AMERICAN PATIENTS UNITED

Title: HR 676 - The United States National Health Insurance Act - Reception
Location: Colorado Convention Center, 700 14th Street, Denver, CO, The Four Seasons Ballroom 1
Description: Join supporters of and advocates for a “single-payer” health care system for drinks, appetizers and live music.
Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director, California Nurses Association / National Nurse Organizing Committee (NNOC)
Dr. Quentin Young, National Coordinator, Physicians for a National Health Program
Greg Junemann, Chair of H.R. 676 Labor Caucus and President
IFPTE Leaders of the Congressional H.R. 676 Caucus
Michael Moore (invited)
Start Time: 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM
Date: 2008-08-26

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Title: Healthcare Panel: Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign
Location: Central Presbyterian Church, 1660 Sherman St
Description: Co-chairs Norman Solomon, Donna Smith, founder, American Patients for Universal Healthcare; Dr. Rocky White, Health Care for All Colorado, Marilyn Albert, RN, CNA/ NNOC and Rep. John Conyers.

Start Time: 1:00 - 2:05 PM
Date: 2008-08-25

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Title: Donna Smith SiCKO screening
Location: Mercury Cafe, 2199 California St.
Description: 1:30 - 4:30 pm Film \”SICKO\” - discussion facilitated by Donna Smith
Date: 2008-08-17

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In Pittsburgh, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) platform committee unanimously voted to add the language “guaranteed healthcare for every man, woman and child in America” to its Party platform. This breakthrough wasn’t supposed to happen except that a few committed people chose to get involved. I was there — and I mean as one of the people who negotiated the changes in language with Rep. John Conyers and DNC platform committee member Bob Remer of Chicago. How did one middle-aged grandma from Chicago insert a voice for patients — OK, demanded that our voice be inserted — well the following is a first hand account of 27 hours on the ground in Pittsburgh. I can tell you that there probably was a little nodding to the Clinton camp and some hope to quiet the single payer rumblings, but the more significant outcomes are yet to be realized from our effort - That is if we who are in this for the long haul grab this moment and this victory and make it our own.

Are we finished with our fight in favor of HR676, John Conyers’ “National Health Insurance Act” already co-sponsored by 91 members of Congress? Not by a long shot. In the AP report of the day’s activities, the reporter got it wrong. (For a better report see The Nation) It’s hard to say if someone from the DNC pitched him on the point — I didn’t see that happen but the big boys were working pretty hard. But allow me to set the record straight: Single payer reform was never taken off any table — in fact, a language shift a bit deeper in the platform section on healthcare specifically adds the terminology, “everybody in and no one left out” to the mix. Heard that before? Everybody in, Nobody out.

And I promise you the reasons for inserting that specific language — as innocuous as it may seem to the general reader — should send a signal of seismic levels to those thundering forward to Denver and beyond. It is in ours hands, my friends, it is now in our hands.

SAUSAGE MAKING:

Back to the activists’ tour, the only flight my wonderful Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) folks and I could find on short notice and at a price we could afford took me from O’Hare to LaGuardia (ugh and double ugh) and then from LaGuardia to Pittsburgh. Eight hours later, I arrived at the Westin Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. Nice digs. Paid for by others activists. Since I had been in transit the better part of the afternoon and evening, I had little word about whether or not the platform committee member we found willing to offer PDA’s amendment on “guaranteed healthcare for all” had made the 5 p.m., Friday deadline to file that amendment or not. I soon found out he had done so and had already been deeply involved in the DNC’s platform leadership’s efforts to alter the language of the amendment.

But Bob Remer was already hard at work. Bob was (and is) a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton’s. From the icy cold in Iowa to this moment, Bob believed with his heart and his head that Sen. Clinton was the best choice to lead his nation. A big, hulking fellow with a rich history of community and political involvement and a career spent working in the healthcare field, Bob did see the strengthening of the platform language on healthcare as a way to honor Sen. Clinton. So, I thought, that’s fine, so long as we agree that every American has a basic human right to healthcare. We didn’t know one another before that moment. But here in a hotel coffee shop in Pittsburgh, two ordinary folks from Chicago were hoping we could push our Party off the mark on this issue and toward true reform. We both agreed that the platform is not where legislative details or programs are either negotiated or adopted — and because we disagreed on what the final outcome of health reform legislation might be, Bob and I quickly moved beyond that discussion. He supports a Clinton-type reform while I am firmly in the single payer camp.

