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.

(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.

(Insurance denied because they can’t cherry pick? B-R-O-K-E-N – promoted by blogswarm)

More than a healthcare crisis-this nation has a widespread health insurance crisis.  Just today, the LA Times reports that professional associations are increasingly shut out of the health insurance market because group purchasing doesn’t let insurers cherry pick the healthiest customers.  This comes on the heels of last week’s news that Blue Cross is being fined $1 million for illegally dumping patients off the rolls, a new look at how elderly patients are being fleeced by their mercenary insurers, and complaints from doctors that they spend more time fighting corporate denials of care than tending to their patients.  Given this health insurance crisis that demands a solution, it’s no wonder the Sacramento Bee comes close to endorsing the SinglePayer system, and doing away with these bad actors. 

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

The latest canary in the insurance coal mines are the professional associations that offer their members health insurnace.  As Lisa Girion of the LA Times, who has been on a tear lately, writes:

Health plans offered by professional associations were once havens for millions of people who couldn’t get coverage anywhere else. But as medical costs have soared, groups representing professions as varied as law and golf have been forced to stop offering the benefit or been dropped by insurers.

More than 8,000 people with coverage through the California Assn. of Realtors could be next if Blue Shield of California succeeds with its plan to cancel the group’s health coverage.

“It’s a real stab in the heart,” said Marcy Garber, 62, an Encino real estate agent whose history of breast cancer makes her an almost-certain reject if she seeks similar coverage on her own.

Why are the insurance companies leaving this market?  Because they can’t cherrypick customers:

Insurance carriers began pulling out of association markets about 10 years ago amid mandates requiring the groups – like employers – to offer coverage to all members who wanted to buy it, regardless of preexisting conditions. Unlike employers, however, who typically pick up the much of the premiums for employees, most associations do not share in the costs. Instead, they arrange for their members to purchase coverage at group, rather than individual, rates.

Another real estate agent, Hector Aguirre, 39, of Rancho Cucamonga, also thought the group’s coverage was safe. He pays nearly $1,000 a month for coverage for himself and his family. His wife has lupus and a daughter needs daily shots of an expensive growth hormone.

“I always thought it had more control and more pull because it’s such a huge umbrella under the whole California Assn. of Realtors,” Aguirre said.

Realtor Terry Lucoff, 60, of Malibu, who pays a monthly premium of more than $600, fears that if he loses his coverage he will be unable to obtain new coverage that will allow him to continue seeing his regular doctors because he has been diagnosed with a kidney condition.

“If they can do this to the California Realtors association, they can do it to anybody,” he said.

It is truly, grotesquely surreal that the American medical system is organized around and by huge corporations that only want to serve healthy customers, and that make money by denying the healthcare they are chartered to insure.

Is it any wonder everyone hates them?  But look, there’s more from the car-wreck that is our insurance market.

Girion again: 

Blue Cross of California “routinely” violated state law when it canceled individual health insurance coverage after policyholders got pregnant or sick, making no attempt to determine whether they did anything to merit such “harsh” treatment, according to a state investigation of practices that appear to be industrywide….

As a result of its unprecedented investigation, the Department of Managed Health Care on Thursday said that it had fined Blue Cross $1 million – an amount immediately criticized by canceled policyholders and consumer advocates as too small to matter to an insurer whose parent company, WellPoint Inc., earned $3.1 billion in profit last year on revenue of $57 billion.

Stunningly:

Regulators examined 90 randomly selected cases of policy cancellations – out of about 1,000 a year in California – and found violations in each one.

Insurance companies aren’t just abusing sick people; they’re abusing old people, too:

  Interviews by The New York Times and confidential depositions indicate that some long-term-care insurers have developed procedures that make it difficult – if not impossible – for policyholders to get paid. A review of more than 400 of the thousands of grievances and lawsuits filed in recent years shows elderly policyholders confronting unnecessary delays and overwhelming bureaucracies. In California alone, nearly one in every four long-term-care claims was denied in 2005, according to the state.

And now doctors are reporting that all the time they spend with insurance corporation bureaucrats harms their patients.

So, I ask all the politicians who are supporting insurance mandates: do we really want to force the entire nation to sign up with their heartless corporations?  Do want to increase their influence over the delivery of care in our health system?

