If passed through Congress, HR 676 will create a single-payer healthcare system administered by private entities and funded by the government. The legislation will provide access to health insurance for all Americans.

You can download the Fort Lee resolution here (.pdf).

New Jersey One Plan, One Nation members and healthcare activists Paula Friedman, Matt Shapiro, Bonnie Shapiro, Jeanine Ciliotta, and Edie Garbowitz organized the push to pass the endorsment as part of Healthcare-NOW!’s Win-Win Campaign targeting local government entities–cities, towns, counties, school boards-–in an effort to get them to endorse HR 676.

The activists began by finding their town’s budget and figured out the healthcare costs for one year. Next, they found the city’s total salaries. Under HR 676 employers pay about 4.75% payroll tax on employee salaries. Given Fort Lee’s current health insurance costs and total salaries, the city would save close to $5.5 million a year from the municipal budget alone. They suggested that the savings from the Board of Education budget would be similar, and the Mayor and Council later confirmed that.

The group identified a council person who they thought might be sympathetic. They met with him and gave him a small packet of information–some of which included resolutions passed by other towns, the Bergen County Board of Chosen Freeholders, and the United States Conference of Mayors, as well as evidence of NJ State Government savings of about $2.2 billion. The councilman met with the Mayor and other council members in an Executive Session to discuss the resolution. It was voted on, and passed, at the next open meeting on March 10.

MONTPELIER — Rutland City Mayor Christopher Louras on Wednesday urged lawmakers to pursue with force the single-payer health-care proposal now under consideration in the Statehouse.

At the risk of offending his former Republican colleagues and the Rutland business community at large, Louras said, he believes the state’s health-care system must be “blown up” and remade from scratch.

Enacting a publicly financed system that delivers universal care and decouples medical coverage from employment is the only way to save municipalities like Rutland City from collapsing under the weight of rising health-care costs, Louras told the House Committee on Health Care.

“I have not made friends among former colleagues with ‘Rs’ next to their names,” said Louras, a former Republican representative from Rutland who served on the same health care committee to which he testified Wednesday morning. “And I think it’s fair to say the city’s position on universal health and the Rutland Chamber of Commerce’s and business community’s may not be specifically aligned.”

Still, Louras said, pressure on the city budget wrought by rising health-care costs have compelled him to speak out in favor of the single-payer plan.

“I started out as a skeptic of single-payer universal,” he said.

After assuming his mayoral post four years ago and seeing firsthand the impact of health-care costs on the city budget, Louras said, his perspective has changed.

Rutland is on pace to spend $7 million in payroll expenses in 2011 for 150 city employees. More than $2.5 million of that, Louras said Wednesday, will be spent on health care. And the figure would have been higher, he said, if the city hadn’t negotiated a new higher-deductible plan that could require more out-of-pocket expenses for city employees.

Those figures don’t include the $15 million in unfunded liabilities associated with health-care benefits for retired city employees.

“It has created a situation where, frankly, as individuals retired, I have not replaced those retirees due to the double cost of covering health insurance,” Louras said.

Rutland pays $16,000 per employee annually for a two-person plan and “north of $22,000” a year, Louras said, for an employee who opts for the family plan. As a result, he has left many vacant city positions unfilled; the Rutland City Police Department has three fewer officers today than it did four years ago.

“We’ve been drawing down staff not because it was easy or there was fat in the budget, but drawing down staff as matter of necessity to keep the budget within a range that was tenable to taxpayers,” Louras said. “And the largest piece that we could not control is health care.”

Louras said “incremental” steps like Catamount Health, an initiative he voted against as a lawmaker, won’t solve the problem that cities like Rutland now confront.

“Controlling health-care costs, and therefore controlling budgetary costs associated with health care, is a problem that needs to be licked and frankly I do support, as chief municipal officer of the city of Rutland, the universal single-payer health care under the conditions that have been defined by the governor of the state of Vermont,” Louras said.

Louras said his support is conditioned on one caveat: public employees cannot be eligible for taxpayer-subsidized “wraparound” coverage to supplement the basic benefits package envisioned in Shumlin’s plan.

Exposing municipalities to the cost of supplemental coverage, he said, would undo the cost-cutting benefits of a single-payer system.

Healthcare-NOW! members renew support for national single-payer health care to make health care a right for all, start plans for divestiture campaign from private health insurance, and urge support for advanced state single-payer movements in Vermont and California.

