Single-Payer

The Battles Ahead: Meet The Biggest Opponents Of 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...

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.”

Survey: Physician Attitudes Shift To Single Payer

June 15, 2017 Staff, www.cmsdocs.org Educate! Health Care, Single-Payer

By Staff of CMS - The AHCA, which would roll back the Medicaid expansion in 31 states, including Illinois, earned positive views from just 23.4 percent of physicians who said they were “generally favorable” about the legislation. Rather, physicians voice support for single payer and and also support the Affordable Care Act (ACA)with some fixes. In the Chicago Medical Society survey, the ACA received a “generally favorable” view from 62.7% of Chicago area physicians and even more, or 66.8% have a “generally favorable” view of a single-payer financing health care system. Given a choice between single payer, an improved ACA and the AHCA, Chicago physicians favored a single payer approach by 2 to 1 over the ACA and by 3 to 1 over the AHCA. Chicago area physicians’ more positive views of single-payer financing comes as attitudes shift on the issue. Just last week, the California Senate approved a “Medicare for all-type/single payer bill.”

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.

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