I'd urge you to read the excerpts from the e-mail below and to contact your representative to co-sponsor this important bill. But those from Virginia's 3rd District are off the hook -- Representative Bobby Scott (VA-3) has already stepped up to the plate!
Demand National Health Care For EveryoneAccess to health care is a fundamental human right, not a luxury.
People need and deserve universal, continuous, and accessible health coverage that is provided by a single payer and does not require full-time employment and a beneficent employer. It is time for our nation to adopt a national public health policy that ensures an equitable health care delivery system and a healthier society.
Action Needed:
Take Action: Ask your representative to co-sponsor the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, H.R. 676.
Introduced by Representative John Conyers (D-Mich.), the bill would create a publicly financed, privately delivered system for providing comprehensive health care for all U.S. residents by expanding and improving the existing Medicare program.
The goal of the legislation is to ensure that all U.S. residents have access to quality, affordable health care regardless of employment, income, or health status. The program covers all medically-necessary care, including primary care and prevention, prescription drugs, emergency care, mental health services, dentistry, eye care, and substance abuse treatment. Patients would also have the freedom to choose their physicians, providers, hospitals, and clinics.
As background, NOW provides the following chilling information about just what a mess our healthcare system in the US has become:
Approximately 45 million U.S. residents lack health insurance and another 50 million are underinsured. Our employer-based health insurance system disadvantages the poor, the unemployed, the part-time worker, the self-employed, and employees of small businesses. The costly and inefficient U.S. health care system spends over $2 trillion each year, the highest health care expenditure per capita worldwide. A third of this money is spent on insurance company profits, CEO salaries, marketing, lobbying, and other non-health care expenses.Over the last five years, health care costs skyrocketed 87% while wages increased by only 20%. Many people do not go to the doctor, or receive recommended treatment, or fill prescriptions due to their lack of insurance or because they cannot afford the out-of-pocket costs. As prices continue to rise, both insured and uninsured individuals and families worry about their ability to access health care services.
While the U.S. has the highest health care expenditure in the world, we are not the healthiest nation. The U.S. ranks 31st in life expectancy and 28th in infant mortality rate among industrialized nations. Countries with single-payer health insurance have far better health outcomes and spend significantly less than the United States.
NOW's e-mail provided the following resource references about the bill and about the current American healthcare situation:
Read the text of the bill
Healthcare Now!
Kaiser Family Foundation: Health Care in America 2006 Survey (PDF)This is an impressive study!
Organisation for Economic and Cooperation Development (OECD): How Does the United States Compare Among Industrialized Nations (PDF)
Read the background and the legislation and then contact your representative to say "Please co-sponsor the U.S. National Health Insurance Act (H.R. 676)."
Maybe as in most cases the producer wants to get their point across, but his movie has more good points then bad and most are easy to prove.
There was chuckles and mild laughter thru out the movie. It starts with the great Bush comment "GYN's are being separated from the Women they love" and ends in Cuba where 9/11 fire fighters, etc. finally got the treatment they deserve.
In between is Canada's, France's and the UK's medicine. The UK's has been around since 1948. Something I did not know.
Last night on the "Situation Room" Moore was asked to view Rudy's remarks in the last debate where he spoke against socialized medicine. When Wolf asked him what he had to say, Michael replied " Rudy is against Medicare and Medicaid". "After all they are Socialized Medicine programs."
In response to the NOW email, yes I will write Virgil Goode, but I feel it is a lost cause.
It was good to read Bobby Scott's name, but right away I wondered "where is Moran's?"
Waiting to hear from UK and France people who had medicine under their program. Maybe a "Share you Experience in Socailized medicine" would be a good topic.
But then again all we have to hear is from poeple on Medicare and Medicaid, after al that is socailized medicine.
I know for as little as I paid in over the years, I would be lost without it. I lost my heath care in 2003 when the company I worked for went bankrupt.
Amen for Democrats.
When this family member came back to the US to finish her rehab, she maxed out her insurance before the year was out. Luckily - astoundingly - her employer paid the rest.
Our healthcare system doesn't work:
-- Between 45-75 million people in the U.S. were uninsured at some point over a two year period and another 50 million are under-insured.
-- Only people who can afford health insurance and co-pays receive quality health care. Health care is a right, not a privilege.
-- Investor-owned companies like the for-profit insurance companies that dominate the healthcare industry report to their shareholders, not to the public.
-- More than 24 cents of every health care dollar goes to paperwork, advertising, CEO salaries, profits, and other non-clinical costs.
-- According to the Institute of Medicine,18,000 people in the U.S. die every year because they don't have health insurance.
-- The current system is full of racial disparities:
**About 30 percent of Hispanic and 20 percent of African Americans lack a regular source of health care compared with less than 16 percent of whites.
**Hispanic children are nearly three times as likely as non-Hispanic white children to have no regular source of health care.
**African Americans and Hispanic Americans are far more likely to rely on hospitals or clinics for their health care than are whites.
Single-payer healthcare is fair, equitable, and accountable to the public:
-- Single-payer healthcare would actually be less expensive for most people. Insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles, and all other out-of-pocket payments would be eliminated. Payroll taxes and shared cost savings would help pay for health care for all. The payroll tax on employers would replace all other employer expenses for employees' health care.
-- A publicly-funded system is accountable to the public, while the current system is accountable to the stockholders.
-- Under a single-payer system, all individuals residing in the U.S. will be covered.
-- This system covers outpatient care, long term care, medical equipment, mental health services, and substance abuse treatment.
-- This system allows patients to choose their own doctors, hospitals, and facilities.
-- All hospitals, clinics, and other providers would be required to be public or not-for-profit. This means that medical decisions are left to patients and doctors, not corporations looking to maximize profits.
-- This system eliminates unnecessary administrative costs, paperwork, and bureaucracy.
An interesting comment from my congressional representative Jo Ann Davis (R VA-1). She has been battling breast cancer and made a statement to the Fredericksburg Free Lance Star last year that, after looking at the bills her insurance company paid for her, she just didn't know how people with out health insurance pay their medical bills! Yes, she actually said that!!!!
Use of Health Services by Previously Uninsured Medicare Beneficiaries Special Article, July 12, 2007
Background: Previously uninsured adults who enroll in the Medicare program at the age of 65 years may have greater morbidity, requiring more intensive and costlier care over subsequent years, than they would if they had been previously insured.Methods: We used longitudinal data from the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study to assess self-reported health care use and expenditures from 1992 through 2004 among 5158 adults who were privately insured or uninsured before Medicare coverage began at the age of 65 years. We used propensity-score methods to compare health care use and expenditures for previously insured and uninsured beneficiaries who were similar across numerous characteristics at 59 to 60 years of age and adjusted for differences in supplemental and prescription-drug coverage after 65 years of age.
Results: Among 2951 adults with hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, or stroke diagnosed before 65 years of age, previously uninsured adults who acquired Medicare coverage at the age of 65 reported significantly greater increases in the numbers of doctor visits (P<0.001) and hospitalizations (P=0.001) and in total medical expenditures (P=0.02) than did previously insured adults (my emphasis added).
Don't you think this sounds like a no-brainer?