(Philadelphia, PA) Last weekend, 130 single-payer activists representing 24 states, Canada, and Washington DC, gathered in Philadelphia for Healthcare NOW!’s annual strategy conference. Participants were tasked with identifying the way forward for the grassroots movement for single-payer health care through a democratic, bottom-up model of decision making.

Healthcare NOW! represents a broad constituency of people engaged in the struggle to win guaranteed health care for all people with no financial or other barriers. Participants at the conference included social workers, nurses, doctors, patients, the insured, uninsured, and underinsured, people of faith, and medical professionals –folks on the front lines of the healthcare crisis – who are working at both the state and national level to win single-payer payer health care.

Launched in 2004 by founder and visionary Marilyn Clement, Healthcare-NOW! has grown to 54,000 supporters nationwide. With the continued passion of the grassroots movement as on display in Philadelphia, we will continue to grow and win.

The conference was facilitated by Laurie Wen, Healthcare NOW! NYC, and Don Bechler, Single Payer NOW, California.

Activists renewed support for the movement for single-payer national health care, and legislation HR 676. Excitement about advanced state efforts inspired many in the room. Vermont and California are gearing up for serious campaigns to push for passage of single-payer legislation on the state level. Support for these advanced efforts was affirmed as a way to build the movement for a national single-payer health care system.

The agenda was packed with plenary panels focusing on the new health law and its failure to solve the health and economic crisis, the recent PASNAP strike in Philadelphia, organizing in communities of faith, the history of fighting for universal health care, as well as workshops on the Win-Win Campaign for Healthy Cities, Health Care is a Human Right, Outreach and Base Building, Speaker Trainings, Technical Support, and State Strategies.

Decision making was done in the break out groups. 6 fronts of the struggle were identified as themes for the break out groups:

1) Deficit Commission/National Legislation
2) State Strategies
3) Challenging Corporate Power
4) Labor
5) Outreach/Base Building
6) Education

Facilitators were tasked with reaching consensus on recommendations from each break out group so that several refined recommendations were made to the larger group. It is a great achievement to capture the energy and ideas in the movement for the way forward to make health care a right for all. The recommendations from break-out groups are summarized here.

This past weekend represented a success for democracy, grassroots organizing, and the renewed commitment that winning the right to health care in this country is both necessary and possible.

Special thanks to all of the leaders of the workshops, panels, break out groups, and program sponsors featured in the conference program book.

Every attendee received a packet containing new resources including information on how to affiliate with Healthcare NOW! and receive tech support, the new OUTREACH GUIDE, and the NEW IMPROVED MEDICARE FOR ALL BOOKLET (coming soon).

Comments are welcome on the revised booklet as we work to develop useful resources for activists. We welcome you to download and distribute or contact info@healthcare-now.org to order more.

Couldn’t make the conference? You can watch each of the plenaries and panels online.

Yours in the struggle,

Katie Robbins
Healthcare-NOW!

If you missed the call, you can listen to it here:

Or you can download the call by going here: Win-Win Campaign Call (Jan. 23, 2010).

If you’d like to follow along with the call, please download this pdf file.

If you’d like to connect with someone else in your area working on a municipal resolution for single-payer healthcare, please contact Tom Knoche.

Finally, on the call, Bob Mueller mentioned a video about Stephen Challinor explaining Australia’s healthcare system. Here it is:

New York, NY – Citizens and health care providers today staged a sit-in at the offices of Aetna, one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies, in New York City (99 Park Ave @ 40th). The action is part of a national mobilization to end health insurance abuses such as the denial of coverage for lifesaving treatments, and win support for the only real public option – Medicare for all, a single payer plan. The action was part of a Mobilization for Health Care for All campaign that includes actions in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities across the country.

The 17 participants, wearing T-shirts with slogans that read “Medicare for All” and chanting “patients, not profits!” linked arms and sat down in the lobby of the Aetna building, prompting Aetna employees to step around them on their way into their offices, where insurance claim reviewers are busy looking for ways to deny people the lifesaving treatment that they need. A crowd of supporters picketing outside the building held signs that said “Aetna is the real death panel,” and “Single payer now.”

Participants in the action demanded that the insurance company immediately approve all doctor-recommended lifesaving treatments in their files, stating that they would not leave until Aetna approved care. Aetna, however, refused to meet with their representative.

