Medicare

Medicare’s Anniversary Reminds Us The Impossible Is Possible

August 5, 2017 Mark Karlin, www.truth-out.org Create! Congress, Health Care, Medicare

By Mark Karlin for Truth Out - Before the establishment of Medicare, many persons more than 65 years of age who weren't wealthy dealt with a harrowing reality. When they became seriously ill or required a costly procedure, they possibly faced bankruptcy due to lack of health insurance or high deductibles and co-pays. Many also confronted having to go without health care because of costs, sometimes leading to a painful death because of the exorbitant price of medical care without insurance. In fact, the lack of a government health insurance program for the elderly led to seniors being among the poorest age groups in the nation. This past Sunday, Medicare celebrated its 52nd anniversary. National health care coverage in the United States for seniors had been an elusive goal until the program was launched in 1965. For years, efforts to pass Medicare were thwarted by charges that we still hear today against the Affordable Care Act and proposals for single-payer health care. Government health care insurance for the elderly was called "communist" medicine and accused of being "un-American." Despite his ability to get Social Security enacted in 1935 and launch other government-administered New Deal programs, President Franklin Roosevelt was not able to overcome vigorous opposition to government health coverage for seniors...

Newsletter: Fight For Health Care Begins

July 30, 2017 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org Newsletter health, Health Care, Medicare, National Improved Medicare for All, Poverty, Privatization, Wages, Wealth Ineq

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were stalled again this week, due in large part to public pressure including courageous and persistent civil resistance in Congress. This was another battle won to prevent millions more from losing health insurance and tax cuts for the rich, but the fight for a universal healthcare system is far from over. In fact, we have barely begun. 1hcsenDr. Carol Paris writes, "Today, we breathe a quick sigh of relief. But we cannot celebrate a return to the status quo, a system that rations health care based on income and allows 18,000 Americans to die each year unnecessarily." Dr. Paris argues that rather than focusing on the ACA, we must now advance National Improved Medicare for All (NIMA) - a publicly-funded and comprehensive universal healthcare system in the United States. Imagine the impacts National Improved Medicare for All will have when it is achieved...

Civil Resistance Helped Kill Trumpcare – On To Medicare For All

July 29, 2017 Michael Corcoran, www.truth-out.org Resist! Health Care, Medicare

By Michael Corcoran for Truthout - In a dramatic vote that took place between midnight and dawn on Friday, the bill was defeated 51-49, to the surprise of almost everyone who was still awake to see it. Less than an hour before the vote, Democrats and pundits had suggested that passage of the Health Care Freedom Act, the Senate's bizarre "skinny repeal" approach to gutting health care access in the US, was almost inevitable. Three GOP defections, however, sealed its fate. Sen. John McCain, who recently was diagnosed with a brain tumor, became the final swing vote for the second time this week, joining Sen. Susan Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski in opposing the measure. Earlier this week, to the dismay of health care advocates everywhere, McCain had kept Trumpcare alive with his vote on a procedural motion to proceed with debate on the GOP legislation; this time his vote had the opposite effect. The Trumpcare efforts have often played out like a bad horror movie franchise where the bad guys just won't die. Just when the main characters feel safe and walk away to pleasant music, an ominous monstrosity such as the Upton Amendment in the House or the "skinny repeal" plan in the Senate reaches into sight, startling the audience members and reminding them that the danger is still very real.

The Plot To Kill Care

July 29, 2017 Eleanor Goldfield, www.occupy.com Educate! Health Care, Medicare

By Eleanor Goldfield for Occupy - Medicare turns 52 this Sunday as Republicans lament their slow going efforts to privatize a public service on behalf of the insurance industry and other healthcare profiteers. (This is also Medicaid’s birthday, healthcare for the poor, passed along with Medicare, healthcare for the elderly). That being said, Democrats have made a concerted effort to do the same, they just wrap their efforts in a more caring and affordable facade. As we stare down the possibility of millions more losing access to life saving medicines and treatment, the numbers show that neither the ACA nor the House’s AHCA or the senate’s BCRA will alleviate widespread suffering, deaths or economic hardships. Only one thing can solve the US health crisis: single payer, improved Medicare for All. So, as we come around to Medicare’s birthday, we can’t just watch Congress ready their machetes and slash away at care for the sake of profit. We need to join the fight for improved Medicare for All, once and for all - here’s how.

