Single-Payer

Single Payer Not Top Priority Even For Democrats

June 10, 2017 Staff, www.singlepayeraction.org Organize! Health Care, Single-Payer

By Staff of SIngle Payer Action - “Congressional Democrats and the national Democratic Party don’t actually want to pass Medicare for All because that would be the end of the steady flow of campaign money the party receives from the for-profit health care industries,” Kirkwood says. “This money powers the careers of Party insiders and the political campaigns of their candidates. But, Democratic elected officials need to publicly appear to support HR 676 because it is extremely popular among Democratic voters. Democrats privately tell reformers that they support Medicare for All and, if anyone asks, they say – yes they have co-sponsored HR 676. But, when push comes to shove, they will not vote to pass HR 676 in the Congress. And they have little fear that push ever will come to shove because party leadership will not allow such a vote – as they did not in 2009.” In an open letter to single payer activists, Kirkwood calls for a campaign to recruit and run single payer doctors for Congress. “We should try to recruit physicians or retired physicians to run in both parties and in multiple Congressional districts,” Kirkwood writes. “Asking physicians to stand for election produces several benefits.”

Voters Are Fired Up For Single Payer Creating Dilemma For Democrats

June 6, 2017 Margaret Flowers, www.healthoverprofit.org Organize! Congress, Health Care, Single-Payer, Voting

By Margaret Flowers for Health Over Profit - On Sunday, June 4, the same day that Our Revolution, a Democratic Party group that arose from the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, organized rallies and die-ins to highlight the number of people dying in the United States due to lack of access to health care, the New York Times published an article, “The Single Payer Party? Democrats Shift Left on Health Care“, prominently on the front page and above the fold. The article quotes RoseAnn DeMoro, head of National Nurses United, saying, “There is a cultural shift. Health care is now seen as something everyone deserves. It’s like a national light went off.” Minnesota Congressman Rick Nolan was also quoted, saying that rank and file Democrats “are energized in a way I have not witnessed in a long, long time.” Nolan is correct in stating that following the Democrat’s large loss in 2016, the party needs “a more boldly ‘aspirational’ health care platform.” Democratic Party voters have been strong supporters of single payer health care for a long time. Polls have consistently shown that super-majorities of Democratic Party voters want single payer, but Democratic Party candidates keep telling them that they can’t have it.

Why Fight For Single-Payer Is More Important Than Ever

May 13, 2017 Sarah Jaffe, www.inthesetimes.com Create! Health Care, Single payer health care, Single-Payer

By Sarah Jaffe for In These Times - Just from the big picture perspective, what are some of the things it is doing? Well, on the one hand, it is cutting programs. There is a major cut in Medicaid. Over 10 years, we are talking about greater than $800 billion dollars in Medicaid cuts. That is about a quarter of federal spending. That is going to throw millions of people off of Medicaid. As you know, Medicaid is a program for lower income people that covers a lot of Americans. More than 70 million. That is one thing. The second thing is it is going to weaken the subsidies that people use to buy health plans on the marketplaces, the so-called “Obamacare” plans. Those are still going to be around—the private insurance industry will still be subsidized—but those subsidies are going to be worse, they are going to be more regressive, and they are going to be less adequate for many folks. That is one side of the ledger. On the other side of the ledger there's just a huge redistribution of wealth upwards. Essentially, it gets rid of a variety of taxes that the Affordable Care Act put in place, and that is almost entirely going to benefit the very wealthy.

Single Payer, Progressive Caucus And Cuban Revolution

March 22, 2017 Staff, www.singlepayeraction.org Create! Cuba, Health Care, Revolution, Single payer health care, Single-Payer

By Staff of Single Payer Action - And the only Senate member of the Progressive Caucus — Bernie Sanders — is dragging his feet on introducing a companion single payer bill in the Senate. Recalcitrant Democrats say they are too busy defending Obamneycare to get behind single payer. Typical is Progressive Caucus member Don Beyer who said that while he has voiced support for single payer in the past, his immediate priority is “protecting the health care achievements of President Obama.” There is a history here, of course. Back in 2009, a young single payer activist, Nick Skala, ran into the same kind of stonewall from the Progressive Caucus, when he presented the case for single payer.

