Skip to content

Medicare for all

Supreme Court Challenge To ACA Highlights Why We Need Medicare For All

Once again, the fate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the health law passed under the Obama administration in 2010, will be in the hands of the Supreme Court. The court heard oral arguments in the case, California v. Texas, on Tuesday. A decision is expected in the spring. This is the third time the law has been tested in the Supreme Court, but this time experts are not certain the outcome will be as favorable as it was in 2012 and 2015 due to the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement with Amy Coney Barrett.

Racism And Health Toolkit

Here are the materials you need to give a presentation to your organization or group on racism and health and why we need a national improved Medicare for all healthcare system. This is meant to inform and stimulate discussion about this topic.

Could Your Medical Bills Make You Sick?

Devin Barrington-Ward was doubled over with stomach pain. His chest hurt, too. Though his family urged him to call an ambulance and he was terrified that his condition was serious, Barrington-Ward had another concern on his mind: the expense. Uninsured, he knew he couldn’t afford the ambulance ride. So his mother raced him to a hospital near his home in suburban Atlanta that day in January earlier this year. After several hours in the emergency room, where he saw numerous physicians and got a CT scan and other tests, Barrington-Ward was diagnosed with colitis.

Tens Of Millions More Expected To Lose Employer-Based Insurance

While for-profit health insurers have reported record-high earnings this year amid the coronavirus pandemic, small companies across the U.S. are reporting difficulty paying premiums for their employees—and tens of millions of workers are expected to lose their employer-based health insurance by the end of the year, even if they keep their jobs. The New York Times reported on Monday that although some small businesses were able to use funds from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to cover their employees' health benefits, nearly a third of employers reported to Harvard Business School researchers...

New Report: Private Health Insurers Overpay Hospitals

Prices paid to hospitals nationally during 2018 by privately insured patients averaged 247% of what Medicare would have paid, with wide variation in prices among states, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Some states (Arkansas, Michigan, and Rhode Island) had relative prices under 200% of Medicare, while other states (Florida, Tennessee, Alaska, West Virginia, and South Carolina) had relative prices that were above 325% of Medicare. The study notes a steady increase in hospital prices, rising to the 2018 average level from an average of 224% of Medicare costs in 2016 and 230% of Medicare costs in 2017.

Medicare For All Is A Beginning, Not The End Point

As a coup de grâce to the Bernie Sanders campaign Joe Biden declared that he would veto Medicare-for-All. This could drive a dedicated health care advocate to relentlessly pursue Med-4-All as a final goal. However, it is not the final goal. It should be the first step in a complete transformation of medicine which includes combining community medicine with natural medicine and health-care-for-the-world. Contrasting Cuban changes in medicine during the last 60 years with the US non-system of medical care gives a clear picture of why changes must be all-encompassing.

Supreme Court Just Made The Case For Medicare For All

This July, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that President Trump, who does not have a uterus, was quite right to object to Obama-era rules under the Affordable Care Act that allowed Americans who do have uteri access to free birth control through their employer-provided health insurance plans. Specifically, NPR reports, the Supreme Court upheld a Trump administration rule that “would give broad exemptions from the birth control mandate to nonprofits and some for-profit companies that object to birth control on religious or moral grounds.”

Two-Week Strike By Illinois Nurses In Danger

Joliet, IL - The two-week strike by 720 nurses at the AMITA St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Joliet, Illinois is at a critical juncture. The nurses, who walked out on July 4, are demanding improvements that are necessary for all health care workers, particularly in the midst of the pandemic: safer patient-to-nurse ratios, improved wages and protection against management retaliation. However, the Illinois Nurses Association (INA), the state AFL-CIO and major unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have forced the nurses to fight one of the largest hospital chains in the state alone, even as AMITA brings in out-of-state strikebreakers and threatens striking workers with poverty if they don’t capitulate.

Why Covid-19 Racial Disparities Make The Case For Medicare For All

The racial disparities of COVID-19 have received much attention. Blacks are dying at a higher rate that is typically more than double the rate of whites. But we need to move beyond naming the problem of fighting for solutions. Medicare for All would go a long way to beginning to address racial disparities in health care in general and for COVID-19 in particular. The obvious and immediate need of black and other working-class populations caught in the teeth of the pandemic is the right to health care treatment without the burden of cost. Even before the pandemic, lower-income, Latino, and younger workers were more likely to be uninsured. Undocumented workers had the highest rates of uninsurance. The pronounced differences in COVID-19 mortality are not driven by a lack of health care per se but a reflection of how the virus compounds health problems created by inequality.