So on Friday night, with my mind screaming for some rest, and my need to do some more work I had not been able to do in the air — I felt it best to relax a bit and get to know Bob. I know, slacker Donna. The guilt and the conflicting pressures are part of my work-ethic run amok which many simply exploit — and which also has been terrifically heightened by my fears that unless I work harder and smarter than every other person I will once again be homeless and without voice as a victim of the healthcare crisis. And I am not a victim any longer, so I work — a lot. Such an aside, sorry.

When the DNC folks came to lobby Bob — which they did repeatedly — to alter the amendment’s language, I wanted the personal relationship formed with me to also inform his choices. I suggested we not agree to any language morph on the amendment unless and until Rep. Conyers was with us in the morning. He liked that idea, and I did too. I figured it couldn’t hurt to bring along a couple of big guns. Bob and I wondered briefly if we could actually move our Party even a bit toward a more just reality in the healthcare reform arena. And then it was time to rest up for Saturday.

I slept only from 1 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. as I was fired up and worried about work and worried about my husband Larry at home not feeling well. I spent as much time as I could on the hotel computer (at $6.95 every 15 minutes that wasn’t long). But down in the convention center where the DNC platform committee would be meeting, Bob was already at work. And we had some wonderful local folks who had somehow decided the PDA amendment wasn’t single-payer friendly decide to leaflet against the amendment — interesting strategy, I thought. And because of that leafleting, I think some of the amendment’s strength was diminished. It’s the old and time-tested yet failed pattern of activists targeting one of their own rather than forming a united front. It hurt to see that, but I actually thought it quite interesting to see all the various levels of interest playing out — and all the agendas, hidden and not.

All the while, PDA’s fearless leader, Tim Carpenter, called in frequently with his classic, ‘We’ve got your back” calls — a tremendous offering of support and confidence in what his on-the-ground co-chairs are doing on our collective PDA behalf. Another PDA friend and single payer stalwart, Chuck Pennachio, of HealthCare4AllPA worked tirelessly in the crowd spreading the good word of amendment #33, guaranteed healthcare for all.

And a wonderful new PDA friend, Harvie Branscomb of Colorado, flew in to Pittsburgh just to help support the effort. He handed out fliers and offered such support to us all as we worked through the committee members.

Rep. Conyers arrived and he and I and Chuck participated in a press conference hosted by State Sen. Jim Ferlo of Pittsburgh — a tireless advocate of single payer. Meanwhile, Bob was in the DNC platform meeting room. Rep .Conyers eloquently talked about the long haul — the plodding, committed work it takes to make legislative change. He repeated the idea that HR676 will move along much more quickly as soon as a co-sponsor comes from the other side of the political aisle. And it will happen, he said. “Everything is everything,” he quipped as he shared a story meant to validate all of the various efforts to push reform — every point of pressure having its place in the whole.

When we wrapped up the press conference, Bob and a representative from the Obama/DNC effort came to talk about the amendment language. As Conyers stood up-front getting his photo taken with citizens and talking to people, the DNC fellow said that as soon as Conyers was done, he and Bob would meet with him to discuss the amendment. I couldn’t tell exactly what the plan was in terms of my participation but I quickly said that as a PDA Healthcare Not Warfare co-chair with Conyers, I wanted to come along for this meeting. All agreed.

We walked to the center of the open refreshment area of the convention center. And around a raised cocktail table meant to allow folks to eat $3 hot pretzels, chips and sip $2 sodas, Bob, me and the chairman of the House Judiciary (and my fellow PDA Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign co-chair) John Conyers talked platform language with two or three DNC/Obama folks who would then race back to the meeting room and confer.