The Sacramento Bee doesn’t think so–and kind-of/almost endorse SinglePayer healthcare as the way to deal with our sick health insurance market:

Blue Cross denies wrongdoing. That’s fine. There is a larger lesson here: This health insurance market, the one for individuals or families who don’t automatically get covered through their jobs, is sick. Insurers try to avoid covering people who need care. And many Californians avoid getting insurance until it is in their financial interest to do so. It’s a game, and the game must end somehow. That can only happen by blowing up the individual health insurance market that exists today and replacing it with something that makes more sense. And that can only happen with the California Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

There are two basic choices here when it comes to health insurance. One is to get rid of private health insurance altogether and replace it with a program in which the government directly pays doctors and hospitals to provide care. That’s known as single-payer. It is championed by some Democrats, but opposed by the governor. Single-payer isn’t a likely short-term compromise, but the more we look at this mess, single-payer seems to be an increasingly likely long-term solution because of the many ills of the private insurance market.

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.

(Yes, go nurses! : ) – promoted by atdleft)

Roxy Carr is where any of us could be: medically bankrupt.  She’s both the face of our nation’s healthcare crisis, and symptomatic of the most important aspect of that crisis, affordability.  While private insurance companies enjoy record profits, average Americans find they can barely afford medical care, and they are one crisis away from seeing their life savings gone.  Coincidence?  We learn more about just how unaffordable Massachusetts’ healthcare reform plan is for residents, why a Minnesota plan is even worse, and how California’s plan is failing as a result.  Meanwhile, Connecticut unions fight for the kind of SinglePayer insurance that makes care affordable–and the national AFL-CIO endorses a similar proposal.

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

Meet Roxy Carr of Twin Falls, ID:

She was making $6.25 an hour working for an employer that didn’t offer health insurance, and she certainly couldn’t afford to purchase her own policy. After paying rent and utility bills and putting gas in the car and food on the table, there was nothing left to pay for the expensive medications she needed to manage her diabetes.

“I juggled bills to afford medications,” Carr said. “I was robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Carr couldn’t juggle forever. Complications from her diabetes eventually landed her in the hospital, adding yet another bill to the growing stack on her table waiting to be paid. One day, she woke up and discovered she was more than $45,000 in debt. So she did the only thing she believed she could do: She filed medical bankruptcy.

While Roxy had no insurance, many people with insurance have similar problems in the face of deductibles, co-pays, and uncovered costs.  In fact, three-quarters of those bankrupted by illness had insurance, according to a Harvard study. 

So we drive our patients to bankruptcy, and then what happens to them? 

The bankruptcy wasn’t the end of Carr’s story. Still uninsured, she ended up in an emergency room one night when she fell ill. She was diagnosed with shingles – a skin rash caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox. An emergency room doctor examined her, ran some tests and gave her a shot for pain. She was there for three hours, and the bill came to $3,700. Carr could have received the same treatment in a doctor’s office for less than $200.

That’s right we send them into bizarro world where they have to spend even more money on health maintenance.

As Roxy learned, the big problem with our health system is affordability-so many interests are sucking care dollars out of the system that regular, working Americans can’t afford care, especially if they actually get sick. 

Massachusetts has led the way in healthcare reform lately, implementing the dastardly “individual mandates” that require people to buy insurance from private insurers, and impoverish themselves while enriching the insurers.  Who’s hit hardest?  The middle class:

The economic pressure in the state’s new plan falls on those in the middle, the almost poor, several experts told The Standard-Times.
  “For the low-income family earning $36,000 a year before taxes, how do they pay what amounts to 6 to 8 percent of their income for health care, perhaps $2,400 a year?” asked Alan Sager, a professor of health policy and management at the Boston University School of Public Health.

Health costs can be crippling, even to families with health insurance, writes Yale University professor Jacob S. Hacker in his 2006 Oxford University Press book, “The Great Risk Shift.”

In 2003, 82 million Americans were without health insurance at some point, Mr. Hacker reported.
  “And yet, these ordinary Americans at extraordinary risk have for years remained largely unnoticed, an inconvenient blot on the heralded success story of the American economy,” Mr. Hacker wrote.

As people learn about these problems in Massachusetts, copy-cat programs in states like California are starting to run into trouble:

As California lawmakers work out a health insurance overhaul that could contain a similar requirement for individuals, advocacy groups here say the Massachusetts example raises questions about whether it’s possible to come up with affordable health insurance for people to buy on their own.

“Our big concern is that without guarantees that costs will be controlled, we’re certain to stick some patients with health plans that simply aren’t affordable,” said Carmen Balber of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Los Angeles, an organization that wants the state to limit how much insurers can charge

It’s even worse than that in a Minnesota proposal.  The plan actually wants to garnish employees wages to pay for their private insurance.  Not only do are you MANDATED to buy insurance, but they will helpfully take it our of your paycheck for you. You won’t be surprised to hear that:

The proposal grew out of a task force of insurers and health care providers from Blue Cross and Blue Shield, HealthPartners, Mayo Clinic and elsewhere.

The opposition is being led by the Minnesota Nurses Association.  Go nurses!

