Health care debate and the single payer fight moves to the Senate--call today to support Sanders' amendments to health care bill

After our many alerts for action at each stage of the struggle for real health care reform in the House, our attention now turns to the Senate.

Late Saturday night, after debate over allowing debate on the Patient Protection and Affordability Act, Senate Democrats stopped the threat of a Republican filibuster on a party-line vote 60-39.

Today, please take action to bring the single payer argument to the Senate: Physicians for a National Health Program report Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce two single payer/Medicare for All amendments to the Senate bill.

The first would create a national single-payer/Medicare for All plan, similar to his earlier S. 703 and Conyer’s H.R. 676, and the second would allow states to adopt single payer similar to Rep. Kucinich’s amendment that never got to the House floor.

Please call your senators now (capital switchboard 202-224-3121, or call their offices directly) and urge them to vote "yes" on Sanders' two single-payer amendments.

You may send a fax directly from the PNHP website here.

PNHP writes: The Senate bill like the House version (H.R.3962) is totally inadequate. In brief, it gives $450 billion in taxpayer money to the private insurance industry, along with an individual mandate that shunts them millions of mandatory new customers for their defective product. It doesn’t expand Medicaid or private coverage for another four years, until 2014, and event then would leave over half of the uninsured – 24 million people – without any coverage. The puny “public option” would only cover 1 percent of Americans. All key elements of the bill have already been tried and failed to reduce the number of uninsured or health care costs at the state level. The only durable result is likely to be a strengthening of the power of the insurance and drug companies to hijack the reform process.

Read more:
From PNHP: Talking points on HR 3962 with some comparisons to the Senate (Reid) bill in bold here

From PNHP: Robert Reich, "The public option ain't what it used to be"

Huffington Post: "Meet the New Health Care Reform, Same as the Old Health Care Reform"

Human Rights Day on December 10th. The Single Payer Coaliton, including AfD, is working to build actions on that day. Now is the time for you to write a Letter to the Editor to your local paper on healthcare as a human right not a corporate right to profit. Why should the corporate person deny care to real persons? Please contact info@healthcare-now.org if you would like to organize an action near you.

Thank you for taking action today!
AfD’s Single Payer/Medicare for All Team...
Nancy, Peter, David, Rick, Barbara, Ruth W., Ruth C., and Lou