I was incredibly honored that Conyers deferred to me and Bob on the language of “guaranteed health care” not coverage, and also I referenced a connection I have of my own within the Obama camp with whom I had also reviewed our amendment language to make sure they all understood that this language was agreeable and simply (and strongly) expressed a common goal: to guarantee one of our basic human rights. I suppose I felt it necessary to wipe away this notion that those of us in this movement do not have the smarts or the pull to develop our own connections and strategies. I may be a grandmom from Chicago, but … well, you get the picture.

Both Bob and I let it be known that the American people are not stupid and they do know the difference between health”care” and insurance coverage, and that we agree that the legislative process must now work out the details of achieving the amendment’s pledge, but that we were unwavering in that wording: “guaranteed health care for every man, woman and child.” Another committee member actually liked the man, woman, and child tag — Bob and I wanted it to say “every American,” but so be it, we concurred, so be it.

Then we added the “everybody in and no one left out” phrasing later in the discussion. And I hope that signals to every single payer advocate in the land that the battle is on — we are in the mix, no matter what the AP reporter helped spin or misunderstood. Everyone gathered around that table heard me say that — there was no direct support expressed for our position besides mine but there also was no opposition expressed. So, again, the ball is now in our court, good citizens.

Conyers patted Bob and me on the back — wonderful and wise legislator that he is — and said, “this is huge.” In the overall context of world order, did we accomplish all that we wanted? No. But did we make a dent? Did we stake a claim for real reform? Yes, we did. And knowing as Conyers can know after more than 40 years in Congress, negotiating in the right direction of the desired goal is tough work, and perhaps made a bit tougher when you are just Donna and Bob from Chicago up against some of the political and policy wonks who have agendas and ambitions way out of this world compared to ours.

The DNC/Obama gang raced back to Bob with the written and corrected amendment, went over how it would be presented and then told us it would be up for consideration right after the break. Conyers bid us farewell and walked off for yet some more meetings.

BACK TO THE FLOOR

Back inside the ballroom, the platform committee was called back to order. Bob stood at the microphone with another committee member and they read the amendment. The chair called vote seconds. And here, fellow Dems, is where the nobility and the dignity entered the picture.

Do I have seconds for this amendment, the chair asked? And slowly but deliberately, nearly every platform committee member present rose to their feet in support. They stood. For guaranteed healthcare for all. They stood in support.

And moments later, after hearing comments of support from Chris Jennings, senior health policy advisor during the Bill Clinton administration (and one of our cocktail table DNC negotiators), the chair called the amendment for a vote. All in favor, “AYE” — All opposed — silence. Guaranteed healthcare for all passed unanimously.

Bob and I hugged in the back of the room. And we both cried. A victory from two people who didn’t even know one another two days ago — and who share different views on how we get to the place so clearly stated in our amendment. It is our Party that allowed us to do this work, and it is our Party that will make guaranteed healthcare for all a reality.

THE PATH FORWARD

I have no illusions. And especially after this gruelling few days. The fight to actually achieve guaranteed healthcare for all is not going to be any easier — and in some ways those who oppose us will grow even more devious and they will pour more money into the battle. As evidenced by the AP report and other reports that somehow show this as a brokering on behalf of a Hillary Clinton plan, the reality was much cleaner and much more clear and we’ll need to be vigilant in our calling for honesty and for clarity as we move forward.

In the airport hours later, Chuck Pennachio and I sat sharing just a few moments of joy surrounding our shared victory. We also wanted to honor all those advocates who share our continued commitment to the passage of single payer, healthcare reform. Publicly financed, privately delivered, guaranteed healthcare for all. HR676.

As we rapid-fired ideas at one another for the future, Chuck scrawled on an airport napkin what we thought Conyers might want to title HR676 when he introduces it once again but this time to a new, more progressive Congress in 2009. “The National Guaranteed Healthcare for All Act.”

Bravo, and Onward.

