HealthCare Not Warfare
My mother died in a hospice care in San Diego. My grandmother was a nurse in an Oakland Hospital. I cannot afford adequate health insurance in California, or most of the rest of our United States, for that matter. My awareness and appreciation of the “Healthcare Not Warfare” campaign launched by the Progressive Democrats of America over this last year has helped shape the kind of activism that truly speaks to my heart.
In a presidential election year, especially this one, when the sheer urgency of the moment begs to grab all the attention, my activist friends and I are scattered thin, literally and figuratively. We each have pet causes; America’s troubles are too numerous even for full time loudmouths to give voice!
My own personal favorites over the last eight years of a Neo-con Bush administration have been election integrity and corporate media reform, both equally hungry issues soon to be yanking on the Obama chain. I will be among the hordes of citizens waiting to make these issues important to our new president.
But I am also selfishly, passionately driven to make this slogan and its campaign leaders in the Progressive Democrats of America to help in every way possible to make “Healthcare Not Warfare” a priority on the first hundred days agenda. I am in good company, too. The powerful CNA, California Nurses’ Association and several other teamsters unions have joined together with PDA (pdamerica.org) to create a groundswell of momentum to help shape President Obama’s universal healthcare plan.
Currently, his platform does not include the all important single payer clause, so the big pharma and big insurance corporate cabal would still be able to manipulate the insurance payout matrix. Single payer simply means that we as individuals would be able to rely on a much simpler, more cost effective system like Medicare to handle claims and payouts and even more significant, to lobby for competitive pricing from Big Pharma on our behalf.
When the California nurses (who strengthened their union sufficiently enough to permanently tarnish Governor Schwarzenegger’s claim to be a ‘friend of the service employee’) decided to throw their fists in the air for single payer universal health insurance, the issue gained a feisty ally. The nurses had come out in massive numbers for movie theatre openings of Michael Moore’s “Sicko”, handling out pamphlets explaining how single payer healthcare for every American was not a radical, left wing, socialist idea, but a reasonable, logical solution to one of America’s most shameful problems; we are the ONLY industrialized nation on the planet with an estimated fifty million uninsured citizens.
National PDA Director Tim Carpenter tapped into this whirling dervish of life in the balance caregivers and he has been marshalling his nightingales toward DC ever since. Obama will soon feel the wind at his back from a nation ready for change. Part of that change must include making Americans feel a healthy pride in our country! Universal, single payer healthcare will help do that. Who better to give our pride a healthy glow, than an army of nurses with progressive human values and a concise, simple agenda for a new president’s first hundred days?
November 8th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
The health care bill that just passed the House is very different from the universal single-payer that Mr. Obama first championed, and that many of us are demanding. It seems to me that this is the time to insist that the U.S. Senate throw out this legislative junk NOW!
Incidentally..as you may know…in California, (some four months ago) MediCal recently cancelled many health care services, such as chiropractic, eyeglasses, audiometry and dental care, which is scandalous. How can people–who have already qualified for the program–live like this?!! BTW, a lawyer advised me a few months ago, that MediCare would pick up the slack in a month or two, but this has not yet occurred, as far as I know, so millions of folks are still “left out in the cold.”
I will say that the movie “Sicko” really opened my eyes. I had mixed feelings about this concept of a universal health care system. Yet, this type of system seems to working pretty well in Canada and many European countries. Too, a patient of mine, originally from Norway, advised me that–while the health care program there raised taxes significantly for awhile–after something like ten years–the costs went way down,and by now it has shown itself to be a very workable, realistic system, which nicely covers the health care needs of many millions today.
As I understand it, the glory of a single-payer system, is that when most everyone belongs, the costs come way down (including drug costs, which are at least twice the price of what they are in Canada, e.g.!). Even if the current plan has a “public option,” this amount–I am told–is something like 5% of the total population, which negates any advantage it might enjoy. Without high numbers, this will have no impact on costs. In a word, the plan which just passed the House of Representatives is a joke. I urge everyone to reject it, and to insist that we bring out troops home NOW, and pass a realistic SINGLE PAYER health care program NOW!!
November 14th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
“The nurses had come out in massive numbers for movie theatre openings of Michael Moore’s “Sicko”, handling out pamphlets explaining how single payer healthcare for every American was not a radical, left wing, socialist idea, but a reasonable, logical solution to one of America’s most shameful problems; we are the ONLY industrialized nation on the planet with an estimated fifty million uninsured citizens.”
Moore’s movie idealizes the Cuban healthcare system, which certainly is “radical, left wing, socialist.” It is also a very poor system once you get past the Potemkin village that Castro’s lackeys undoubtedly showed Moore. I would also suspect that the actual infant-mortality and life-expectancy rates are much worse than the “official” rates published by the Cuban government and (probably) sympathetic international organizations.