Single payer health care

Single Payer Could Stop The Rural Hospital Closure Crisis

America’s rural hospitals are closing down at an alarming rate. According to the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program, there were seventy-two rural hospital closures between 2010 and 2016, close to double the number that closed between 2005 and 2009. Hundreds more are teetering on the brink of closure. Consequently, rural America faces a serious healthcare delivery challenge, which is made all the more urgent by the fact that rural residents tend to be much sicker to begin with. They have higher rates of chronic conditions and greater psychological distress. Rural counties have higher death rates from unintentional injuries, more motor vehicle injuries, greater premature mortality (below age 75), higher suicide rates amongst men, and higher infant mortality rates.

Jacob Hacker Rises Again To Stop Single Payer

January 6, 2018 Margaret Flowers, Healthoverprofit.org Strategize! Health Care, Single payer health care

In the article linked below, The Road to Medicare for Everyone, Jacob Hacker is once again working to dissuade single payer healthcare supporters from demanding National Improved Medicare for All and use our language to send us down a false path. Once again, he comes up with a scheme to convince people to ask for less and calls those who disagree “purists”. Hacker calls his “Medicare Part E” “daring and doable,” I call it dumb and dumber. Here’s why. Hacker makes the same assertions we witnessed in August of 2017 when other progressives tried to dissuade single payer supporters. He starts with “risk aversion,” although he doesn’t use the term in his article. Hacker asserts that those who have health insurance through their employers won’t want to give it up for the new system.

Building Single-Payer Health System: Lessons From Taiwan’s Turnaround

January 5, 2018 By Michael Corcoran, Truthout.org Create! Health Care, New Economy, Single payer health care, Taiwan

There are obvious reasons why some people in the United States oppose the prospect of single-payer health care. Taking the profit out of health care -- a moral imperative and the norm internationally -- poses a major threat to the pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies and others. These interests spend millions donatingto and lobbying powerful politicians in both parties. The goal is to do what corporations are designed to do: maximize profit regardless of its impact on outside stakeholders and the public at large. Capitulating to the donor class is never a good look for politicians, so lobbying and campaign finance are virtually never the stated reasons for opposition to a better health care system. The actual reasons for opposition are often quite separate from the explanations offered to the public.

Luxury Socialized Medicine

November 20, 2017 Meagan Day, jacobinmag.com Educate! Health Care, Single payer health care

By Meagan Day for Jacobin Magazine - The standard case for a single-payer health insurance system is pretty well known. Anyone can get care without courting financial ruin. Monumental personal decisions, like when to have a child or whether to leave or take a job, no longer hinge on the whims of an employer or the dysfunctions of the private insurance market. Surprise hospital bills, endless phone calls with insurance companies, juggling premiums, copays, and deductibles — all will be things of the past. The case against single-payer often boils down to a single word: rationing. When critics peddle scare stories about Canadian or British “waiting lists,” they’re trying to conjure images of scarcity and austerity — the social-democratic equivalent of Soviet bread lines. The truth, of course, is that you only have to look around to see that health care in America is already rationed. Try finding an in-demand specialist willing to take your “bronze-tier” insurance plan, or paying for high-priced specialty prescriptions out of pocket. Health care rationing is a fact of life in this country. But there’s another important point to be made about single-payer and “rationing”: in many places around the world, national health insurance not only isn’t austere — it’s downright luxurious.

Corporate Media Fails To Report Truth About Single Payer

November 12, 2017 Michael Corcoran, www.fair.org Educate! Bernie Sanders, Canada, Media, Single payer health care

By Michael Corcoran for FAIR. It is a sad reflection on the state of healthcare reporting in the United States that one can so easily predict how many media outlets will respond to a news event before it even happens. Yet for many familiar with years of media either ignoring or rejecting the merits of a universal public healthcare system—Canada’s in particular—it was hard not to expect dismissiveness and/or mockery from outlets such as the New York Times and Vox, who sent reporters on the tour. The results were unsurprising. Vox (10/31/17) used the occasion to explain why single-payer is likely a pipe dream that doesn’t fit with American values. Much of the Times article (11/2/17) read like satire aimed at mocking Canada and Sanders. A New York Times ad circulating on Facebook proudly declares: “Evidence-driven reporting. No matter what the subject.” It’s a hollow boast to those familiar with the paper’s uniformly negative coverage of single-payer.