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I want to reprint Don McCanne’s quote of the day column from Monday. For those of you that don’t know Don, he is a Senior Policy Fellow at PNHP and you can receive his excellent daily columns at Quote-of-the-day@mccanne.org

State of California
Department of Managed Health Care
August 1, 2008
DMHC Builds on Efforts to Protect Patients from Unfair and Unexpected Bills

The California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) today announced that it has finalized new regulations to restrict the practice of “balance billing” in emergency care settings – a practice that makes patients, not providers or health plans, responsible for paying the disputed difference between their provider’s bill and the health plan’s coverage. The regulations restrict balance billing by making it an unfair billing practice, thus allowing DMHC enforcement actions against those providers who engage in activities that unfairly burden consumers.

“Consumers, employers and taxpayers pay millions of dollars each year in health care premiums in exchange for a promise to protect them from unexpected bills when a health emergency strikes,” said Cindy Ehnes, Director of the DMHC. “The practice of balance billing breaks this promise to consumers and is unacceptable.”

Balance billing happens most often when an HMO patient receives emergency care from a physician or hospital that is not contracted with their health plan.

The DMHC has a strong record of aggressively protecting consumers from unfair balance billing. It recently filed a lawsuit in the Orange County Superior Court to stop Prime Healthcare Services, a Southern California-based hospital chain, from balance billing more than 3,500 HMO patients for services received at its hospitals. For complete report

Comment: The issue of balance billing stems from a conflict between contracts (health plans) that patients have with their managed care organizations and contracts that physicians and hospitals do not have with the managed care organizations covering patients that they are required to provide services for in emergency situations.

This action by the California Department of Managed Care requires that hospitals and physicians comply with contracts between patients and their managed care organizations, even though a contract to provide services has never been negotiated with these private managed care entities. Thus the providers are required to accept fees that may be lower than their costs - fees that are dictated by the private health plan.

The example of Prime Healthcare Services demonstrates why it was necessary to adopt regulations to prevent patients from being gouged at unfair rack prices. But this action, in protecting patients, also protected the private managed care organizations, often at the cost of ripping off the health care providers.

In contrast, our public insurance program, Medicare, does set rates with which providers must comply (with slight variations depending on accepting assignment or contracting as a provider). Recently, in many regions, Medicare rates have been declining in relation to provider costs. A greater effort must be made by the administrators of Medicare to establish rates that cover legitimate costs and provide fair profits. Only then is it fair to demand compliance with government regulated rates.

If we had a universal single payer national health program, a unified effort would be made to demand fair compensation at a level that would ensure that our health care delivery system would be there when we need it. What we don’t need is private intermediaries that manipulate patients and providers to accomplish their business goals. We’ve had enough of that.

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By Donna Smith, American SiCKO

Founder, American Patients United

CHICAGO – So, here it is folks. Many intelligent and gifted leaders believe our healthcare system needs major reform and that a single payer system would be the ideal way to accomplish that overhaul. Yet many of those same bright people opt to support “incremental change” as the way to begin fixing a system that leaves millions without any access to healthcare and millions of others with inadequate access.

Just down and dirty: a single payer system would have every American pay into one pool for healthcare (just as we now pay into Medicare), and all claims would be paid from that one pool to patient-chosen doctors, clinics, hospitals and other providers. Publicly financed, privately delivered healthcare. That’s what single payer is.

Awesomely simple and exquisitely responsible, single payer offers patients maximum flexibility in seeking quality healthcare, and it offers the nation maximum “bang for the buck” by removing the mark-ups for excessive profit necessary in the current for-profit, private health insurance markets.

It’s not a difficult concept.

The incremental health reform plans are quite convoluted and difficult to follow. Designed to protect all the corporate, for-profit entities currently making money in our system, it is nearly impossible to accomplish universal access to care while maintaining the status quo of our national corporate healthcare system.

Make no mistake about it, Americans already pay more for healthcare than any other people on earth, and many don’t even get care at all though they are legally bound to pay it for others. (To read a great piece on this, See “Pay More and Getting Less by Joel Harrison in Dollars and Sense at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2008/0508harrison.html) As author Harrison points out, even the uninsured spend at nearly 10 percent of their incomes paying tax burdens for healthcare others will get, including their elected representatives.