“Insurance companies are denying care to people who need it right and left, but that’s not how it should work. Health care is a right, not a privilege,” said Constancia ‘Dinky’ Romily, 68, just before getting arrested. Romily is a retired nurse and a resident of East Village, New York. “I’m putting myself on the line and getting arrested to end insurance abuse and win health care for all,” she says.

The sit-in is part of the Patients Not Profit campaign of the Mobilization for Health Care for All. The mobilization was launched by the organizations Prosperity Agenda, Health Care NOW!, and the Center for the Working Poor. Today’s action has been organized by the Private Health Insurance Must Go coalition, a local New York organization.

“People are dying because these corporations put profits before patients, and the health care bill currently on the floor of Congress fails to address the real cause of the health care crisis – the insurance companies.” says Katie Robbins, an organizer with Healthcare-Now! “The only solution to our health care crisis is the real public option, Medicare for All, a single payer plan.”

Laurie Wen, 38, a Manhattan resident, is one of the everyday Americans who are fed up with the state of health care in our country, and was arrested today to stand up for the hundreds of Americans who are denied lifesaving care every day, and to call for the only solution for health care for all, Medicare for all. A friend of hers, she says, was recently denied by Aetna for coverage for a bone marrow transfusion to treat cancer for three months, setting his care back for three months.

“We will continue to stage these sit-ins as Congress debates legislation that expands the insurance company stranglehold over our health, our lives, and our government,” says Wen. “We need a better system to end insurance abuse and win health care for all.”

For more information:
Mobilization for Health Care www.MobilizeForHealthCare.org
Photos from today

The Mad As Hell Doctors have been traveling across the country speaking out, educating and listening. They are appropriately angry at the current situation (which they distinguish from the destructive rage witnessed recently at Town Halls) and are doing something about it.

The tour will arrive in Washington, D.C on Wednesday, September 30th. We hope you can join us for their final stop – the White House.

The Mad As Hell Doctors will lead a care-a-van to Washington (details below), march and then rally at Lafayette Park. We hope you can be there. These doctors are for health reform but against insurance companes. They want to see the President and Congress do the best reform for the people of this country: enact a national single payer health system. It isn’t too late.

Here are the details:

Caravan Meet-Up #1
September 30
Location: Frederick, Maryland
Place: Frederick Fairground
Address: 797 E Patrick Street
Arrival Time: 9:30 am
Departure Time: 10:00 am
Drive Time to Columbia: Approximately 1 Hour

Caravan Meet-Up #2
September 30
Location: Columbia, Maryland
Place: Columbia Mall
In front of J.C. Penny
Arrival Time: 11:00 am
Departure Time: 11:30
Drive time to Silver Springs Metro Station approx 30 minutes

Caravan Meet-Up #3
September 30
Location: Silver Springs Metro Station, Maryland
Arrival Time: 12:00 pm (noon)

Rally attendees will park their cars in the Silver Springs Metro Station and take the Red Line toward Shady Grove and get off at McPherson Square. Be sure to wear a white ribbon so that others in the movement can recognize you! You now have a few hours off before the White Ribbon Rally begins.

Meet at McPherson Square at 3 pm to march down Vermont Ave to Lafayette Park. Rally begins at 4 pm with music and exciting speakers.

Join us! Bring your single payer signs and paraphernalia! Wear white ribbons – the symbol of the single payer movement.

I hope to see you there! Spread the word!

New York State Senate Resolution
Urging the New York State Congressional delegation to enact H.R. 676

Adopted 06/02/09

BILL TEXT: 2313
Sponsor: Senator BRESLIN
Cosponsors: Senators ADDABBO, DIAZ, DUANE, ESPADA, HASSELL-THOMPSON, ONORATO, SCHNEIDERMAN, STAVISKY, THOMPSON

LEGISLATIVE RESOLUTION urging the New York State Congressional delegation to enact H.R. 676, the United States National Health Care Act

WHEREAS, Every person in New York State and in all the United States deserves access to affordable, quality health care; and

WHEREAS, There is a growing crisis in health care in the United States of America, manifested in rising health care costs, increased premiums, out-of-pocket spending, decreased international business
competitive- ness, and massive layoffs; and

WHEREAS, As of May of 2009, approximately 2.6 million New Yorkers lack health insurance; and

WHEREAS, Those uninsured now often experience unacceptable medical debt and sometimes life-threatening delays in obtaining health care; and

WHEREAS, One-half of all personal bankruptcies are due to illnesses or medical bills; and