Unlike Single Payer, Obamacare’s Design Neglects Black People

October 31, 2017 Eli Day, peoplespolicyproject.org Educate! Health Care, Obamacare, Single payer health care

By Eli Day for Peoples Policy Report - Mainstream liberals, and in particular Democrats, have been known to cozy up to radical language and symbols just as their value, and with it the political fortunes of those who parrot and exploit them, begins to rise. The last few years are crowded with examples. I’m thinking here of liberals’ oafish performance as champions of social justice. You see it most strikingly in the warm embrace of intersectionality and Black Lives Matter (both of which emerged from the black feminist tradition). That each has exploded in popularity in recent years isn’t itself the problem. The problem is that in the hands of many a liberal politician and pundit, they’ve been rapidly evacuated of substance. Substance that otherwise includes a set of short and long-term political commitments aimed at improving black life. Anyone who claims to value those lives should feel an awful rage at the outcome. After all, rhetorical admiration for black people without a full-throated embrace of policies that stand to improve the actual lives of black people may buoy the fortunes of the speaker, but it’s a pretty shitty deal for…black people. What’s cool is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Take healthcare. Judged by the misery it inflicts on black people, few systems should be as easily slated for decimation as America’s employer-provided system. In its place, the admirers of black life should get behind Medicare-for-All pronto.

Single Payer Myths: Removing People From Employer Plans

October 25, 2017 Matt Bruenig, www.peoplespolicyproject.org Create! Health Care, New Economy, Single payer health care

By Matt Bruenig for People's Policy Project - After you have demonstrated that the switching pain argument is wrong on the merits, critics will typically retreat to some kind of political argument about how the objective incorrectness of the point will not solve the political difficulty of it. You see this move in a lot of single payer stuff. For instance, critics will say it involves a big tax hike and then you’ll respond that the taxes will just replace private premiums and then they go “but that’s not how it will be interpreted.” In reality, nobody knows how it will be interpreted and the conventional wisdom of the political class (which is itself often constructed in self-delusional ways) has not had a great track record recently. These political arguments proceed as if the Democratic establishment is completely incapable of persuasion and framing and as if the Republican establishment is going to say things about single payer that it hasn’t already said about every health care proposal favored by liberals. If liberals can pass a plan that Republicans say is socialized medicine run by bureaucrats who can decide to kill you when they want, why can’t they do it again? Finally, in recent surveys, most people say they want a single payer system and, however ignorant you think poll respondents are, it seems clear from the questions asked that they at least know they would not be on their employer’s insurance anymore.

Single Payer Movement Has Transformed The Healthcare Fight

October 1, 2017 Theo Anderson, www.inthesetimes.com Educate! Bernie Sanders, Health Care, Medicare for all, Single payer health care

By Theo Anderson for In These Times. The grassroots fight for single payer, championed by Bernie Sanders, has thoroughly reframed the healthcare debate over the past year. That became clear during CNN’s Monday night healthcare debate between Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). The debate came as Republicans labor, Sisyphus-like, to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Graham said in his opening remarks that the debate was about “who we want to be as a nation.” Cassidy said that it was about who has power.

Newsletter: Is Health Care A Commodity Or Right?

September 23, 2017 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org Newsletter ACA, Big Pharma, health insurance industry, Healthcare, Medicare for all, National Improved Medicare for All, Single payer health care, universal healthcare

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. With just a week left before Congress' budget reconciliation process ends, the Senate is once again peddling a poorly-thought out plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). And once again, people are rising up in opposition to the plan, making it unpopular and unlikely to pass. At the same time, support for a National Improved Medicare for All single payer healthcare system is increasing and there are bills in both the House and Senate with record numbers of co-sponsors. Will the United States finally join the long list of countries that provide healthcare to everyone? Overall, it is a time to be optimistic.