We run scared rather than stand tall. We die and let others we love die without healthcare rather then fight the battle against the titan insurance industry and the gigantic pharmaceutical companies. We are not behaving like we give a damn; we are behaving like we need to beg for relief, for care — like we are weak.

We lost our generational fire somewhere between the Sea of Tranquility and the Lower Ninth Ward. How else do we explain our national ability to watch our fellow citizens drowning on rooftops while our national emergency manager worried about whether or not to roll his sleeves up for the cameras?

When did we become a nation of people who settle for the possible? We used to be made up of pioneers with spirits as big as the open plains and dreams to match. We built railroads no one ever thought we could, had the generational fortitude to win World War II, fought against oppression during the civil rights battles in the 60s, clawed and clamored to put a man on the moon first and told ourselves there were no limits to our aspirations.

Then we softened, and we began to settle for only what we thought we could get. I blame my generation – we baby boomers sold out in ways that our children and grandchildren are now dying for. We let our guard down when Viet Nam ended, when Watergate wrapped up, when Jimmy Carter lost and when Ronald Reagan clamped down on the labor movement and used the air traffic controllers as his ghoulish examples of what happens to people if they stand up together for what they believe.

We began to internalize a behavior of settling for the possible rather than losing the farm. America’s leaders behaved in the world like drunken bullies, demanding allegiance and rewarding compliance to what our leaders dictated. We taught ourselves that to succeed one must never break rank, lest you be crushed by those more powerful.

Why were we not in the streets, up in arms – quite literally — for our brothers and sisters in New Orleans? Why are we forgetting them still?

We are no longer our forefathers’ daughters or our foremothers’ sons. We lost our emotional and societal grounding and sought easier, softer ways – earn money, buy stuff, retire early, buy more stuff. We judged one another more based on superficial acquisitions than substantial accomplishments.

Well, it is time for the people of the nation to stop it. Just stop it. We know better than this, and we are smarter than this. Stop settling for the pabulum and demand the best solutions not just the possible. Healthcare for every person in this nation is not a pipe dream nor is it impossible to achieve in our lifetimes. We do not need to cede this battle to the next generation or the generation after that.

Don’t worry about the insurance companies and the pharmaceuticals… they’ll find ways to make cash under a new, single payer system. Some folks will want to buy and have the resources to buy designer meds and procedures. And more power to them. But the vast majority of us will welcome paying into a single pool that will provide us the basic of health and preventative care. When I hear the incrementalists talk, I know they understand that any healthcare system built on profit-making cannot stand the test of justice and compassion – nor can it stand the test of fiscal responsibility, else we wouldn’t be having these problems today.

I admit to my complicity in not fighting soon enough or hard enough. I am ready for this battle. I was trained in life by a World War II veteran and a mom who worked hard to provide me with a good life full of opportunity. Now it is my turn to fight another tough American battle: the battle for sanity and common sense and the exponential potential of single payer. I want to leave this nation a better and stronger one, and unless I help fix this mess, I will surely have failed.

And I am my father’s daughter. I do not like to fail.

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Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-founder of Physicians for National Health
Program (PNHP), a group of 15,000 physicians nationwide who support a single-payer health care system, spoke on Thursday, June 26 in Chicago at the PHNP offices. She spoke about the presidential
candidates health plans and single-payer in the 2008 elections. She is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an internist at Cambridge Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I’ve been asked to make some comments on the upcoming Presidential elections and developing a strategy around them. I am an expert in health policy, not on political strategy. People in this room have more experience in that than me. But I do want to talk a little about where I see us going in the single-payer movement within the broader political context. I am paradoxically optimistic about the political situation right now. And I say paradoxically because if we look at the actual health policy proposals of Obama and McCain they are not good.

Let’s start with McCain. He has said that he is goi ng to continue most of the proposals of the Bush Administration with accelerated privatization of Medicare. He does use the word privatization – but he’s been very clear that he is going to push for more “competition” and “choice” within Medicare, euphemisms for privatization.

