It is time to fix a system that delivers profits to the health insurance industry at the expense of people, their families and our communities. We're glad to be working in coalition with groups across the country that feel the same, and proudly announce our membership in the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care:
AfD Press Release 1-28-09
The Rx for our healthcare system? Single payer, not individual mandates.
If you were one of the thousands of people who participated in the January 15 congressional call-in day on single-payer, thank you! But the pressure can't stop now! HR 676 still needs co-sponsors, and legislators and aides still need to hear from you. Ask your Representative to get on board with this important piece of legislation, and urge your senators to sponsor companion legislation in the Senate, to counter the current proposals there.
Don't forget to remind legislators to attend a briefing on HR 676 to be held January 28, from 3-5 p.m. in the Rayburn Building's Room 2237. The briefing will focus on single payer's role in economic recovery, reducing health care costs by more than $1.1 trillion over the next decade. For background, see this analysis by Physicians for a National Healthcare Policy here, or read this article by John Nichols, originally written for The Nation and posted on our Headlines Blog.
Check out our healthcare action alerts here.
Here's the quick and easy way to read, print, or forward a terrific brochure on the myths and facts of single payer, written by AfD secretary Dr. Peter Mott:
AfDHCareMyths
If you missed Change.org's top ten ideas vote tally, you can see the winners here. Single payer came in third and ending corporate rule made it to the top 25.
If you joined Change.org to vote, you can also show your support for AfD and democracy on our Change.org page here
Print it out, download it, modify it, and use it! Note: this file streams from Scribd.com, and will take a minute or two to load on a dial-up connection.
Healthcare for People
The latest issue of Justice Rising, "Money for People not Corporate Plunder," has been posted to our website, here.
As always, individual articles are available for download to use in your own organizing, and your feedback is always welcome! Email the editor, Jim Tarbell, at rtp@mcn.org. If you'd like hard copies, contact the office at afd@thealliancefordemocracy.org.
Contributing to this issue: Luke Allen, Ruth Caplan, John Cobb Jr., Chuck Collins, Herman Daly, Jan Edwards, Naomi Klein, David Korten, Bill Meyers, Emily Posner, and Jim Tarbell. It was edited by Ruth Caplan and Jim Tarbell.
Please mark your calendar now and take a few minutes this Thursday, January 15, to call your Congress member's Washington office in support of HR 676. Ask him or her to:
One Nation – One Plan –
Support H.R. 676 – The United States
National Health Insurance Act
“Expanded & Improved Medicare for All”
AfD Joins the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care, the National Single Payer Coalition
The Leadership Conference is an independent, non-partisan, voluntary collaboration of a diverse group of organizations – labor, faith, social and economic justice – nurses, teachers and medical professionals - that seeks to mobilize massive nation-wide grassroots public support for single payer healthcare reform and passage of H.R. 676.
The mission of the Coalition is to win a comprehensive, high-quality, publicly funded healthcare program, with a single standard of care for all residents of the United States.
H.R. 676, authored by Rep. John Conyers, D-MI, was introduced to the 110th Congress on January 24, 2007 and currently has 93 sponsors. It will need to be re-introduced in the new 111th Congress. We must increase the number of sponsors and make sure it is passed by the House of Representatives. See Take Action Now below.
HR 676, the "Medicare for All Act," is being reintroduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. John Conyers with the same bill number. Under the legislation, the federal government becomes the "single payer" just like with Medicare. This will eliminate the costly paperwork generated by the hundreds of complicated and redundant payment plans currently imposed on doctors' offices and hospitals by private "for profit" health insurance companies and save BILLIONS of dollars every year. And like with Medicare, there will be no change in the private delivery of health services by doctors and hospitals who will be able to eliminate endless paperwork and serve your needs much more effectively. Just imagine what a huge benefit this will be!
Bad Healthcare Reform Must be Stopped! Urgent Action Needed
The Senate (Senators Max Baucus and Edward Kennedy) is proposing a healthcare reform plan that will mandate health insurance coverage for every person in the United States. Individual mandates are bad policy because they subsidize the private health insurance industry, enriching CEOs and corporations. It does not insure more people, and it will likely worsen the more inhumane aspects of our current healthcare system.
We need to tell our elected officials to support national, single-payer healthcare instead. If you're interested in helping, tell your congressperson you want single-payer healthcare (H.R. 676). See Take Action Now below.
And, “Obama Does Not Support HR 676.” Obama’s plan continues the status quo of government subsidized private corporate health insurance operating parallel to and within the lower overhead Medicare system.
NOTE: Don’t be confused by the Healthcare for America NOW (HCAN) plan.The name is similar to Healthcare-NOW, but private insurance companies play a central role in the HCAN reform that offers a mix of public funding and private insurance. This mix of private and public funding is similar to the Massachusetts Plan that analyists and experts in healthcare reform consider inadequate and failed policy.
Read: Massachusetts Health Reform: Solution or Stopgap? Questions about the Massachusetts health plan? This brochure might help you sort through this recently popular “blueprint” for a national healthcare plan. Get all the details about the limits of mandates and keeping private health insurance companies in the mix. From the brochure: Massachusetts health reform (known as “Chapter 58″) has been billed as a “model for the nation” and a “blueprint to universal coverage.” This rhetoric has generated expectations that Massachusetts residents of all incomes will be able to get affordable coverage. This hype distracts us from what really has been achieved, what hasn’t, and the strengths and weaknesses of the political strategy that brought us the new law.
