RN issues.  They write in an open letter about their experiences with SEIU:

1199/SEIU has a top-down leadership structure with very few RNs in top leadership positions.

We negotiated strong contract language only after we left 1199, including minimum nurse/patient ratios and a prohibition against all mandatory overtime.  

We became an independent union in order to gain control over our own bargaining and our own professional lives.  No union can represent the interest of registered professional nurses better than a nurses union.  Nurses need a union of nurse, by nurses and for nurses.  

Serving Employers Instead of Us.

Andy Stern’s SEIU International has gone and proven why RNs want nothing to do with.

Even though they’re providing the evidence for all the critiques of CNA/NNOC, today is a dark, dark day for the labor movement.  Last night, in Dearborn Michigan, at an annual conference of union activists, sponsored by the non-partisal Labor Notes SEIU resorted to violence to get their messages across.

I will link to the release and pictures after the release.

I’m sure SEIU will come on here with some crazy spin justifying their violence, but please first answer these questions:

1. Will SEIU pay the bill of the hospitalized worker?

2. Will Andy Stern promise to renounce violence?

3. Will you aplogize to all involved?

4. Will we see the same tactics in other venues?

I ask everyone reading this to go look at these two pictures: here and here.

That is the face of modern-day union thuggery.  

And now I’m posting below the press release put out by Labor Notes.  They only have a short blurb up on their site so far, but this release has been circulating, and I am going to post the whole thing:

April 12, 2008

SERVICE EMPLOYEES UNION ATTACKS LABOR GATHERING- CONFERENCE-GOERS ASSAULTED

Dearborn, MI-The Service Employees International Union turned their dispute with the California Nurses Association violent by attacking a labor conference April 12, injuring several and sending an American Axle striker to the hospital.

A recently retired member of United Auto Workers Local 235, Dianne Feeley, suffered a head wound after being knocked to the ground by SEIU International staff and local members. Other conference-goers-members of the Teamsters, UAW, UNITE HERE, International Longshoremen’s Association, and SEIU itself-were punched, kicked, shoved, and pushed to the floor. Dearborn police responded and evicted the three bus loads of SEIU International staff and members of local and regional health care unions. No arrests were made.

The assault took place at the Labor Notes conference, a biennial gathering of 1,100 union members and leaders who met to discuss strategies to rebuild the labor movement.

David Cohen, an international representative of the United Electrical Workers, asked protesters why they came. He said one responded, “they told us just to get on the bus.” The protesters included several members with young children, who had to be ushered away when SEIU tried to force their way into the conference banquet hall. Protesters were targeting Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the AFL-CIO-affiliated CNA. DeMoro was scheduled to speak but declined to appear after threats were made against her union’s leadership.

Despite being welcomed to the conference earlier in the day-and given space to debate supporters of the CNA and the National Nurses Organizing Committee about neutrality organizing agreements-SEIU international and regional staff shouted down speakers at workshops and panels throughout the event.

“Labor Notes has always been a space for open debate, but when a union decides to engage in violence against their brothers and sisters, we draw a line,” said Mark Brenner, director of Labor Notes. “Violence within the labor movement is unacceptable and we call on the national leadership of SEIU, including President Andy Stern, to repudiate it.”

For more information, contact Chris Kutalik 313-378-2588 or Mischa Gaus 773-627-3205  

A major reason for the increasing controversy surrounding SEIU International has been their lack of commitment to genuine healthcare reform-and in fact their active attempts to undermine and sink patient-centered, single-payer reforms.  

Progressive elements in the labor movement (and their own union) have long been aware of this problem, as have healthcare and single-payer activists around the country.  

This story is now entering the wider public discussion as SEIU International embarks on new partnerships with corporate America and, all too often, Republican power brokers.  We’ll take a look, below, at their latest partnership, this one with the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Association of Realtors, to support a bill that hurts patients in the name of increasing insurance corporation profits-and, perhaps, winning employer sanction for SEIU organizing.

…for more background, please visit the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee’s new site, ServingEmployersInsteadofUs.

Jeffrey Young in the Hill newspaper this morning unveils the new partnership:

A bipartisan group of senators, with the support of small-business and labor union lobbyists, on Wednesday unveiled legislation they said would go a long way toward expanding healthcare coverage for the largest segment of the uninsured… the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and the National Association of Realtors (NAR) to develop the legislation. …[to]  break a deadlock that has stalled past efforts to facilitate access to health benefits for small-business owners, their employees and the self-employed… in addition to the business groups, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has endorsed the bill.

What does  the bill do?

The legislation would combine annual tax credits up to $2,000 per worker for small-business owners and $3,600 for the self-employed with state- and federally based insurance pools designed to spread risk for insurers and reduce premiums for workers.

Please note that these tax changes to encourage more people to purchase private, for-profit insurance products are the basis of the healthcare proposals of both George Bush and John McCain.  These policies are widely disparaged by most healthcare reform activists because they further entrench the insurance industry in the delivery of care, will lead to greater profits for the insurance industry at the expense of patient care, and make it that much harder for our nation to ever achieve the guaranteed, single-payer healthcare reform we desperately need.

Here’s what right-wing Senator Mike Enzi had to say about the proposal:

 Asked about the Durbin-Snowe bill, a spokesman said Enzi “welcomes bipartisan efforts to bring market-based solutions to the health insurance crisis that is hurting millions of families.”

“Market-based” health care solution is a Republican talking point that basically means, “let’s do everything we can to help insurance corporations and stop single-payer healthcare.”