He’s also very big on consumer-directed health care, on bare-bone health plans with big co-payments and deductibles as a way as a way to save money. He has put forward a fairly desultory proposal about refundable tax credits, whereas he previously had no proposal on his website for months and months. About a month ago he put up a proposal in which he said that he would offer a refundable tax credit of $2500 for an individual, $5000 for a family.

What he didn’t say on his website is how he would fund the tax credit. So we are left wondering. There are a couple of theories about it. Most of us think he is not prepared to give people $2500 or $5000 in a ref undable tax credit without some way of funding it. That would be a tremendous transfer of wealth out of the tax system to the taxpayers, so we don’t really think he’s planning that.

If McCain is planning on going with the Bush-style plan, then the tax credits would be funded by caps on the tax-deductibility on employer-based insurance. In fact, several pundits have been talking as if that is McCain’s plan. There’s a third point of view, which says, “well if he isn’t including any funding, then he isn’t particularly serious about doing any of this.”

If in fact he is serious, his proposal is what I call “voucherization” of health care; families would get a fixed tax credit or a fixed amount of tax deductibility of your employer-sponsored plan and above that tax credit or deductibility there would be no further government subsidies for health care. So, it is essentially a “voucherization” of government’s contribution to health coverage. Another way of thinking about it is that McCain would switch health care from a defined benefit system to a defined contribution system.

For those not familiar with this concept, let’s back up a little bit and discuss pensions. Retirees used to get pensions with something called a defined benefit, say 60% of your salary for as long as you lived. But few of us will get such pensions except for a handful of public workers. Nowadays, we get something called a defined contribution, at my institution, the employer puts 6% of my salary into a retirement plan. It turns out 6% of my salary summed up over 30 working years is a whole lot less money than what you would need to generate 60% of my salary for the rest of my life. So, the new pension arrangements, like the Bus/McCain health proposals, are actually a massive cutback disguised as a shift from a defined benefit to a defined contribution.

Needless to say, the concept of switching from defined benefit to defined contribution has been very popular with the Republicans. There’s been an effort to move Medicare in that direction (under the moniker “premium support”) where the federal government would pay $6-8,000 but not guarantee the full future costs of senior’s insurance. If McCain is serious about his health plan it probably represents a similar effort within the commercial (non-elderly) health insurance market to push people into defined contribution rather than defined benefit arrangements.

We could spend some time on it, but to be honest I don’t want to focus too much on McCain because were not at all sure whether or not he’s serious about his health plan. He was under a lot of pressure to come up with something. And similar to what George Bush, did with his proposals for tax credits, McCain seems to be putting no political capital at all into actually implementing them. I don’t think any of us in this room ever thought Bush meant what he said about health care tax credits in his State-of-the-Union address. He certainly hasn’t given any indication that he’s planning on pushing forward his proposed health care tax credits.

As for Obama his health proposal is not a universal health care proposal. He scarcely even claims it’s a universal health proposal. It would include a big expansion of Medicaid and Medicaid-like programs. Medicaid expansion is of course, better than no Medicaid expansion; those of us who work in the public sector know that. But we also know that Medicaid and Medicaid-like expansions have been tried over and over and over the last thirty years. This has not moved us towards universal health care.

After Medicaid expansion, we usually see a small drop in the number of uninsured. We are seeing that in Massachusetts right now. As long as we keep pumping money into Medicaid or Medicaid-like programs, we can push down the number of uninsured by a couple of percentage points. But that’s not a viable, long-term strategy because it’s not affordable. Obama’s plan does have significant money for Medicaid expansion, restoring money to S-CHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program), subsidized programs for the poor and the near poor.

Obama is also talking about an employer mandate without providing much detail about what it would be like. Certainly, even in a very liberal state like Massachusetts we were not able to implement any real employer mandate the employer mandate is in the new law in name only.

In fact the only mandate Obama is clear about is a mandate that parents have to buy health insurance for their children. Health insurance for children is cheap and children garner a lot of political sympathy. This mandate would leave tens of millions of American adults uninsured if the Obama plan goes though as he proposes it.