Scheer Intelligence: Does Medicare For All Await Us At The End Of This Viral Massacre?

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed a number of fatal flaws in the ways the United States operates that all link back to capitalism. Perhaps the most egregious, however, is the country’s inhumane health care system. Given the global spread of Covid-19, it has been possible to witness in real time how other countries have fared against the deadly virus, and for anyone paying attention to health care systems, it has been clear from the onset that the American system, which boasts the highest costs in the world, was going to lead to mass death on a scale unseen in other nations. The combination of obscene health insurance costs, as well as deductibles and copays, and the fact that it is often tied to employment--a problem exacerbated by the rapid rise in unemployment linked to lockdowns across the U.S.--has left many Americans without recourse amid a pandemic in which the overall health of the nation has been determined by those who can’t access health care. 

Build The General Strike Movement To Change The World

Now that May Day is behind us, we must build the General Strike campaign. The next strike day, June 1, should be the culmination of a month of working toward the day of action.  This is the responsibility of everyone involved in the General Strike movement. This is an ongoing campaign. We emphasize it is a campaign as campaigns provide ongoing opportunities to build the movement. The goal is to ensure that those running for office, those in office and those who make policy -- including non-profits, corporations, and the media -- cannot ignore the movement as we demonstrate our ability to make the country ungovernable. To do this we need to build a movement that: (1) Creates national consensus for our demands, and (2) Involves enough people to be a mass movement that cannot be ignored. This requires people to act at local and national levels to build the movement as described below.

The COVID-19 Pandemic Exposes Deep Flaws In America’s Broken Healthcare System

When it comes to the number of Covid-19 cases and deaths, the United States is off the charts compared to other countries. Although the USA comprises five percent of the global population, 32 percent of Covid-19 cases and 25 percent of deaths worldwide are there. By contrast, China, where the novel coronavirus originated, has one-tenth of the number of cases and deaths, despite having a population that is four times larger. A disaster scenario is playing out across the United States, particularly in New York City where scores of refrigerator trucks have been brought in to hold the dead, hundreds of people are dying in their homes without medical attention every day, mass graves are being used to store bodies while mortuaries are overwhelmed, and health professionals lack basic personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, and dialysis machines.

Biden Dismisses Democratic Party Base’s Support For Medicare For All

We often hear criticism of Donald Trump for, among other faults, his overwhelming Olympian arrogance, which drives millions of Democrats to pray daily for an end to his presidency.  But on the topic of Medicare for All, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, exhibits similar heights of arrogance.  Recently, Biden told MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, that even if the Congress sent him a Medicare for All bill, he would veto it.  And a week later, he confirmed that position.   Under our current private, for-profit, health system, the lack of treatment and care for the 75 million uninsured and underinsured puts them at extreme risk.  Now with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, that risk will extend to tens of millions of the newly unemployed in our country.

National Health Care Day Of Action April 15

We are health care workers on the front lines of the pandemic. Please support our National Day of Action on Tax Day, April 15, to tell the world that #TheSystemIsBroken and demand that we reorganize the U.S. health care system to prioritize the interests of patients over those of billionaires and corporations. Our private, for-profit health care system has left us with a deep scarcity of resources and properly trained health care workers. We are not heroes and we did not enlist to die in our jobs due to government inaction and corporate greed. The pandemic has clearly exposed why critical infrastructure, including our country’s health care, cannot be left to the market.  The mass graves being dug for tomorrow are made deeper by the political choices made today.

Nearly 5 Million Lost Health Coverage In The Past Three Weeks

4,805,894 American workers and their dependents have lost health insurance coverage in the past three weeks, according to a new estimate by researchers at The City of New York’s Hunter College and Harvard Medical School. The researchers also estimate that a total of 13.475 million will join the ranks of the uninsured by June 30, raising the number of uninsured Americans to about 43 million. The new figures include coverage losses among newly-unemployed workers as well as their dependents covered under job-based family policies. The figures update previous estimates that the same researchers published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine on April 7, 2020. Those previous estimates only included workers themselves who were laid off during the last two weeks of March, and did not include dependents losing family coverage because of layoffs, or the most recent week of data.
assetto corsa mods

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.