WHEREAS, The increasing expense of Medicaid and the rising costs of insuring state employees and teachers can best be met not by limiting benefits, but by expanding them under a national, publicly-funded health insurance program; and

WHEREAS, The complex bureaucracy arising from our system of fragmented, for-profit, multi-payer system of health care financing consumes approximately 30 percent of the United States’ healthcare
spending; and

WHEREAS, United States Representatives John Conyers, Yvette D. Clarke, Eliot L. Engel, Maurice D. Hinchey, Carolyn B. Maloney, Eric J.J. Massa, Gregory W. Meeks, Jerrold Nadler, Paul D. Tonko, Edolphus Towns and Nydia M. Velazquez have introduced H.R. 676, the United States National Health Care Act, in the United States House of Representatives for the 111th Congress, this Act would provide a universal, comprehensive, single payer system of high quality national health insurance; and

WHEREAS, Passage of H.R. 676 would save New York State citizens, businesses and governmental bodies at least ten billion dollars ($10,000,000,000) annually in health care costs; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the New York State Congressional delegation be and hereby is respectfully memorialized by this Legislative Body to enact H.R. 676, the United States National Health Care Act; and be it further

RESOLVED, That copies of this Resolution, suitably engrossed, be transmitted to each member of the Congressional delegation from the State of New York.

Twenty four state legislators, from 16 states, have sent a copy of the Appeal to all 7,500 state legislators in the United States asking them to add their names to The Appeal which will be published in Roll Call, a widely read Capitol Hill publication.

The legislators, in their letter, cite the growing “economic crisis” and “badly strained” state budgets as the reason why they are asking “The U.S. Congress … to heal our hemorrhaging state budgets while bringing comprehensive quality health care to all our people, by passing HR 676….”

Co-conveners of the campaign are State Senator Jim Ferlo of Pittsburgh and Assemblyman Richard Gottfried of New York. Senators and representatives from Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Texas, Virginia and
Wisconsin also signed the letter.

Kay Tillow, Coordinator of the All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care—HR 676, welcomed the effort by these state legislators and urged everyone to contact their own state senator and representative and ask them to sign the Appeal.

“State legislators,” Tillow said, “are caught in a vice of escalating healthcare costs, driven largely by the for-profit insurance industry and declining revenues. Without a national single payer system, state budgets will continue in crisis and health needs will not be met.”

The ‘Dear Colleague” letter, the ‘Appeal’ and other materials can be found at: http://www.healthcare-now.org/campaigns/state-legislators/

After a vote Tuesday, the City Council threw its support behind universal health care, passing a resolution to back federal legislation to establish a new paradigm for medical insurance.

If passed through Congress, the HR-676 will create a single-payer health care system administered by private entities and funded by the government. The legislation will provide access to health insurance for all Americans.

Numerous members of the public addressed the council to voice their support for the system.

“Where is our sense of moral outrage?” asked Rabbi Linda Motzkin, of Temple Sinai, after noting that members of the public frequently address her, as a member of the clergy, in seeking help to navigate the private health insurance industry. She said “every other western Democracy” provides access to health care for its citizens.

Jane Weihe, a former candidate for commissioner of finance, also urged the council to support the measure, saying it would remove a large portion of the personnel cost from the city’s budget.

Wilma Koss was the only person who urged the council to not support the measure.

“The city should refrain from taking positions on national issues over which it has no jurisdiction,” she said. She further commented that if adopted, the legislation could take health care decisions out of the hands of patients.

In calling for a vote on backing the resolution, Commissioner of Accounts John Franck said he supported the plan as a fiscal conservative, noting that the plan could save government money on many levels, and urged his colleagues on the council to join a growing number of communities backing the legislation.

In the 4-1 vote, Commissioner of Finance Kenneth Ivins Jr. was the only “no” vote.

Public speakers included nurse Geri Jenkins, co-president of the California Nurses Association National Nurses’ Organizing Committee; Progressive Democrats of America member Dr. Jo Olson, pediatrician at Children’s Hospital, assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and Southern California co-chair of the Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party of California; and Dr. Matt Hendrickson, emergency room doctor and founding member of the Southern California chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Santa Monica is among a growing number of cities, towns, and municipalities who support single-payer healthcare. A majority of Americans, doctors and nurses also support this type of healthcare reform, as do over 500 local Labor Unions.

The endorsement of HR 676 by the city of Santa Monica follows the passing, on Wednesday April 8, of a similar resolution in support of HR 676 by the Maine Legislature.