More and more labor unions are supporting the answer to the affordability problem-a SinglePayer system that does away with the bloat of the insurance industry middleman.  Connecticut’s unions are the latest to join the fight.  Nationally, the AFL-CIO recently endorsed Medicare for All, and the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee will affiliate with them.

If the unions don’t succeed, we might see more of the global outsourcing of medicine, a/k/a “medical tourism,” that has devastated other industries in this country. 

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.

(Horray for the nurses… And horray for a health care proposal that actually helps real working people! : ) – promoted by atdleft)

State Senator Sheila Kuehl yesterday re-introduced SB 840, her historic bill to move California to a “Medicare for All” health plan.  These kinds of SinglePayer health systems exist in every other developed nation in the world and are the only solution to the problems of access and cost of healthcare-problems caused by the wasteful private insurance bureaucracy.  Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill last year; this year he has promised to bring about healthcare reform and, when SB 840 lands on his desk again, he will have to consider if he is serious about his promise.

The California Nurses Association is the lead sponsor of SB 840, and a strong advocate of H.R.676, the national bill sponsored by Rep. John Conyers.  Nurses are motivated to fight for SinglePayer healthcare because so much of their time is spent fighting insurance corporations on behalf of their patients.  A nurse explains below….

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

Deborah Burger, RN, President of the California Nurses Association explains why nurses support SinglePayer in her testimony from the SB840 hearing yesterday, and why nurses will continue to fight for it every way they know how, including in a new advertising campaign.  We are at a historic moment in this movement, and California’s progress should provide hope to people across the country that we can cure this healthcare tragedy that is touching so many of us.

Registered Nurses use what’s called the “nursing process” to assess and treat patients.  We are educated to collect objective and subjective data, synthesize that data, and apply our judgment skills to help patients survive both their health problems and the treatment for those problems.  When we ask a patient how they are doing, what their favorite flower is or if they have children, we are not just being pleasant.  We are noting their skin tone, their speech, their pain level, their emotional response and many other indicators of their overall condition.  We are doing a comprehensive assessment of their health, although it may not be apparent to them.

Applying the nursing process to the ailing patient called California, we note symptoms of less access, increasing costs and a less healthy population leading to a diagnosis of healthcare crisis.

The good news is that there is a cure.  It is called SB 840 authored by Senator Sheila Kuehl.

It is probably no accident that the same legislator who fought to protect patients in hospitals and authored California’s historic nurse-to-patient ratios is also the author of SB 840, a SinglePayer, or “Medicare for All” system, where everyone is in, benefits are better, and costs are controlled.  We are very proud, as the principal sponsor of SB 840, to work again with Senator Kuehl.

The California Nurses Association and nurses around the country have  fought insurance companies, HMO’s, patient-care gatekeepers, hospital corporate chains, and everyone else who wants to put us in the position of letting our patients suffer from inadequate care. 

We know one very important fact: a SinglePayer system is the only cure for the current market-based system that has turned our health into a commodity subjected to “insurance products” that cost more and deliver less every year.

Treating these symptoms with more insurance would be like treating a patient with lung cancer or asthma with cigarette smoke.

A SinglePayer plan is the only way to assure genuinely universal care – not universal insurance with a windfall to health plans.

It is the only way to avoid a multi-tiered system, assure better, more comprehensive benefits, and guarantee patient choice of physician and hospital. 

It is the only effective way to adequately control premium and out-of-pocket costs and to end an insurance bureaucracy that wastes 30% of every healthcare dollar because it quite simply takes the insurance middle man out of the middle.

Therefore, CNA RNs are proud to stand with Senator Kuehl, other advocates and other legislators who will fight for the right cure for California’s health crisis.

If you want to join the fight for SinglePayer 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.

(Shiela Kuehl is back, this ought to be interesting. – promoted by dday)

While Schwarzenegger’s healthcare plan languishes, California State Senator Sheila Kuehl will re-introduce her historic SinglePayer bill tomorrow.  It landed on Arnold’s desk last year and it will land there again–except this year he has promised to finally deal with the healthcare crisis.  Elsewhere, Republican and Democratic Governors are fighting Washington for their healthcare dollars, indicative of the national consensus for reform, but the Cook County Board of Supervisors drops the ball by fighting for their patronage jobs instead.  Meanwhile bloggers and editorialists check in on the state of healthcare reform in this country.

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

The battle for genuine healthcare reform is shifting now to California, where tomorrow Sen. Sheila Kuehl, hero of the SinglePayer movement, will re-introduce SB840, the nation’s signature SinglePayer bill.  It was vetoed by Arnold Schwarzenegger last year even though, as Senator Kuehl remarks, 

“SB 840 represents the gold standard for healthcare reform-the plan that will move California into healthcare solvency and security, not only for ourselves, but for the generations that will follow.”

