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Healthcare

Now Is The Time To Win National Improved Medicare For All

National improved Medicare for all is making tremendous progress during the 2020 election cycle. Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who advocate for it, are achieving record numbers of contributions and performing strongly in polls. Candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden, who opposes Medicare for all, and Senator Kamala Harris, who came out with a phony plan she called Medicare for all, are losing ground. This is happening because of the decades of work by the single-payer movement to educate people, organize and build consensus for National Improved Medicare for All (NIMA). The opposition is gearing up too but the Medicare for All movement is responding to their false claims, which are repeated in the corporate media and by insurance-funded candidates.

Jeff Bezos Abruptly Cuts Health Benefits For Part-Time Whole Foods Workers

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Thursday cut benefits for part-time workers at his grocery chain Whole Foods, drawing criticism from the left for a move that could leave thousands of people without health insurance. "Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world," Boston-based activist Jonathan Cohn said on Twitter. "This is disgusting." Business Insider reporter Hayley Peterson broke the story.  The decision will affect 1,900 of the business's 95,000 workers—the ones who work part-time, or around 20 hours a week. "We are providing team members with resources to find alternative healthcare coverage options, or to explore full-time, healthcare-eligible positions starting at 30 hours per week," a Whole Foods spokesperson told Peterson.

Value Based Programs Are Undermining Medicare And Single Payer

Last week, the Single Payer Action Podcast brought Sullivan together with Dr. Matthew Hahn, a family doctor based in Hancock, Maryland and author of Distracted: How Regulations Are Destroying the Practice of Medicine and Preventing True Health-Care Reform for a deep dive into how value based programs are undermining Medicare and the drive for single payer. “Every single payer advocate I am aware of takes a position we’ve got to get rid of the Medicare Advantage program, because we sure as heck aren’t proposing to enroll one third of Americans in insurance companies and call that a single payer,” Sullivan said.

How America Came Heartbreakingly Close To Universal Healthcare

As was recently, and perhaps shockingly, reported, life expectancy gains in the US, which plateaued in 2012, have declined for the past two years. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reported that the new average life expectancy for Americans is 78.7 years, 1.6 years behind the average in developed nations (including Canada, Germany, Mexico, France, Japan, and the UK), which is 80.3. As Dartmouth economists Ellen Meara and Jonathan Skinner remarked about the downward reversal of US life expectancy, “It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude.”

Surge In Lobbying Opposed To Medicare For All

Between the first quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019, lobbying on Medicare for All increased dramatically, almost entirely due to a surge in lobbying activity by organizations that oppose it. This indicates that opponents of Medicare for All are newly scared about its rising prospects. The diverse and powerful array of trade groups, conservative activist organizations, GOP-linked establishment groups and health care industry interests launching an all-out advertising blitz against Medicare for All further reinforces this reality. The number of organizations hiring lobbyists to work on Medicare for All increased from nine in the first quarter of 2018 to 61 in the first quarter of 2019 – a nearly sevenfold increase. The number of individual federal lobbyists working on Medicare for All increased from 29 in the first quarter of 2018 to 270 in the first quarter of 2019 – a ninefold increase.

Low-Wage Workers Being Sued For Medical Bills By Nonprofit Hospital That Employs Them

MEMPHIS, Tennessee — This year, a Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare housekeeper left her job just three hours into her shift and caught a bus to Shelby County General Sessions Court. Wearing her black and gray uniform, she had a different kind of appointment with her employer: The hospital was suing her for unpaid medical bills. In 2017, the nonprofit hospital system based in Memphis sued the woman for the cost of hospital stays to treat chronic abdominal pain she experienced before the hospital hired her. She now owes Methodist more than $23,000, including around $5,800 in attorney’s fees. It’s surreal, she said, to be sued by the organization that pays her $12.25 an hour. “You know how much you pay me. And the money you’re paying, I can’t live on,” said the housekeeper, who asked that her name not be used for fear that the hospital would fire her for talking to a reporter.

We Desperately Need Medicare for All. These 10 Statistics Prove It.

Here’s a reminder of the disastrous state of American healthcare. It was a big week for Medicare for All. The House Rules Committee held its first-ever congressional hearing to discuss U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal's (D-Wash.) Medicare for All Act of 2019, and the Congressional Budget Office will release a report addressing many of the key questions about single-payer healthcare. This discussion couldn't come soon enough. Here's a statistical snapshot of the gravity of America's current healthcare crisis.