Trumpcare Is Dead. ‘Single Payer Is The Only Real Answer’

July 21, 2017 Zaid Jilani, www.theintercept.com Create! Health Care, Medicare, Single payer health care, Trump Administration

By Zaid Jilani for The Intercept - THANKS TO A PAIR of defections from more GOP senators late yesterday, the Republican plan to repeal and replace or simply repeal the Affordable Care Act is dead — for now. But the health care status quo is far from popular, with 57 percent of Americans telling Gallup pollsters in March that they “personally worry” a “great deal” about health care costs. Many health care activists are now pushing to adopt what is called a “single payer” health care system, where one public health insurance program would cover everyone. The U.S. currently has one federal program like that: Medicare. Expanding it polls very well. One of the activists pushing for such an expansion is Max Fine, someone who is intimately familiar with the program — because he helped create it. Fine is the last surviving member of President Kennedy’s Medicare Task Force, and he was also President Johnson’s designated debunker against the health insurance industry. Fine, now 91, wrote to The Intercept recently to explain that Medicare was never intended to cover only the elderly population, and that expanding it to everyone was a goal that its architects long campaigned for. “Three years after the enactment of Medicare, in Dec. 1968, a Committee of 100 leading Americans was formed to campaign for single payer National Heath Insurance.

Medicare Halts Release Of Much-Anticipated Data

July 7, 2017 Charles Ornstein, www.propublica.org Educate! Data, Healthcare, Medicare, Research

By Charles Ornstein for Pro Publica - The government had planned to share data with researchers on patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage health plans. Then, suddenly, it didn’t. In the past few years, many seniors and disabled people have eschewed traditional Medicare coverage to enroll in privately run health plans paid for by Medicare, which often come with lower out-of-pocket costs and some enhanced benefits. These so-called Medicare Advantage plans now enroll more than a third of the 58 million beneficiaries in the Medicare program, a share that grows by the month. But little is known about the care delivered to these people, from how many services they get to which doctors treat them to whether taxpayer money is being well-spent or misused. The government has collected data on patients’ diagnoses and the services they receive since 2012 and began using it last year to help calculate payments to private insurers, which run the Medicare Advantage plans. But it has never made that data public. Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have been validating the accuracy of the data and, in recent months, were preparing to release it to researchers. Medicare already shares data on the 38 million patients in the traditional Medicare program, which the government runs.

Medicare For Everyone With A Pre-Existing Condition

June 21, 2017 Staff, www.singlepayeraction.org Create! Health Care, Medicare, Single-Payer

By Staff of Single Payer Action - Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) has no time for single payer. But Senator Lindsey Graham says yes to single payer for sick people. That’s what came out of a meeting with Senator Manchin with single payer activists earlier this month in Charleston, West Virginia. Also present during the meeting, via Skype, was University of Massachusetts Economics Professor Gerald Friedman. According to notes taken during the meeting by a participant, Manchin dismissed single payer in the the Senate, saying “my interest is in finding a workable pathway.” “Republicans are not going to back off of a private sector market,” Manchin said. “Mitch McConnell is determined to vote to repeal. But he wants to get rid of taxes to pay for what we want to do. To do that they’ve got to cut services. They’re not trying to look for efficiencies or work with preventative care.” “A few of us — Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, and others — are looking for a better way. Lindsey Graham says — let’s put everyone with a pre-existing condition on Medicare.” “That’s a big leap forward,” Manchin said. “But I told him — we have to change the tax structure. We can’t accumulate more debt.” “There is not another Republican who supports what Lindsey has said,” Manchin said. “But people are listening. It gives us an opening we didn’t have before. I told Chuck Schumer to act like he doesn’t like it and wait and see what happens.”

The Washington Post Is Selling Snake Oil

June 20, 2017 Adam Gaffney, www.jacobinmag.com Educate! Corporate Media, Health Care, Media, Medicare

By Adam Gaffney for Jacobin Magazine - Our friends at the Washington Post are waging a brave campaign against Medicare for All. Over the weekend, the Washington Post editorial board took a bold stance: they argued that universal health care with single-payer financing is simply beyond reach. That the Post felt the need to issue the editorial at this particular moment is a testament to single payer’s rising fortunes. From coast to coast, activists are on the march: against the widely loathed, upward-wealth-redistributing, health-care-stripping abomination known as Trumpcare, for sure — but also for real universal health care. Yet the Post’s frail arguments should be confronted, because they repeat a number of common talking points that rest on flawed assumptions and that could do real harm. The Post editorial board begins by briefly conceding that single payer does have “some strong advantages.” It notes that single payer would be less of a hassle for many people (a good point), that it would get employers out of the messy role of providing health-care benefits (reasonable), and finally that it would facilitate cost-effectiveness research by government investigators (fine I suppose, although this is unlikely to galvanize the average person).

6 Lessons From The UK Election For National Improved Medicare For All

June 17, 2017 Brittany Shannahan, www.hchrmd.org Educate! Elections, Medicare, United Kingdom (UK)

By Brittany Shannahan for HCHRMD - This is the end of the center-left as we know it. In democracies across the world, we have seen a polarization of politics, with far-right populists and ethnonationalists sparring against a new wave of leftist political activism as the traditional center-left collapses under its own weight. The process has a name, Pasokification, after the Democrat-esque Greek center-left party that went from a major government player into a fringe institution overnight after an election in 2015. Had Labour replaced Jeremy Corbyn with a centrist, Theresa May and the Conservative party would have won by a landslide. We see a leftist coalition built on a visionary plan for a future for the many rather than for the few taking on a highly popular right-wing government and almost beating it entirely after only six weeks of campaigning. Some will bring up Macron in France as an example of a centrist, neoliberal political party holding its own against the far right. But we need to remember that Nazi sympathizers and collaborators founded the Front National. As Naomi Klein has said, the Front National is more David Duke than Donald Trump.