The time for this bill is now:

Universal health care is possible.  Polls are showing that 60% of Californians now support a publicly funded universal health care system over the current system.  The conversation is steering away from whether we need to enact such a system in favor of how.  SB 840, the California Universal Healthcare Act, is a very important step forward in this because it answers the how.

Here’s how it works:

SB 840 is the only proposal that establishes universal, affordable, comprehensive health insurance for all Californians and that guarantees the right of each patient to choose his or her own doctor.  SB 840 replaces insurance companies with a state-wide trust fund that collects premiums paid by employers and individuals, sharing the responsibility for funding.  This reduces the administrative portion of California’s healthcare costs from nearly 30% to under 10%.  With everyone in one risk pool, no one is denied coverage for a so-called pre-existing condition. Consumers are free to change jobs; start a business; go to school or start a family without losing the doctors they trust.

So what about Arnold?  He has promised to bring universal, affordable coverage to California.  His mask briefly slipped off this weekend, when he made a slightly different promise in reference to the insurance companies:  “You must let everyone make their profits.”

Nonetheless, he hopes to make his legacy with healthcare reform.  His problem is that his plan won’t work.  Legally, he won’t be able to mandate employers provide their workers with health care.  Practically, he won’t be able to mandate individuals to purchase insurance they can’t afford.  And financially, the numbers don’t add up. 

It’s interesting to note that Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts is also facing severe problem; he over-promised and under-delivered.  Unfortunately for Schwarzenegger, RomneyCare was his inspiration.  Here’s one of many articles detailing the Massachusetts mess, in which a conservative activist notes “RomneyCare is in the intensive care unit, soon to be wheeled into hospice.” 

This kind of uncertainly is leading to legislative trouble for Schwrazenegger.  He has yet to find a sponsor for his bill, much of the state is still sitting on the sidelines watch the drama unfold, and it is entirely unclear that his plan will even get out of committee.  Moreover, the California Nurses Association today unveils a wide-ranging media campaign to shape public opinion about the Governor’s plan, and spread the word that it is an insurance industry giveaway barely pretending to address the problems of cost and access of healthcare.  The San Francisco Chronicle writes:

The ads are strong and striking in a political arena that so far has treated the governor’s health care plan with kid gloves.
Although a lot of interest groups have expressed doubts about parts of the governor’s plan, there’s been little public criticism. Many groups, like the Service Employees International Union and the California Chamber of Commerce, have said that they are withholding judgment until the legislative process takes it course and at least, so far, are willing to work with the administration. The nurses do not appear interested in being part of that effort.
“We will never be a part of any plan that benefits only the big insurance companies,” said Chuck Idelson, association spokesman.

Schwarzenegger will have to choose between affordable, universal coverage under the SinglePayer system proposed by Senator Kuehl or breaking his promise of healthcare reform.  The movement for SinglePayer healthcare runs through the California legislature for the next few months.

Around the country, despite the strong public mood for an increase in healthcare, much of our public health system is in deep peril.  A bi-partisan coalition of Governors is raising a red flag about underfunding of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, a stop-gap program which helps millions of families.

The program in question, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, covers more than six million children in families that have too much income to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to buy private insurance.

Karen A. Smigielski, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Human Services, said her state had a federal allocation of $48.6 million this year, would run out of money in July and would need $15 million to continue the program as it is.

In a separate letter to Congress, the National Governors Association criticized a Bush administration proposal to cut federal Medicaid payments to public hospitals and nursing homes. The White House says the changes are needed to ensure the “fiscal integrity” of Medicaid and to curb “excessive payments.”

It is extraordinary that Republican governors are forcing a confrontation with a Republican President over a healthcare issue.  Are we seeing healthcare emerge as the new third rail of American politics-the issue that no candidate dares to fail on?

If so, Cook County Board President Todd Stroger in Chicago hasn’t gotten the message.  Many of Cook County’s 5.2 million residents rely on their public health system, which is among the best in the nation.  Not for long, if Stroger has his way-his new budget would cut nearly 10% of the system’s nurses and close half the clinics, while maintaing 400 high-paid patronage jobs doled out by the politicians.

The County’s RNs, represented by the National Nurses Organizing Committee, promises a furious fight-back.  Watch this one.

Finally, the Agonist notes why market-based health insurance simply CANNOT work,  USA Today notes that we are approaching a choice: change the employer-based system of healthcare or junk it, and an insurance corporation executive argues that it’s not his bloated industry driving costs in our healthcare system-it’s those darn, sick 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.