Capitalism Is Killing Patients… And Their Physicians

Until physicians are willing to accept the fact they they are being exploited by the same system that harms their patients, there will be no progress made in addressing physician depression and suicide. At that same time, until health care providers generally accept that it is our current capitalist system which puts profit production above the well being of every living thing on this planet--including themselves--we will not be able to effectively address true social and structural causes of disease and suffering. Capitalism exploits, damages, and destroys us all.

Healthcare Advocates Block Chicago Streets Demanding Care

Responding to Iashea Cross’s cry, “Are you ready to take action?,” on August 31 members of Chicago ADAPT and the Alliance for Community Services, and personal assistants from SEIU Healthcare Illinois, kicked off Labor Day weekend by blocking two streets at the State of Illinois Building in downtown Chicago. Demonstrators held the intersection, disrupting early holiday traffic, for 20 minutes, and ended the action just before the police began to make arrests.

Improved Medicare For All Becoming Unstoppable

Medicare for all has had majority support in the United States for more than a decade. Support has been growing as more become aware of the details of the policy. The most recent poll, conducted by Reuters/Ispos found 70% of the public now supports Medicare for all. We see the potential for winning National Improved Medicare for All in the early 2020s, if people continue to build the movement necessary to demand it. People are understanding that for our health and for our economy we cannot afford not to put in place National Improved Medicare for All.

Why Won’t The Mainstream Media Tell The Truth About ‘Medicare For All’?

At the end of a segment posted Friday in conjunction with factcheck.org, CNN’s Jake Tapper issues a playful warning to the country’s politicians: “You’re perfectly entitled to your own opinions,” he quips, “not to your own facts.” It’s a piece of advice the correspondent would be wise to heed himself. As a pair of essays published in Jacobin this week demonstrate, his comprehensive fact-check of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s claims about the cost-efficiency of “Medicare for all” is misleading at best and willfully dishonest at worst. The subject of Tapper’s report is a study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a libertarian think tank underwritten by the Koch brothers. More specifically, he focuses on Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s contention that the study’s findings indicate universal health care would save money over a 10-year period.

Healthcare Lessons From The Cuban Polyclinic

During the 1960s, Cuban medicine experienced changes as tumultuous as the civil rights and anti-war protests in the US. While those in western Europe and the US confronted the institutions of capitalism, Cuba faced the challenge of building a new society. The tasks of Cuban medicine differed sharply between the first and the second five years of the revolution. The years 1959-1964 aimed at overcoming the crisis of care delivery as half of the island's physicians fled. It was during the second half of the decade (1964-1969) that Cuba began redesigning medicine as an integrated system. A re-conceptualizations of health care which put the area polyclinic at the center of medical care created a model for poor countries that forever changed medicine.

People Are Showing They’ve Had Enough

The growing wealth divide is generating a backlash, which will likely grow. As David F. Ruccio points out in the chart below, since the 1980s, the wealth gap between the top 1% and the bottom 90%, which was stable for several decades, has been widening at a fast pace. At the same time, the military budget has been growing, now consuming 57% of federal discretionary funding, leaving only 43% to meet our many needs for education, housing, transportation, protection of the planet and more.

Medical Students March Through New Orleans For Universal Healthcare

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - Medical students from across the country gathered in New Orleans, Saturday, walking the streets chanting, advocating for a single-payer system. It's the seventh annual march for the group-- Students for a National Health Program.   A sea of white flowed towards City Hall, demanding healthcare for everyone. "We're here under the idea people deserve equal access to healthcare. People are going bankrupt, people are dying because they don't have access to the basic medical care needs they have," said medical student Kale Flory from Missouri. More than 100 medical students from across the country marched in New Orleans, vying for a single payer healthcare system.  "It would mean for everybody who lives in the United States, they would have comprehensive healthcare for all of their basic needs," Chicago medical student Cyrus Alavi said. 

Urgent Protests To Stop Tax Theft

Starting Monday, Dec 18, and continuing through Tuesday, Dec 19, doctors, nurses and medical students are joining with patients to STOP the VOTE on the GOP's tax cut that takes away health care from millions of Americans and raises insurance premiums on millions more.  The action is organized by the Center for Popular Democracy, Housing Works, the Women's March, ACT UP, CPD's Ady Barkan and a national network of birddoggers who have been fighting all year to#protectpatients. They’re going to try to vote on this bill Monday or Tuesday. We are going to stop them.  The tax bill will decimate health care. Congress has been ignoring renewing funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), community health centers, and safety net hospitals that serve large numbers of uninsured patients.

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