The Weiner amendment [PDF] --will be submitted for a floor vote in the House, in the coming days, - This will be a historic vote - the fist time ever Single-Payer has gotten a floor vote.
The Kucinich amendment, [PDF] which will more easily allow states to implement single-payer plans, is already within the bill and must be retained.
Passing these amendments will be difficult, but the votes on them will help set the benchmarks for the next debates on health care so they really do matter. Win or lose, we’ll know who our friends in Congress are...
Sen. Bernie Sanders is sponsoring a Medicare for All bill in the Senate, S. 703. Tell your Senators to support it; find contact info here. He has said that he will be introducing amendments to the Senate Health Care bill, so keep your eyes and ears open for them.
Why it is important to keep fighting for real Health Care Reform:
The New York Times reported on Saturday, October 17, that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is warning his constituents that the “public option” is not going to be available to the great majority of Americans. No one who has actually read the Senate health committee’s “reform” bill or the House “reform” bill (HR 3200) disputes this. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the “option” will be available only to about 30 million people, or about one American in ten. As the Times put it (slightly inaccurately), the “option” in the Democrats’ legislation “would be out of bounds to the approximately 160 million people already covered through employers.”
Does the public understand this? According to Wyden, they don’t. Wyden says his constituents are shocked when they are told the "option" will not be available to the vast majority of Americans. When he began informing his constituents about this truth last summer, "They nearly fell out of the bleachers," he said.
Once a bill is passed and signed by President Obama, voters will start to learn just how little help the current reform policies will provide. While it is probable that the reforms will continue to funnel money to the Health Insurance companies to fund their lobbying machines, the relief for citizens maybe too little and/or too complicated and I don't believe anything currently being offered will be sustainable in the long term. So we will come back to this table. And that is why good support for the current Single Payer amendments to H.R. 3200 in the House are critically important.
FAIR noted that the article, titled "Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely", laid out a list of arguments against single-payer while failing to include any balancing responses from the option's supporters.
In explaining the slant, article author Katharine Seelye said she was trying to explain why Medicare-for-all was "not going anywhere." "I thought the substance of [single-payer] had been dealt with elsewhere many times," she said.
On October 13, Times public editor Clark Hoyt conceded that FAIR "had a point," and agreed that the article excluded the point of view of single-payer health care system supporters. FAIR said it finds Seelye's defense "alarming," and points out that the Times, like the rest of the corporate-owned media, has given the issue of single-payer health care "scant attention."
ACTION:
Ask New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt to have the Times run a piece devoted to the case for single-payer healthcare - Medicare for all. The public deserves to have the full story.
CONTACT:
New York Times
Clark Hoyt, Public Editor
public@nytimes.com
Phone: 212-556-7652
So why has it not occurred to the champions of reform that instead of telling people that the public option is "like Medicare," we might simply let the public option be Medicare? That would reduce all the complexities to one clear-cut public-option solution: Amend Medicare so that it will be available to everyone regardless of age.
Since 1951, the self-employed have been able to buy into Social Security; currently about 9 million of them are in the system. Why not remove the age restriction on Medicare and let everybody buy in who wants to buy in? Medicare provides a very elusive target for right-wing vilification or for those who seek to make reform look so complex that we must wait an additional 20 years to change the system. It is a time-tested program that people know and trust. It has an exemplary track record for low-overhead administration. Medicare is already the most successful cost-control program we have, and it can be made more effective still. (There are estimates that fraud in the system costs over $60 billion a year -- a serious but fixable flaw that accounts for enough money to keep the system solvent.)
Above all, it's here. Its administrative procedures and personnel are in place. Unlike health co-ops -- which remain a mystery to most of us -- Medicare needs only to be expanded, which has to be cheaper than starting from square one.
The Weiner amendment would replace Division A of HR 3200 with the text of HR 676, the "U.S. National Health Care Act," sponsored by Rep. John Conyers. This would effectively transform HR 3200 into single-payer legislation. Single-payer is a superior reform to HR 3200 in many ways:
Single payer would provide universal and comprehensive coverage for all medically necessary services. Unamended, HR 3200 would leave millions uninsured or with skimpy coverage.
Single payer allows patients free choice of doctor and hospital. Under HR 3200, insurance companies would continue to deny care and restrict access to services.
Single payer pays for itself by eliminating $400 billion in insurance company administrative waste and redirecting it to care. HR 3200 requires $1 trillion in new revenue in the next decade.
Single payer establishes proven and effective cost-containing mechanisms to ensure that benefits are sustainable over the long run. HR 3200 lacks effective cost controls.
The Weiner amendment presents an historic opportunity for Members to register their support for single-payer national health insurance as the best way to solve the U.S. healthcare crisis. It additionally will provide a vote that Members can stand by when approached by constituents.
Don't try to explain the "public option" one more more time.