‘Ryancare’ Dead On Arrival: Can We Please Now Try Single Payer?

March 16, 2017 Ellen Brown, www.ellenbrown.com Educate! Health Care, Single-Payer

By Ellen Brown for Web of Debt - The secret to the success of these more efficient systems is that they control medical costs. According to T. R. Reid in The Healing of America, they follow one of three models: the “Bismarck model” established in Germany, in which health providers and insurers are private but insurers are not allowed to make a profit; the “Beveridge model” adopted in Britain, where most healthcare providers work as government employees and the government acts as the single payer for all health services; and the Canadian model, a single-payer system in which the healthcare providers are mostly private.

Six Ways Ryancare Makes Healthcare Worse

March 15, 2017 Staff, www.laborforsinglepayer.org Educate! Health Care, Single-Payer

By Staff of Labor Campaign for Single Payer - The Affordable Care Act never really solved the healthcare crisis. It treated healthcare as a commodity allocated through market forces rather than as a public good and failed to address the profiteering at the core of our healthcare system, forcing it to use a series of confusing and convoluted mechanisms to expand heath insurance coverage and regulate health insurance providers. The most unpopular of these provisions was the “individual mandate”–the requirement that everyone who wasn’t covered by a qualified employment-based plan or eligible for a public healthcare program had to purchase private health insurance coverages.

Single Payer Bernie Sanders Mark Cuban Ralph Nader Indivisible — Not

March 15, 2017 Staff, www.singlepayeraction.org Create! Bernie Sanders, Health Care, Single-Payer

By Staff of Single Payer Action - Bernie has yet to introduce his single payer bill into the Senate — despite promises from his health care legislative assistant that he will do so. (A Sanders aide told one single payer supporter that “Senator Sanders will definitely introduce a single payer bill in the Senate this Congress.” When asked to be more specific, the aide told the caller they can’t be more specific “because we don’t want to give the opposition time to organize against the bill.”) And at a CNN healthcare debate with Senator Ted Cruz earlier this year, Bernie embarrassed himself when he was asked a question by a small business owner in Texas.

Translating Trump’s Healthcare Promises & Plans

March 1, 2017 Staff, www.PopularResistance.org Educate! Donald Trump, Healthcare, National Improved Medicare for All, Single-Payer

By Staff for Popular Resistance. The only way to achieve President Trump's goals of lowering costs, giving people choice and improving the quality of healthcare is to put in place a National Improved Medicare for All. The policies the Republicans and the administration have been describing will lower the quality of healthcare, decrease people's health coverage and while they may lower premiums, they will not lower costs. Achieving that outcome requires elected officials to stand up to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries as well as investers in for-profit healthcare. To achieve that people need to join the Health Over Profit campaign and work together over the next several years to achieve a historic change or putting in place a real health system in the United States that covers everyone with high quality healthcare from birth to death.

Single-Payer Reform: Only Way To Get More Coverage, Better Benefits, And Lower Costs

February 22, 2017 Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, www.annals.org Educate! Single payer health care, Single-Payer

By Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein for Annals of Internal Medicine - President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have vowed to repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Repealing it is relatively easy. Replacing it with “something great” is much trickier. The president has promised universal coverage and reduced deductibles and copayments, all within tight budgetary constraints. That is a tall order and unlikely to be filled by proposals that Republicans have offered thus far. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's blueprint (1) would rebrand the ACA's premium subsidies as “tax credits” (technically, the subsidies are already tax credits) and offer them to anyone lacking job-based coverage—even the wealthy—reducing the funds available to subsidize premiums for lower-income persons in the United States. He would allow “mini-med” plans offering miniscule coverage and interstate sales of insurance, circumventing state-based consumer protections.

