Apparently not, in the latest concession to the insurance industry, Blue Dog Democrats and other conservative interests who seem to have long held the whip hand on healthcare reform.
In July, the House Labor and Education Committee approved an amendment introduced by Rep. Dennis Kucinich that would exempt states that enact Medicare for all/single payer bills from the onerous limitations contained in the federal ERISA law governing employer sponsored health plans.
Since then a rogues gallery of Fortune 500 corporate interests and insurance lobbyists have put a lot of pressure on the House leadership to strip the Kucinich amendment from final bill going to the House floor.
There's a fundamental lesson in collective bargaining that seems to have been lost on the White House, and those in Congress who devised their failing strategy on healthcare reform:
Don't make all your compromises before you walk in the room.
Enough already on the handwringing over the plan to start taxing employee healthcare benefits.
The tax is not a threat to the type of reform plan expected to emerge from Congress. It's a central element -- to pay for the massive public bailout of the health insurance industry and as a backdoor way to cut costs by discouraging people from seeking medical care.
Is the public option that some have deemed the sword we should all fall on in the healthcare debate little more than fool's gold?
In the wake of the now widely touted New York Times poll this weekend that showed 85 percent of Americans believe our health care system should be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt and that people are even willing to pay more in taxes to get that kind of system, the next question ought to be why are Democrats and some liberal constituency groups willing to settle for so little?
From the news pages to the blogs, some progressive activists are counting up the votes and what can be done to persuade 12 recalcitrant Senators and a number of insurance industry fans in the House to vote for a "robust" public option.
Today's meeting of the nation's leading single payer activists with Sen. Max Baucus was historic, and a recognition of the power of the tens of thousands of nurses, doctors, and grassroots activists across the country who have been turning up the heat on the policy makers in Washington.
Make no mistake - your voices are being heard. And, the protests and pressure will continue.
As Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, told Baucus, "there is a groundswell" across the country that will continue to press for single payer reform, and Baucus and other policy makers in Washington "are going to get to know us very well." In a later press conference, DeMoro blasted the conventional wisdom that single payer is not politically viable. "Is it politically viable to let people die and suffer from a lack of political will?" Noting the fight for women's suffrage and the civil rights movement, she emphasized, "we're going to have to turn up the heat. Women did not get the right to vote by voting on it."
With Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee continuing to shut out the voices of single payer advocates while rolling out the red carpet for the insurance giants and other health care corporations, five more were arrested today and dozens of other nurses stood before the committee in a dramatic silent protest.
Today's action -- the second in a week that led to 8 arrests -- coincided with the anniversary of the birth of Nightingale. It also marked the kickoff of two days of actions by nurses from around the country who are pressing for a legislative agenda for quality nursing care and a single standard of quality care for all.
Tuesday, May 12, is Florence Nightingale Day--and the chance to honor our first nurse with a "revolt of the nurses and doctors" protest against Sen. Max Baucus and the health insurance corporations who are doing their best to undermine healthcare reform, this time by excluding all mention of single-payer healthcare reforms from the Senate Finance debate over healthcare financing.
We urge all nurses and doctors and patients who are in the Washington D.C. area to join the Florence Nightingale Day protests this Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 12 noon right outside the Dirksen Senate Office Building, at 1st St. and Constitution Ave., right near Union Station in Washington, D.C. (Caregivers, wear your scrubs!)
Is this a turning point in the single-payer debate? Will the DC insiders be forced to listen to the public and healthcare activists--and not just big-money healthcare donors?
Both AP and Politico are reporting on the events at this morning's Senate Finance Committee, where brave healthcare activists, one after the other, stood up to protest the exclusion of single-payer reforms from the conversation.
After years of shredding our public health infrastructure and ill advised minimal preparations for the next great global pandemic, the spreading swine flu threat is at last making clear the very real calamity that could be just around the corner. If not today, surely from the next epidemic.
The Obama administration's call on Congress Tuesday to allocate $1.5 billion for combating the virus is a start, but only a start. The RNs of the National Nurses Organizing Committee and California Nurses Association (NNOC/CNA) believe that far more is needed in federal action, in regulatory crackdown on insurance practices that potentially inhibit those who are infected from seeking help, and in global coordination.
From SARS to avian flu to the swine influenza, the only question has not been if, but when.
(Much more going on around universal healthcare than the usual Beltway Banditry dominating the news. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
In Canada, it took the dogged determination of one province, Saskatchewan, and a visionary leader Tommy Douglas, to pave the path to a national health care system, which they call Medicare.
For all the detractors of the Canadian system in the studios of Fox News and the board rooms of rightwing think tanks, consider this one note: In 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation conducted a national poll to select the greatest Canadian of all time. The winner in a landslide --Tommy Douglas.
While the federal window remains open for reform, with two national single payer bills, John Conyers' HR 676 in the House and now Bernie Sanders' S 703 in the Senate, many nurses, doctors, and health activists are turning to the states to lead as well.
With the final White House Forum on healthcare scheduled Monday, April 6 in downtown Los Angeles, advocates of single payer/guaranteed healthcare have one more opportunity to shake up what has become a dreary conventional wisdom about the presumed acceptable parameters of the debate.
Hundreds of nurses, doctors, healthcare and labor activists will rally at 9 a.m. outside the California Endowment, 1000 North Alameda St., Los Angeles.
It will mark the fifth time, at all five White House regional forums, that the single payer/Medicare for all message will come to the stage, outside and inside the forum. You can extend that to the town hall meeting at the White House last week where the President was asked why we can't have a national healthcare system like they have in other industrialized nations.
(Reform or deform? Things are so bad that they can't prevent SOMETHING from being done. But the corporate powers that be are fighting like mad to prevent it from being anything remotely like what we need. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Haven't we heard this song before? It sure looks like the people who already control our healthcare system are framing the biggest issues of the present healthcare reform debate.
From the back rooms to the committee hearings to the White House summits to the front pages of the newspapers, the demands of the insurance industry are given enormous deference and accommodation.
Is it fear of Harry and Louise, the insurance campaign that some believe torpedoed the muddled Clinton health proposal? Is it the considerable influence of insurance industry contributions in the pockets of many legislators?
Or perhaps it's the caution or lack of will of some liberal groups to press for more fundamental reform--such as a single payer/expanded Medicare for all approach--that permits the industry and its conservative champions in Congress to dominate the terrain.
It's time to lay to rest the myth that spending billions on more high tech is the salvation for rising healthcare costs. Some people will peddle any notion to avoid addressing the best way to rein in costs, pushing the insurance companies out of the way with a single payer system.
It's become an article of faith that a national system of electronic medical records would produce huge savings. President Obama made it a centerpiece of his healthcare plan during the campaign (as did Sen. John McCain), and has emphasized it repeatedly in legislation and speeches.
Why in the world are we allowing the perpetrators of the health care crisis to set the terms of the debate on how to clean up their mess?
Join nurses, doctors, and health care activists Tuesday for a day of calls in Congress and a protest against the insurers as we convey a different message.
During this incredible election, we have seen the nasty and toxic side of the American character forced to the surface.
It has rarely been worse than the words uttered just this morning at a "Stop Obama" rally perpetuated by one Mark Phillips, a conservative activist and sometime Fox News commentator.
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