What Is National Health Insurance (NHI)?
To begin with, it is NOT “Socialized Medicine”, far from it in fact. Also, it does not mean that our medical system will be taken over by the government and run like the post office as many of our opposition friends would mistakenly have you believe.
Taxes: We all know that nothing of any real value is ever free, but if you think of the taxes that will be required to support national health insurance as simply a lower cost alternative to the staggering private health insurance premiums that most of us already have to pay but which will be totally eliminated under the new system, then it becomes immediately clear that this could be a really good deal after all!Organizations
Educational MaterialsTake Action Now
Up-Coming Events
January 15th CALL! CALL! CALL!
National Call-In Day for HR 676
The Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Healthcare/National Single Payer Coalition Steering Committee adopted an action plan for two national call-in days to Congressional members to support HR676.
The first national call-in day was Monday, December 22nd and it was a total success! Hundreds of calls were made across the country, and Senator Kennedy’s office was flooded with single-payer support.
The second national call-in day is January 15th. Find out how to contact your representatives from Project Vote Smart.
The deadline is January 15, so don't put off taking part in the final round of voting in the “Ideas for Change in America” competition at www.change.org/ideas. You may vote for 10 “ideas.”
On January 16, the top 10 rated ideas will be announced at an event at the National Press Club and formally presented to the Obama administration. The National Single Payer Health Care Coalition will be at this event.
1. Vote for “Free Single-Payer Health Care
2. Vote to end Corporate Personhood
1. Let’s make single-payer healthcare one of the ten ideas to be presented to President Barack Obama on January 16th and let’s work to make this actual policy.
Vote for “Free Single Payer Health Care” here. (Note: We realize that single-payer healthcare isn’t free--the author of the idea has noted it would be paid through taxes and mentions HR 676.)
AfD Joins National Coalition for Single-Payer Health Care. The Alliance has joined the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care (LCGHC), the National Single Payer Coalition. The Coalition will work to pass H.R. 676, the US National Health Insurance Act, that Rep. John Conyers will re-introduce to the new Congressional 111th session. Hundreds of national, state and local labor, faith and social justic groups, and many teacher, medical and nursing professional organizations support H.R. 676. Many members of Congress are co-signers of H.R. 676.
Healthcare is a human right. A national federally-funded single-payer program is the only way to ensure that right is met. It is the only way to get private insurance and HMO corporations out of the for-profit healthcare business and have a healthcare system that is affordable, and covers and serves people of all ages regardless of income and employment status.
Join us to support H.R. 676. We are posting materials for education and action to our website. Please consult the website often to keep up-to-date. Thank you from the Single-Payer Health Care Committee: Peter Mott, Rick LaMonica, John Noronha, Lou Hammann, Ruth Weizenbaum, Ruth Caplan, Barbara Clancy, David Delk and Nancy Price.
2. Vote to end END CORPORATE "PERSONHOOD.” Seize the day! “End Corporate Personhood” has qualified for the final round! Join us and help realize AfD’s mission to “end corporate rule. Vote for this idea here.
Let your friends know about the vote! Forward the link to this post, blog it, Twitter it, Facebook it, etc. (Telling people face to face works too!)
According to the Associated Press, among others, state officials are scrapping the Trans-Texas Corridor, a transportation component of the Security and Prosperity Partnership.
Since 2002 Texas Governor Rick Perry had promoted the corridor, which was envisioned as a huge set of highways, rail and utility lines crisscrossing the state but had been under fire almost since its inception. Rural landowners in particular were opposed to giving up their property for the project. Scaled-down plans are now in the works, reducing corridor width from a proposed 1,200 feet to 600 feet.
A wait and see attitude might be the wisest. After all, the Dallas Morning News reports that Perry "suggested that the Texas Department of Transportation's decision to pull the plug on one of his biggest initiatives – the Trans Texas Corridor – was mostly a name change, and that public-private partnerships on toll roads would continue."
On a computer near you (or over the SF Bay area airwaves), the inaugural edition of the Cindy Sheehan Soapbox features interviews with music legend and activist Graham Nash and economist Richard Cooke, who talks to Cindy about his plan to fix the economcy. Listen to the show here, or on San Francisco's Green 960 AM on Sundays from 2 to 3pm. You can also podcast it from www.cindysheehanssoapbox.org.
You can be a part of the show by sending a 90-second Soapbox Rant--the show will feature a listener's Soapbox every week. Email your written Soapbox or mp3 to Tiffany@CindySheehansSoapbox.com.
Project Censored has named the Security and Prosperity Partnership as #2 on their "Top 25 Censored Stories" list. Their research focuses on the agreement's militarization of the border regions and the privatization agenda of the North America Competitiveness Council, creating what Connie Fogal of Canadian Action Party says is a "hostile takeover of the apparatus of democratic government . . . a coup d’etat over the government operations of Canada, US and Mexico." You can read what they have to say here.
Read more...
As true now as ever!
For ordering info see this page on our website!