This kind of selling out of healthcare reform is the same pattern SEIU International has engaged in across the country, most recently when Andy Stern put his credibility on the line to help Arnold Schwarzenegger pass a bill, with the support of insurance companies, that would have included enormous public subsidies to insurance corporations and a mandate that all individuals purchase their products,no matter the cost or quality.  The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organzing Committe, along with most of the labor movement in California, healthcare activists and progressive Democrats, defeated that bill by holding it to one single “yes” vote in the state Senate.

Unfortunately these type  of partnerships with corporate CEO’s and Republicans have become standard business practice for SEIU in recent years, as it looks to get new members through organizing employers instead of workers.

A few other examples:

1. In New York, SEIU and the New York State Hospital Association have long worked together to ensure that the Republicans control the state Senate This is a key reason why New York has not had a single-payer bill passed…bad for patients, but good for SEIU’s hospital partners.

2. This post documents SEIU’s partnership with Pfizer to sell Lipitor.  This is ethically and medically dangerous, as wellas representative of the reason that Registered Nurses historically have not wanted to join the SEIU.  RNs are patient advocates, and you can’t advocate both for patients and Pfizer.  One of the other, not both.

3. The Nation documents Stern’s partnership with Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-Mart, in a PR coup for the embattled company, looking to turn around its reputation for denying healthcare to its employees.  The author notes Stern crossed a UFCW picket line to appear on stage with Scott, despite UFCW’s heroic efforts to organize Wal-Mart workers.

Should government mandate the purchase of for-profit insurance products, backed up by threats to garnish wages or place a lien on homes?  Or should we move to a guaranteed healthcare system modeled on the single-payer financing that is working in Taiwan, Canada, and most of Europe?  

This very interesting debate is happening simultaneously at the national and state levels-because mandated insurance is the top priority of the insurance industry, and they’re pushing it everywhere they can.  

We’ll take a look below…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize for GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

In California, Arnold Schwarzenegger and most of the state’s insurers have lined up with Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez to push a mandate law through.  Its future is uncertain.  

At the Presidential level, Sens. Clinton and Edwards are attacking Sen. Obama for declining to endorse their mandate.  Obama rightly argues that people don’t have health insurance not because they don’t want it, but because they can’t afford it.  A difficult argument to make in a sound-bite world, but the right one.

The big Schwarzenegger/Nunez healthcare compromise is going for a hearing and a vote before the Senate Health Committee tomorrow.  No doubt the insurance lobbyists are working overtime to call in their chits.  At least one paper, the San Jose Mercury News, argues the Governor is “misplaying” his hand and “making a bad bet” with his healthcare bill.  Agreed.  They state:

The governor’s proposed budget cuts, which will do considerable damage to a health care system already in crisis, are only exacerbating the political challenge of passing his reforms.

(This editorial has one major factual error-saying that insurance corporations oppose the Schwarzenegger/Nunez bill.  In fact, major CA insurer but one is backing the bill.)

New American Media, a coalition of ethnic news sources, lists the top 5 Reasons ABX11 is a sham, and even reps from the insurance industry thinks it could go down.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts residents are learning what it’s like to live where the purchase of junk insurance is mandated by the power of the state: it’s a kick in the groin:

THE NEARLY 300,000 Massachusetts residents who signed up for health insurance under the state’s new initiative are in for a rude awakening. They may now have some form of coverage, but many of them, even the very poor who used to get free care, are going to be socked with steep medical bills.

Simultaneously, the mandate debate continues to roil the Presidential.  I’ll point out what Sen. Obama won’t–that an individual mandate is the top priority of the insurance industry right now, and that it will end our chance to achieve guaranteed, single-payer healthcare, by giving insurance companies more power and degrading group purchase of insurance.

And Ian Welsh just wants everyone to repeat after him: single-payer is cheaper than what we’ve got now (or would get under mandates.)

Lets not forget that small businesses across the country are being forced into bankruptcy by predatory insurance corporations protecting their huge health insurance profits.  We want more of that?

UPDATE: Please keep an eye out for the announcements from several major California unions that they oppose ABX1.1!

Healthcare’s the hot topic in Nevada…California…insurance industry profit reports…and everywhere!

..cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize for GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

First up, Marc Cooper writes at Off the Bus that the healthcare debate is getting hot in Nevada:

Obama also complained that his supporters were getting calls and fliers from Clinton supporters accusing his health care plan of leaving 15 million Americans uninsured. Obama brushed aside the charge and then proceeded to criticize President Clinton and Hillary Clinton for attempting health care reform “the wrong way” last decade. “They went behind closed doors to do it and allowed lobbyists the and health care industry to shape the plan and eventually kill it.”

The New York Times concurs:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, of New York, and John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, said they would require all Americans to get coverage and would provide subsidies to that end, while Senator Barack Obama, of Illinois, says that as president he would require only children to have coverage. Mr. Obama’s plan would require employers to provide coverage or contribute to a new public program.

Note that word “requires.”  The Times is buying into the framing of the insurance industry, and their proposal to solve the healthcare crisis by an “individual mandate”-requirement-that everyone purchase expensive, for-profit insurance products.  

Remember, health insurance corporations increased their profits 9 percent in the first six months of the year-that’s $3.8 billion profit on $8.8 billion income.  That’s, what, $20 million in insurance industry profits from healthcare EVERY DAY!  No wonder we’re in crisis.   Because they’re making record profits.

Meanwhile, the coalition of the willing (to sell patients out for insurance corporation profits) is breaking up in California.  Yay!  

In New Mexico, Bill Richardson joins the list of people who dismiss guaranteed, single-payer healthcare, while the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce is licking it chops over individual mandates.