Conyers: Medicare For All’s Time Has Come

April 8, 2017 John Conyers Jr., www.freep.com Create! Health Care, Medicare

By John Conyers Jr. for Detroit Free Press - I’m as happy as anyone with the way the Republicans’ plan to wreck our healthcare system crashed and burned last week. And President Donald Trump is right: Republicans lost because Democrats beat them. We beat them because we were organized, we were unified and we were backed by unprecedented grassroots energy. Members of the U.S. Congress hosted dozens of rallies, advocacy organizations hosted hundreds more and constituents showed up in overwhelming numbers at town halls across this country to make their voices heard. And what exactly was their message? One of the most poignant moments came at a town hall hosted by U.S. Rep. Diane Black, Republican of Tennessee, where a constituent explained her opposition to the GOP bill using faith.

Crash Of Trumpcare Opens Door To Full Medicare For All

March 30, 2017 Staff, www.blog.nader.org Create! Health Care, Medicare, Trump Administration

By Staff of The Nader Page - You can thank House Speaker Ryan and President Trump for pushing their cruel health insurance boondoggle. This debacle has created a big opening to put Single Payer or full Medicare for all prominently front and center. Single Payer means everybody in, nobody out, with free choice of physician and hospital. The Single Payer system that has been in place in Canada for Decades comes in at half the cost per capita, compared to what the U.S. spends now. All Canadians are covered at a cost of about $4500 per capita while in the U.S. the cost is over $9000 per capita, with nearly 30 million people without coverage and many millions more underinsured.

Why This Isn’t Time For Public Option Or Medicare For Some

March 29, 2017 Margaret Flowers, www.healthoverprofit.org Educate! Health Care, Medicare

By Margaret Flowers for Popular Resistance - This has been a tumultuous week for healthcare reform. First there was the pleasantly quick defeat of the American Health Care Act in the House of Representatives Friday afternoon. Then, that evening, Senator Sanders spoke at a town hall in Vermont with Senator Pat Leahy and Representative Peter Welch where he announced that he would introduce a Medicare for All bill. Medicare for All and Bernie supporters lit up social media with their excitement over the announcement. This should have been great news, but it wasn’t exactly. Over the weekend, more information was revealed in a series of interviews with Sen. Sanders. Sunday, he said on CNN that single payer legislation wouldn’t have the votes...

Fight For Medicare For All, Stand Against Militarism And Austerity

March 17, 2017 Bruce A. Dixon, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! Austerity, Health Care, Medicare

By Bruce A. Dixon for Black Agenda Report - If politics is the art of the possible, what do supposedly progressive politicians and political organizations fight for after they decide that jobs, justice and peace are impossible? Do they fight for their positions and prerogatives? For the biggest campaign contributions? It's not hard to tell who is on the side of the people. There are after all, bright lines. Last week Physicians for a National Health Care Plan released a press statement declaring the Republican plan to replace Obamacare “a re-branded and far meaner version” of the 2010 Affordable Health Care Act. This ought to raise a pertinent question: If all Republicans have to do is “re-brand” and tweak Obamacare, was it really much good to start with?

RyanCare Undermines Medicare And Medicaid, Despite Trump Promise

March 17, 2017 Janine Jackson, www.fair.org Resist! Congress, Medicaid, Medicare, Trump Administration

By Janine Jackson for CounterSpin - Like others, this story was about how right-wing Republicans might present hurdles to the plan’s passage, because it’s too much like the dreaded Obamacare, and how they might be appeased. So much coverage of healthcare is set in terms of the political process—who presents obstacles, what groups are being whistled to—that the specifics, the reality of how changes in policy could affect actual people, can sometimes get lost. And healthcare could hardly be a worse place for that to happen. Here to help us see some of what’s going on with this GOP bill is Nancy Altman. She’s co-director of Social Security Works and co-chair of the Strengthen Social Security coalition and campaign. She joins us now by phone from Maryland. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Nancy Altman.

Why This Price Is Wrong

January 19, 2017 LeeAnn Hall, www.otherwords.org Educate! health, Health Care, Medicare

By LeeAnn Hall for Other Words - Eli Lilly wasn’t Price’s only investment. In March of last year, he also bought stock in Pfizer and health insurer Aetna. The value of all three corporations rose soon after his stock purchase. He didn’t stop there. In August, Price put down between $50,000 and $100,000 to buy shares in Innate Immunotherapeutics, which makes a multiple sclerosis drug. He also bought stock in Zimmer Biomet Holdings — one week before introducing a bill designed to blunt a regulation that would have hurt the company’s profits, according to CNN. Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer called for that transaction to be investigated as a violation of a law against insider trading.

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