Tag: Single Payer

Has Canada Got the Cure?

Holly Dressel, Yes Magazine

Publicly funded health care has its problems, as any Canadian or Briton knows. But like democracy, it’s the best answer we’ve come up with so far.

Should the United States implement a more inclusive, publicly funded health care system? That’s a big debate throughout the country. But even as it rages, most Americans are unaware that the United States is the only country in the developed world that doesn’t already have a fundamentally public–that is, tax-supported–health care system.

That means that the United States has been the unwitting control subject in a 30-year, worldwide experiment comparing the merits of private versus public health care funding. For the people living in the United States, the results of this experiment with privately funded health care have been grim. The United States now has the most expensive health care system on earth and, despite remarkable technology, the general health of the U.S. population is lower than in most industrialized countries. Worse, Americans’ mortality rates–both general and infant–are shockingly high.

…

The United States spends far more per capita on health care than any comparable country. In fact, the gap is so enormous that a recent University of California, San Francisco, study estimates that the United States would save over $161 billion every year in paperwork alone if it switched to a singlepayer system like Canada’s.3 These billions of dollars are not abstract amounts deducted from government budgets; they come directly out of the pockets of people who are sick.

READ THE WHOLE THING…

This one caught my eye in the NYT front page :

How does this not make the health insurance industry more powerful and entrenched than it already is ??

Single Payer addresses the real issue.

Public Option: window dressing.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…

You might want to slip over and show your support (should you support his idea).

Taught my first daughter well as she did the absolute right thing in spite of pressure from her doctor’s office.  We are after all suburbanites so the cesspool of “normal” urban living is at times most offensive.  My new quote.  I am an American and I’m pissed.

“Your America means nothing to me”

I read my little “Care to Causes” articles this morning, as I usually do to sign lots of petitions, and came across this:

http://www.care2.com/causes/po…

While worded to “support” the idea of public option, it served only to greatly piss me off.

I’ve read the conflicting opinions and analysis about Health Care, including Chris Dodd’s emails insisting single-payer still be an option.

I agree in theory with Gottlieb’s supposition that “public option” is akin to a last straw of broken promises. (I disagree that Obama is a ‘good’ man, though, at this point I think he is a brilliant man, a genius at manipulation. I doubt his will is good now.) Yes a foot in, but who would risk his employment, his child’s roof to protest for cheaper shit he couldn’t afford anyway?

You see, I get it, I will be wildly pissed if 72% (the newest #) of the people’s will gets summarily ignored in losing even Public Option. Worth a day trip to Lansing to protest on my day off. Yes. But:

But what REALLY cheeses me off is that we were promised single-payer, and it was never even OFFERED as a viable option for us.

Guess what? A private/public insurance that will supposedly lower the prices by “competition” is just another Capitalist venture by any other name. Dig it.

We cannot afford our fucking houses, Mr. Obama. How the FUCK do you think we can afford even a discounted policy for a family of three?

Can anyone hear us now?

I worked all my life, and this is what I get? Poverty and illness? They are making us a 3rd World Nation: With Intent.  It is CRIMINAL.

There are reams written by insiders and players, who claim that the “boomers” will break us all, which is utter bullshit considering population has grown since then. Give every immigrant Citizenry and problem solved. (Of course they will never do that, the White Power Boyz Club, for the same reason the Zionazis won’t allow a one-state… fear of reprisal in being outnumbered… fear of attaining the “second class” status they imposed)

The propaganda is so fierce protecting the profiteers, that they even want to block making records electronic, because it would become public just how many DENIALS of service the profiteers impose on their “clients.”

What they are offering is Walmart insurance to a sweepingly destitute population. “Hey there’s a half-off sale on bypass! Woot, quick honey sell a kidney, I want one!”

Fuck that. I will expound later, but DO NOT FOR A SECOND BELIEVE THIS COULD NOT BE DONE.

How about closing Halliburton & Blackwater’s contracts, getting completely out of the ME? There is always money for the War Machine and bailing out the rich. Trickle down looks like sewer run-off from where I sit.

Death is profit. Our lives are only profitable if we PAY not to die.

Put me out there to sell it. I could make every single person in America demand single-payer. One slogan.

“DEAD UNTIL LIFE IS PURCHASED FROM US. ITS THE LAW.”

With so many things bearing down on me, the former middle class (covered Monday) its hard NOT to go into Shock and fold, settling for crumbs.

My last straw broke long ago, now I’m just trying to stay alive, keep my baby (and yes, he is still a baby) alive.

So forgive me, readers, for my rage against all of them. I’m not safe by far, and still have everything to lose, and nothing left to lose.

Its about to get much worse here. Much, much worse.

Off to do work that usually only illegals will take, landscaping in 90 degree heat with my middle aged, bad heart, bad back self… and praying nothing happens today. Just one day at time, god, let me survive it, because if ANYTHING happens, I die.

Fuck this Country. Fuck President Obama. Fuck Congress and the Senate and their Corporate Overlords.

They won’t bring my job or benefits back. So.

I want SINGLE PAYER.

Bernie Sanders is circulating a petition advocating Single Payer.  Here’s what the good Senator has to say about it in his e-mail.  

Please read it and go to his web site and show your support for Single Payer.  We may have to settle for the fall-back position of a Public Option, but we should show them our true desires anyway.  

A PETITION TO CONGRESS

Supporting Single-Payer Health Care

Our current private health insurance system is the most costly, wasteful, complicated and bureaucratic in the world. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance. Even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. Close to 20,000 Americans die each year because they don’t have regular access to a doctor.  

The time is now for our nation to address the most profound moral and economic issue we face.  

The time is now for our country to join the rest of the industrialized world and provide cost-effective, comprehensive quality health care to every man, woman and child in our country.  

The time is now to take on the powerful special interests in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and pass a single-payer national health care program.

Sign the petition

Tell Bernie your experience with health care and insurance.

For more background information, see my diary from a few days ago Healthcare: The Big Issue, The Big Test for Obama

We’ve got to keep pushing, keep yelling, keep demanding.  YYEELLLL!!!

Crossposted at BlueRage and CobaltVA.

The best solution to health care and one that has a large amount of support among the U.S. public is the simplest, the single-payer option.  Single-payer puts the insurance companies out of business, period.  No longer would health care be rationed by cost, services and treatments denied, permission to see doctors of choice denied. No longer would families be forced into bankruptcy, and no longer would the considerable cost of the 50 million uninsured be forced upon a health care system that is already stressed to the breaking point.

Read on, then contact your congress critters, state reps, relatives, friends and neighbors and tell them to raise hell for single-payer.  Grass roots is all we’ve got…