Report: 4 million Americans lost health insurance since recession began

An estimated 4 million Americans have lost their health insurance since the recession began, and as many as 14,000 people could be losing their health coverage every day, according to a report by liberal think tank Center for American Progress' Action Fund.

Um...isn't healthcare ALREADY being rationed?

How many millions of Americans can’t go for preventative care because it is cost prohibitive? How many people have died because an insurance company denied coverage – even retroactively? How many people have lost their homes, jobs and everything they own because of the controlled distribution of healthcare by those who should not be making healthcare and medical decisions?

With the added stress on the economy today with the hundreds of thousands of job losses each month, is the lose your job, lose your healthcare coverage not de facto rationing? When Americans are referred to as healthcare consumers who should make "informed decisions when purchasing healthcare", as opposed to having a basic right to basic preventative care and coverage for common ailments as well as for catastrophic accidents or injuries – how is that not dictating what gets covered and what does not?

When the emergency room is the only available resource to millions of families - especially for things that could either have been avoided through basic preventative care or a simple visit to a physician, how is that not leaving very little choice for these families? When a choice has to be made between medication and food or heat or clothing because insurance and drug companies (who get billions in subsidies) make their products too costly – how is that not rationing healthcare?

It is absolutely insane for anyone to make the argument that expanding coverage (even if it is basic coverage and only "a few million families") to more people so that they can take extra precautions or catch potential diseases earlier or free up emergency rooms for those who really need it will result in "rationing healthcare".

Rationing healthcare by people who have no business making these decisions is already being done on a wide scale. It’s even being called "managed care" and has been taking the healthcare decisions out of the hands of doctors and patients for years now.

Health care bills suffer conspiracy of silence -- Newsday.com

Health care bills suffer conspiracy of silence -- Newsday.com:

"On Jan. 28, a coalition of advocacy groups representing 15,000 doctors and more than 50,000 nurses, met at the Capitol to present a new study asserting that the Conyers' bill, called the National Health Insurance Act (HR 676), could create 2.6 million new jobs and would cost far less than the private insurance currently paid for by individuals and employers.

Only Congressional Quarterly covered it. The Kaiser Family Foundation's daily online report on health care developments at kff.org didn't mention it. Nor has Kaiser, the most comprehensive online source of health care information, made any mention of "single-payer" (the government as the payer), or the Conyers bill since it was introduced in 2003, despite widespread support for such a plan according to Kaiser's own polls. (After my insistent inquiries, Kaiser says it will publish charts next month comparing the Stark and Conyers bills.)

"AARP, another key source of health care information, briefly mentioned single-payer in the AARP Bulletin, sent to its 35 million members. But neither single-payer nor the Conyers bill have been discussed in any of its other publications or its advocacy materials at aarp.org.

"Why? Many health care writers and advocates believe it's because single-payer and the Conyers bill would bar any role for private insurance companies, which would have central roles in all the other proposals under discussion."

We already have healthcare rationing...

PDA - Healthcare Not Warfare

Renew Auto Industry? Start With Real Health Reform

The truth is that U.S. auto firms are being battered by a global economic collapse that has undermined car sales everywhere, leading to demands for government bailouts in every country where cars are made. But the even greater truth is that U.S. firms have been hit harder than many of their competitors by stalling car sales.

That's because it costs more to make cars in the United States. Even though U.S. autoworkers have accepted pay cuts and efficiency schemes that mean they make less than autoworkers in many other countries, the enormous expense imposed by this country's for-profit health care system places an extreme burden on firms that manufacture vehicles in the U.S. How extreme? It is estimated that health care costs add as much as $1,400 to the cost of a car made in an American plant.

So a new bailout, without a serious focus on health care reform, is at best a temporary fix, as three Democratic House members from the hard-hit manufacturing states of Ohio and Michigan explain in a new letter to GM CEO Richard Wagoner, Jr.

Seattle City Council Votes to Support Single Payer

The Seattle City Council has voted unanimously to support national universal health care. Council Resolution 3111 states the right of every person in the United States to have access to health care of equal high quality. The resolution also urges the U.S. Congress to enact legislation to establish and implement this right, and requests our Washington State Congressional delegation to support adoption of HR 676, which provides universal access to quality health care.

Goodbye to rugged American individualism?

More than 44 million Americans lack health insurance, the highest number in any industrialized country, and another 38 million are under-insured.

