Why a National Healthcare System Will Save Our Cities
This article was published in the Baltimore Indy Reader.
The U.S. and its cities are in the midst of a healthcare crisis caused by a broken system that values profit over quality, affordable care.
Cities faced with rapidly increasing employee health insurance premiums, including Baltimore, are cutting back on much needed services to balance their budgets.
City residents aren’t better off. Increasingly, people are going without insurance, while they put off care or rely on extremely expensive emergency rooms for preventable issues.
National, single-payer healthcare is needed now, more than ever, to free cities and families from the private health insurance industry that has profited from devastating levels of inequality in care and quality of life. It would reduce healthcare costs by removing profit and reducing wasteful spending on insurance paperwork that take up 30 percent of current costs ($230 billion nationally). Read more
Philadelphia City Council Votes to Support Single-Payer Healthcare
I, along with folks from PASNAP and Health Care for All–Philadelphia, organized to get this resolution passed. This is our press release.
Today, groups representing doctors, nurses, healthcare advocates and labor unions are applauding the Philadelphia City Council for passing a resolution in support of national, single payer health care (HR 676) and two state single payer bills.
The resolution, sponsored by Councilman Greenlee and Councilwoman Tasco, makes Philadelphia the 28th city and 46th local government to pass a resolution in favor of HR 676, the National Health Insurance Act, sponsored by John Conyers (D-Mich.). The resolution also calls for the enactment of the two single-payer state bills, SB 300 and HB 1660. Read more
Passing on Single-Payer Health Care
Union leadership is out of touch with the rank and file—and the public—on health care.
A coalition of major labor unions and liberal organizations has recently created what it calls “a national grassroots campaign organizing millions of Americans to win a guarantee of quality, affordable health care for all.”
Health Care for America Now (HCAN) is a project of three major unions, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), along with MoveOn and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Elizabeth Edwards is a spokesperson for the new coalition. Read more
Published in Dollars and Sense
An article I wrote, titled “Passing On Single-Payer,” was published in the latest issue of Dollars and Sense magazine. It’s about how the leadership of unions like AFSCME and SEIU have ignored the popularity of single-payer healthcare in order to pursue a public-private health insurance system in the US.
Both AFSCME and SEIU were instrumental in creating Health Care for America Now (HCAN), a lobbying group whose chief objective is to support Barak Obama’s healthcare plan. HCAN is critical of private health insurance companies for their desire to put profit over the lives of their customers. But they won’t go as far as removing private insurance, as single-payer would, from the system completely.
Richard Kirsch, HCAN’s National Campaign Director writes, “One point of this approach [giving people the choice of private insurance or Medicare] was not to scare people away from reform or to make it easier for the opponents of reform to panic the public,” in his blog post “Why Not Single-Payer?“ Read more
New Healthcare-NOW! Website
After about two months of work, I finally finished the new Healthcare-NOW! website. It’s a vast improvement over the old site, which had me incredibly frustrated and scared off potential single-payer healthcare supporters.
Once again, I used WordPress to develop the site and redesigned, with my friend Brian, a theme by Brian Gardner. WordPress has been a joy to work with, and I plan on using it for future projects.
Let me know what you think of the new site.
Working for Healthcare-NOW
I was recently hired by Healthcare-NOW to update their website–I know, it needs a ton of work. If the site isn’t confusing enough, you should see the code. Couple that with my non-profit endeavor, City Prosper, and I’m well on my way to becoming a real writer.
I’m thrilled to start working with Healthcare-NOW because I believe a single-payer health care system is far superior to our current, failed private health care system. Not only is single-payer humane, but it’s far cheaper than our current system, despite what the right would have us believe.
I don’t want to get into too many statistics, but I should mention that we pay twice as much, per-capita, than Germany (which has universal health care) does–$6,102 per capita vs. $3,005 per capita–and receive poorer service. Also, we leave about 45 million people without any insurance, causing about 22,000 needless deaths a year.
