11-17-07, 9:40 am
To People all over the Country Demanding Healthcare for All:
Last week in Chicago, more than 100 Healthcare-NOW activists came together to plan our strategy for quality single payer, guaranteed choice, national healthcare during the coming year. We also launched our first SiCKO-Cure Road Show.
We agreed that our mission is to by-pass all of the incremental compromise plans being proposed that allow the insurance companies to continue killing people. American Patients for Universal Health Care revealed statistics that 282,600 U.S. patients have died since the beginning of the Iraq War as a result of insurance denials.
We all know that we are in a major healthcare crisis – that the crisis of the “uninsured” is only the tip of the iceberg. The truth is that people who think they have good insurance are dying too since the insurance companies cancel and reject and deny even people who have been buying their product for decades. And their salaries and profits continue to rise because the more people they deny, the more money they make. Most people without insurance are people with jobs, striving to make ends meet…many of them making good middle class salaries that don’t stretch to cover health insurance. And many of these are young people who don’t expect to ever have a job that will cover their healthcare needs.
So, what are we getting from all of the major candidates in the Republican and Democratic Parties? The most promoted proposal, supported by both former governor Mitt Romney, a leading Republican, and Senator Hillary Clinton, a leading Democrat, is the “individual mandate,” a plan that would force all of us to purchase health insurance from the insurance companies – further enriching them and allowing them to continue controlling our system, providing inadequate plans, raising premiums, charging co-pays and deductibles, and denying us healthcare.
Why don’t the candidates get it? Why can’t they see that we do not want the insurance corporations and their rich lobbyists to continue controlling our healthcare system? We want a single payer system that WE control as a part of a public responsibility.
In our Chicago meeting of healthcare leaders, our business coalition for single payer noted that in meetings with insurance executives, they have learned that these entrepreneurs are determined to stay in the game and continue to haul away billions of our healthcare dollars (one third of the whole healthcare budget goes into their pockets for administration and profits) as long as they possibly can. Even though they know that the system in the United States is going to change because of our demand, they plan to stay in control and rake in the dough as long as possible.
We know they are powerful. They are able to resist every attempt to regulate them or remove them. They have more than one well-paid lobbyist for every single Member of Congress.
Unfortunately, none of the “media-chosen” front-runners is willing or able to commit to removing the insurance companies so far. Everyone on this Healthcare-NOW mailing list should investigate these candidates. Ask the real questions. Who are their contributors? Where is their loyalty? Bird-dog them. Ask them to commit to a single payer system. Ask them to reject insurance and drug company financing. Some of them expect us to believe the promise that (when they are elected) they are going to heavily regulate the insurance industry. Give me a break! They have never been heavily regulated and they never will be. They must be exposed and ejected.
How many more thousands have to die as a result of insurance denials and rejections before we get the change we need?
Let’s get a system that is not based on denying healthcare procedures to the people who need them in order to increase profits.
What is your job and my job now? Elect Progressive candidates to Congress – Pro-single payer candidates throughout the nation! That’s what we need. Candidates who care about what we think about healthcare and the health of our country and our world. NOW is the time to make it happen – not sometime next year when you realize you don’t have a viable candidate. Find new candidates if you don’t have one in your district, Get ready to help elect them and hold them accountable.
Our national Sicko-Cure Road Show is on the trail right now. We are visiting 22 Congressional Districts and 11 States. Go to our website to read the story. And get ready to join us on more Road Shows into other Districts next year. Who wants to go to New Hampshire in January? Thanks to support from our co-sponsors, the California Nurses Association and the Physicians for a National Health Program, the Steelworkers and hundreds of local groups, this strategy is working and building support for HR 676.
Next year, we will be joining with these groups and others to expose the Massachusetts “individual mandates” requiring/forcing everybody to purchase insurance from insurance companies or pay a hefty fine. Maybe it will be a Boston tea party. We are discussing a Road Show down from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C. culminating in a National Memorial for the 282,600 people who have been killed by insurance company denials. What do you think of this idea?
We need you to be a part of us at every step on this journey. You’ve helped to build a huge movement for a national healthcare system. Now we must redouble our efforts to challenge the privatizers and keep them from sabotaging that movement. Go to our website to learn more. AND Join Healthcare-NOW.