In these bleak surroundings, European-style social safety nets look attractive even to rugged individualists, particularly those affected by the downturn. Even before the present crisis, polls showed growing support for government programs to help those in need. A 2007 Pew survey, for example, showed 69 percent supporting the notion that government should take care of people who can’t care for themselves.

Unfettered capitalism this is not. In the Internet debate prompted by Republican warnings of the impending Europeanization of America, one commentator asked: “Does this mean that the half million Americans losing their jobs each month can count on having health care, public transportation, quality education and a public safety net?”

It is our Government - Let's use it!

"Yes, but . . . "

Today's NY Times piece describing how the Health Care Industry in Talks to Shape Policy, wherein Medicare for All/single Payer is pre-determined to be off the table is but the latest example of "Yes, But-ism...".

Yes, they admit, "Expanded and Improved Medicare for All" is the best policy and makes the most sense economically. Yes, it is the best way to actually get to 100% coverage. Yes, it would mean that nobody would be bankrupted because they or a family member got sick. Yes, it free up both workers and employers from constraining burden they have that their counterparts in the rest of developed world do not have. Yes, it would mean we could actually reduce total and control costs through the benefits of reduced overhead, monospony, global budgeting and planning.

The "but" is always alleged political feasibility. Remember 1994 they say. As if Single Payer was what the Clinton's had proposed. Indeed it was the same "Yes, but" that ruled that day back then, when single payer was not allowed to be at the table as early as the pre-inagural economic summit.

It was a mistake then and it is today.

Young People's Health Significantly Worse Than 10 Years Ago

Young adults today aren't any healthier than 10 to 15 years ago, and in some cases — obesity, for one — they are significantly less so, says a federal report on the nation's health released Wednesday

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Cancer Survivors Struggle to Find Jobs, Study Finds

Although the study did not explore the reasons for high unemployment, Dr. de Boer speculated that disability played a leading role. Many survivors, she said, may simply be unable to return to work.

read more | digg story

"Divided We Fail"; is Divided and Failing

"Divided We Fail" presented itself as a broad coalition of diverse interests that could come together and agree on health care reform. But it isn't a broad coalition. It is a coalition that primarily represents business interests - big business through the Business Roundtable, and small business through the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB).

Death Before Disorder: Health Care and “The Reader”

In the movie, "The Reader," Hannah Schmitz is on trial for her Nazi-era war crimes as an SS officer and prison guard, including the murder of 300 Jewish prisoners kept locked in a burning church. Why, she's asked, didn't you let them out? Her answer, a terrifying one, is that she couldn't. The prisoners might escape. "There would be chaos," she said.

Schmitz's matter-of-fact choice - the death of others before a perceived risk of disorder - shocks the courtroom. Schmitz's act is terrifying, but not because it is a rare moral failure. It's because it is so common. Another Hannah, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, called this sort of evil banal. By that she meant that ordinary people often commit evil acts. They are not sociopaths. They are simply and unquestioningly following the rules of their culture or state.

Isn't this one way to describe the American health care system and the resistance to reform? Don't we keep many locked inside the burning building of a system that denies health care to millions? Don't we coldly guarantee their ill health and death, because reform threatens some sort of ideological disorder?

This brings me back to the awful truth of the banality of evil. What are we to do when confronted with many who resist health care reform because they lack the independence and insight to imagine the consequences of their resistance? It is very easy to demonize (easy because they deserve it) powerful and greedy leaders of the medical/insurance industrial complex. They know what they do.

Debunking McCaughey's Lies

From Huffington Post:

"As the stimulus package wended its way through Congress this week, a familiar face popped up to get up to some familiar shenanigans. Betsy McCaughey, a Republican former Lieutenant Governor of New York, was suddenly on the Bloomberg website and on TV, issuing dire warnings about the changes that the stimulus package was going to wreak on health care. How? McCaughey claimed that the plan contained health technology language that let the federal government could "monitor" patient care in order to "guide your doctor's decisions." In short, a top-down bureaucracy that would enforce its own set of medical treatment protocols.

Naturally, that would be bad, and naturally, not a word of it was true. That didn't stop the contention from flowing from the Rush/Drudge edges onto cable news, most notably Lou Dobbs' CNN show. Happily, however, the media seems to be gathering to put McCaughey's nonsense back on the dungheap.

Last night, Keith Olbermann featured a debunking of McCaughey on Countdown:"

2009 Department of Peace Conference - Washington, D.C.