So , my optimism is not based on Obama’s proposal and it’s certainly not based on McCain’s proposal. My optimism is based on something taught to me a nurse in the Boston-area and a long-time single-payer activist. She used to give this speech where she would say, “People say politics is the art of the possible, but they are wrong. Politics is the art of creating the possible. And what is possible is about what people believe is possible.”

I believe the biggest impediment to our work over the last ten years or so has not been lack of a good program, because we know what a good single-payer program would look like. We have HR676, we can look to Canada and places in northwestern Europe, that’s not the problem, we have models and we have a program. The problem is the lack of hope. – the lack of a sense of possibility. People hate the health insurance system and they know things need to change. But people don’t believe anything can change.

So, what we really need right now is an infusion of hope. Even if Obama can’t deliver on his own plans, when he raises the expectation of the population, people will begin to believe change is possible. And if people truly believe change is possible, they are probably right. I was only a kid when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but I am a student of history. The reality is that Kennedy was not all that liberal. He was a tepid liberal, at best. For instance, there was a big debate within his Administration about whether he was going to send the troops to protect the Civil Rights activists in the South. His program was a very moderate one for his day and age.

Yet his election got people thinking that change was possible. Once people thought change was possible the whole Sixties started to unfold. “Well if Kennedy is there, maybe the Civil Rights movement can move more quickly, maybe the women’s movement can m ove more quickly, maybe we can actually stop a war through domestic protest.”

He raised people’s sense of possibility and that went much further and farther than John Kennedy could have ever envisioned. This is the kind of moment I think we are now at. The electorate’s view of Obama as something really new and exciting, brings a sense of possibility and optimism we have not seen in this country’s political culture for a very, very long time.

The question we need to discuss is what do single-payer advocates do at this point? I don’t think anyone here wants to attack Obama in anyway that would decrease the possibility of his winning the election, but at the same time we need to open up the whole health reform discourse.

I feel very strongly that people need to be articulating the single-payer message, so as Obama and Congress struggle to do something early in the Administration, there will be a very clear
vision out there that there is a single-payer alternative; that there are folks supporting it and that there is a track record of success on single-payer; that there is not track record on mandates and there is a negative track record on the Medicaid expansion.

We need to get the single-payer ideas out there for people as hope wells up and people start to look for ways to move forward.

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Our friends at the Washington Post are reporting that there has been a surge in whistleblower complaints filed with the Department of Justice.

More than 900 cases alleging that government contractors and drugmakers have defrauded taxpayers out of billions of dollars are languishing in a backlog that has built up over the past decade because the Justice Department cannot keep pace with the surge in charges brought by re and pharmaceutical industries and often involve Medicare and Medicaid funds. whistle-blowers, according to lawyers involved in the disputes.

Among the largest false-claims cases to date are a $650 million settlement earlier this year by drugmaker Merck in connection with an alleged failure to repay Medicaid rebates; a $515 million deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb to cover illegal drug pricing and marketing; and a $98 million agreement with software maker Oracle over pricing.

If their claims are successful, whistle-blowers can receive a hefty slice of the settlements or verdicts, sometimes as much as 20 percent of the award. A former Merck sales manager collected $68 million earlier this year for his role in exposing an alleged drug-pricing scheme.

Even bigger lawsuits containing potentially explosive allegations are waiting in the wings. The vast majority, more than 500 cases, involve the care and pharmaceutical industries and often involve Medicare and Medicaid funds.

For the complete story click here

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Our sources in Florida tell us that a resolution supporting HR 676 (the Single Payer bill in Congress that has 90 cosponsors) passed on the floor of the US Council of Mayors conference without objection!  Much of the credit goes to Floridians for Health Care (Alison Landes) and Dr. David Prensky from PNHP who have been working with Healthcare-NOW on this and have been diligently working the conference on site in Miami.  The scoop is that there will be a press conference tomorrow with Mayor Lois Frankel of West Palm Beach; she introduced the HR 676 resolution

This is a big boost in our campaign to make Health Care a Human Right!

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Tags: APU Advisory Board, Donna Smith, Health Insurance Industry // 2 Comments »