Mariame Kaba On Why The Time To Push For Single-Payer Is Now

January 25, 2017 Sarah Jaffe, www.inthesetimes.com Create! Health Care, Single-Payer

By Sarah Jaffe for In These Times - Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. In this series, we'll be talking with organizers, troublemakers, and thinkers who are working both to challenge the Donald Trump administration and the circumstances that created it. It can be easy to despair, to feel like trends toward inequality are impossible to stop, to give in to fear over increased racist, sexist and xenophobic violence. But around the country, people are doing the hard work of fighting back and coming together to plan for what comes next. This series will introduce you to some of them. Mariame Kaba is a longtime organizer around issues of prisons, policing and criminalization. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, which has as its goal the ending of youth incarceration.

Census Data Show US Needs Single Payer Now

September 15, 2016 Mark Almberg, www.pnhp.org Educate! Healthcare, Obamacare, Single-Payer

By Mark Almberg for PNHP - Zarr noted that since the ACA’s passage the number of uninsured has fallen by about 41 percent – from about 49 million people in 2010 to 29 million in 2015, with the largest gains among the poor, near-poor, and minorities. He said such gains “can only be welcomed, since research shows that having some kind of coverage is better than none.” But he said the Census Bureau report shows that new sign-ups dramatically slowed last year, with a decrease in the uninsured rate of only 1.3 percentage points from 2014.

Doctors Call For Single-Payer Health Reform

May 6, 2016 Mark Almberg, www.pnhp.org Create! Health Care, Reform, Single-Payer

By Mark Almberg for PNHP - In a dramatic show of physician support for deeper health reform – and for making a decisive break with the private insurance model of financing medical care – 2,231 physicians called today [Thursday, May 5] for the creation of a publicly financed, single-payer national health program that would cover all Americans for all medically necessary care. Single-payer health reform, often called “Medicare for All,” has been a hotly debated topic in the presidential primaries, thanks in part to it being a prominent plank in the platform of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Democratic Consultants Sign Up To Defeat Colorado Health Initiative

May 4, 2016 Lee Fang, www.theintercept.com Educate! Colorado, Democrats, Single-Payer

By Lee Fang for The Intercept - INFLUENTIAL DEMOCRATIC CONSULTANTS, some of whom work for the Super PACs backing Hillary Clinton, have signed up to fight a bold initiative to create a state-based single-payer system in Colorado, according to a state filing posted Monday. Coloradans for Coloradans, an ad-hoc group opposing single payer in Colorado, revealed that it raised $1 million over the first five months of this year.

Even Insured Can Face Crushing Medical Debt

January 6, 2016 Margot Sanger-Katz, www.nytimes.com Educate! Debt, health, Healthcare, Single-Payer

By Margot Sanger-Katz for The New York Times - The number of uninsured Americans has fallen by an estimated 15 million since 2013, thanks largely to the Affordable Care Act. But a new survey, the first detailed study of Americans struggling with medical bills, shows that insurance often fails as a safety net. Health plans often require hundreds or thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket payments — sums that can create a cascade of financial troubles for the many households living paycheck to paycheck. Carrie Cota learned the hard way that health insurance does not guarantee financial security.

Medicare Is Turning 50! Celebration Flash Mob

July 17, 2015 Nathan Wilkes, www.healthcareforallcolorado.org Organize! Health Care, Medicare for all, Single payer health care, Single-Payer

By Nathan Wilkes of Healthcare for All Colorado. Join Health Care for All Colorado and other supporters in a multi-city Flash Mob as part of a growing list of events across the country celebrating the Golden Anniversary of Medicare! We like it so much, we think it should be Protected, Improved, and Expanded to everyone!!! HCAC is coordinating flash mobs in Denver, Fort Collins, and Pueblo on Thursday, July 30th. Live in another city and want to lead one in your town? Let us know and we'll help you organize it! The "dance" is super easy and you can practice with our custom video.

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