The cure for what ails a healthcare system that leaves close to 50 million Americans uninsured and at least that many underinsured is not an "option."
"As President Obama prepares to address the nation about his vision for healthcare reform, we should not overlook the last, best truly transformative change to our healthcare system: Medicare," argues Weiner..."
Weiner is not merely offering Obama and Democratic leaders a practical proposal. He is telling them how to get out of the political corner in which they placed themselves by trying too hard to satisfy Republican legislators and their insurance-industry paymasters.
"Medicare also provides us with a case study in the hypocrisy of our Republican friends who have built their party on a 44-year record of undermining this popular program. And now their Chairman sees no irony in ripping 'government run' healthcare while publishing an op-ed opposing changes to Medicare, argues Weiner.
"If Medicare has been such a success, why not extend it? Why not have single-payer plans for 55-year-olds? Why not have one for young citizens who just left their parents or college coverage?"
And the New Yorker suggests that, "The real reason we haven't seen the Democratic Party embrace the obvious and simpler idea is that it boils down to pure beltway politics. We've been reluctant to tackle the real inefficiency in the current system, namely, the very presence of the private insurance companies. Too many in Washington would rather stay friends with the insurance and drug companies when real reform probably can't be achieved in a way that makes these powerful institutions happy."
This is a fight that Barack Obama can win -- not for himself but for the tens of millions of Americans who need healthcare and for the hundreds of millions of Americans who need a better healthcare system.
But he won't win it by taking advice from George Bush: "stay the course."
He will win it by taking the wise counsel of Congressman Weiner and offering America what the people understand and want: "Medicare for All."
Since health insurance lobbyists have effectively squelched discussion of single payer bill HR 676 as an option for health care reform in Congress at this time, Rep. Anthony Weiner, a single payer supporter, has filed an amendment to the health reform legislation recently created in the House, HR 3200. Weiner’s amendment would effectively change HR 3200 into a single payer bill.
He left us a model for Senate action - now that Republicans have walked away.
Until last year, Senator Edward M. Kennedy's health care bill, co-authored with with Cong. John Dingell, was a bill known as Medicare for All. Not expensive private insurance for some, but Medicare [a public insurance plan] for All.
Conyer's bill in the House, HR-676 is Expanded and Improved Medicare for All - a single-payer plan. Let's do it.
The whole "you can't sell single payer" is turning out to be, well, rather questionable. Because the way things are going it's fairly clear you can't sell some godawful hodgepodge either and all the screaming about "you're going to take away my Medicare" indicates that a lot of the people who oppose Obamacare, love Medicare.
When you're trying to explain something, you do so by metaphor in almost all cases. Everyone knows what Medicare is. The majority of people with Medicare are happy with it and even people without Medicare know people (usually their parents or grandparents) who have it, and whom it's working for.
Ruling out "single payer" from the very start was an act of mind-bending incompetence on the level of disbanding Iraq's army during the occupation of Iraq. From a policy point of view "Medicare for all" provides massive savings, and we know it works because the equivalent policies have worked for every other nation in the world who ever implemented then. From a sales point of view it's much harder to demonize Medicare and much easier to explain it. From a negotiation point of view pre-compromising is so stupid that anyone who has spent 5 minutes in a third world bazaar or taken even a single negotiating class knows better.
Mike Farrell ("BJ Hunicutt" from TV's MASH) supports Medicare For All. You can too.
AFTER YOU SEE THE VIDEO
Send a fax to the White House and to key Senators and Congressmen by clicking on the "send a fax" link in the video or just send your fax to Congress and the White House right now.
You are invited to sign up today for the Million Letters for Health Care Campaign. When you sign up to help get an improved Medicare for All, you also get monthly reminders to send a letter to your U.S. Representative. You also get a list of suggested notes each month from which you can select one to add by hand to your printed letter.
Each month you can 1) review the suggestions that come with the reminder 2) print the starting point of your letter, already addressed to your U.S. Representative and 3) optionally add one of the suggested notes by hand to help increase the value of your letter, and 4) complete your letter: date, sign, print your name and address, and stamp/mail the letter.
You can also read about the current condition of U.S. health care with its two-part mystery, read real life stories of Americans at home and abroad.
We, the people, can obtain the peace of mind that we have denied ourselves for so very long.
People in all other free-market, high-income, industrialized countries (26 of 26) have peace of mind regarding health care. Those countries have health care for all, paid via their non-profit national health insurance fund. Citizens receive no major medical bills, yet their health care costs are lower by an astonishing amount and their life expectancy is dramatically higher.
It’s time for the U.S. to implement non-profit single-payer national health insurance. The proposed legislation is U.S. House Resolution 676. We need 2/3 of U.S. Representatives to be cosponsors of H.R. 676 to help ensure that they are focused on establishing the best legislation possible.