Sanders Health Bill: Cover For Democratic Party Deals With Trump

September 17, 2017 Patrick Martin, www.wsws.org Educate! Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Healthcare, Single payer health care

By Patrick Martin for WSWS. Senator Bernie Sanders took his campaign to whitewash the right-wing character of the Democratic Party to a new level Wednesday, introducing single-payer, “Medicare for all” legislation, co-sponsored by 15 Democratic senators, on the same day that House and Senate Democratic leaders were to visit the White House for cozy talks with President Trump on corporate tax cuts. The bill was given full-scale media promotion, including an op-ed column by Sanders in the New York Times, lengthy articles in all the major daily newspapers, and reports on the network and cable television news programs. This for a bill which has not the slightest chance of passage by the Republican-controlled Congress, which will never even hold a committee hearing, let alone bring it to a vote. This makes co-sponsorship an opportunity to strike a left pose without actually incurring the wrath of the insurance companies and other giant corporations that control the provision of health care in the United States. Accordingly, a half dozen Democratic senators who are beginning to promote themselves as potential 2020 presidential contenders signed on as co-sponsors—up from zero co-sponsors the last time Sanders introduced such a bill.

‘We’re Figuring Out How We Can Mount A National Campaign’ For Single Payer

July 31, 2017 Staff, www.commondreams.org Create! Health Care, Single payer health care

By Staff of Common Dreams - I'm 'absolutely' introducing single-payer healthcare bill. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday that he will “absolutely” introduce legislation on single-payer healthcare now that the Senate GOP’s bill to repeal ObamaCare has failed. "If people don't like the private insurance that they're getting, they should have a Medicare-type public option available in every state in this country," Sanders said. Asked if he would follow through on his pledge to submit single-payer legislation, Sanders said, “Of course we are, we’re tweaking the final points of the bill and we’re figuring out how we can mount a national campaign to bring people together” “We are the only major country on Earth not to guarantee health care to all people,” Sanders said, “We should ... move in the direction of every other major country.” “I believe at the end of the day, the American people will conclude that Medicare for all — Medicare is working now for people 65 or older — let's expand it to everyone.”

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.

Democratic ‘Resistance Summer’ Becomes Protest Against Democrats

July 15, 2017 Lauren Steiner, www.PopularResistance.org Resist! Healthcare, Medicare for all, Single payer health care

By Lauren Steiner for the Robust Opposition. The Democratic Party has called for a "Resistance Summer" to protest against Donald Trump. They are planning to hold events all over the country. This DNC video promotes "Resistance Summer" and features Rep. Keith Ellison pushing people to participate. Ellison is also featured in the Lauren Steiner "Robust Opposition" video below, where he is shown threatening to arrest an activist calling for single payer (at 7:29). At "Resistance Summer" event in southern California, the resistance turned from Donald Trump to the Democratic Party. People attending the event called for single payer, improved Medicare for all. This is a hot issue in California because healthcare activists are mobilized around a single payer bill that passed the senate but has been stalled by Assembly leader Anthony Rendon. The bill, SB 562, the Healthy California Act seeks to put in place single payer at the state level.

The Battles Ahead: Meet The Biggest Opponents Of Single-Payer

July 7, 2017 Michael Corcoran, www.truth-out.org Strategize! Health Care, Single payer health care, Single-Payer

By Michael Corcoran for Truthout - It has become fashionable to write premature obituaries of the Senate bill to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, using hyperbolic and misleading language. The Senate bill, according to varying headlines, is "in peril," on "life support" and "dead on arrival." These stories should be of little comfort given that the exact same headlines were published prior to the House passing its version of the repeal. That bill was also reportedly "on the verge of collapse," "in tatters," "flailing" and even "dead." Such sentiment could give Americans a false sense of complacency. There is still a real danger that this contemptible bill, which according to the Congressional Budget Office would lead to 22 million Americans becoming uninsured, will still become law. Considering this, stopping this legislation -- which repeals Medicaid as much as it does the ACA -- should remain the top short-term priority for advocates of health care justice. But the fight to stop Trumpcare must also be part of a wider struggle for health care justice. The threat of this shameful legislation alone has demonstrated that it is morally indefensible to leave anyone without coverage. As a result, the argument for single-payer health care is starting to make sense to a lot of people...

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