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Get "SICKO!" Order DVD by clicking Donate Now button below

Receive DVD along with the Discussion Guide and an Organizing Manual. 

Your $100 contribution will make you a member and help to build Healthcare-NOW. Or get SiCKO at your local video store.

Quick Links: SAHNC Winter Newsletter PDF

How to Organize a HealthCare-NOW! Coalition and 27 Other Things You Can Do

To develop an ongoing coalition of people in your community working together
and win healthcare for everybody, contact:
info@healthcare-now.org

We will put you in touch with people in your neighborhood or your state who you can join to work for healthcare for all or give you advice on how to form a group.  . 

Call Congress toll-free: 1-866-338-1015. Talk to the Healthcare Aide in your Congress Member's office.  See list of aides on the following page with the summary of the bill.  Read the Bill: http://www.healthcare-now.org/hr676.html

 

What you can Do: 27 Action Ideas

  

1. Organize around the Michael Moore Film: Get the DVD and urge others to see it...  

Wherever the film is showing in your community, provide information, bring action ideas, leaflet the theatre, and offer people an opportunity to come to a meeting to help organize a Healthcare-NOW Coalition --for guaranteed national healthcare.

  Write to Healthcare-NOW for a copy of the DVD, a Discussion Guide to SiCKO.   Let us know if you are forming a new group.  Get our organizing guide to help you. Also,check out "How to Organize a Truth Hearing" on the website in the Take Action Section. We are building a single payer movement for guaranteed healthcare for all. You are a part of it. We urge you to contribute $100 and get all three --the dvd,  Healthcare-NOW discussion guide organizing guide and membership in Healthcare-NOW at the same time.

2. Get Resources: How would single payer, MEDICARE FOR ALL work? The Myths about the U.S. healthcare system, Films, References, Pamphlets in Spanish and English, Power points, Facts!  Go to RESOURCES Section.   Order Healthcare-NOW's pamphlet, "Improved Medicare for All and How it Would Work" --available FREE (in Spanish or English) to those who join Healthcare-NOW, along with a Martin Luther King, Jr. poster (as long as they last). It answers most of the major questions about single payer and how it will work.  Email Healthcare-NOW at info@healthcare-NOW.org  or order in bulk from prioritypress@optonline.net

3. Watch Inspiring "YouTube Video" on Your Computer
"Giant Steps to Health Care" (6 minutes) --Congressman John Conyers urges us to win single payer MEDICARE FOR ALL as we have won impossible victories in the past.

Also See "The Prom," a great 5 minute video describing how single payer works and other videos on the FILM page.

4. Find out what is wrong with the FOR-PROFIT healthcare plans being proposed by most of the presidential candidates and the state incremental programs -- They continue to have profit-making and insurance companies in control.
Click Below for A Power Point by Professor Len Rodberg, Research Director of the NY Metro Chapter of PNHP. Rodberg presented this comparison at a forum held by the NY Metro Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program and co-sponsored by the NY Chapter of Healthcare-Now. He describes the many "hybrid" healthcare plans that have been introduced by Members of Congress;

5. PNHP Healthcare Plans PowerPoint  (Watch it and download it here)

Watch this site for his new power point that will compare the new presidential plans by all of the candidates.

6. Set up a Meeting with your Member of Congress. Our Washington Office can help you do it either in D.C. or in your home district.  Call: 202-488-5650.  Get your Representative to Endorse H.R. 676. Also Get your organization or Labor Union or Faith Group to endorse HR 676.  Call Congress: 1-866-338-1015.   If your Congress Member won't support healthcare for everybody, elect a new Congress Member.

7. HELP!  Contribute or Pledge to Healthcare-NOW We are asking people to pledge or donate $50 to become a member, help us continue organizing and keep the SiCKO-CURE Road Show moving throughout 2007-2008. Carrying this message around the country is how we are going to win!  For more about the Road Show schedule, go to http://www.healthcare-now.org/healthcare_road_show.html

8.Contact your governor and state legislators to ask them to support a resolution from your State supporting H.R. 676. Every state will save money and be able to cover everyone with H.R. 676.  Get your State, City, County, Union, Church, Synagogue, Mosque, Community or Service Organization to endorse H.R. 676.  Click the Endorse button up top.

9.UrgeYour Friends to Join Healthcare-NOW: 85 Members of Congress have already signed on, and most of the voters and doctors and nurses and unions want single payer, a national healthcare plan that WE own, guaranteed by OUR elected government. No more healthcare denials and unbelievable profits by the profit-making industry. Send names of interested people to info@healthcare-now.org. Urge your friends to join Healthcare-NOW info@healthcare-now.org

10. Join the LETTER WRITING BRIGADE. Write joykal1@aol.com to add your name and receive articles to respond to every day via email. Visit your editorial board too.  Many in the media are beginning to turn our direction.  Finally! Your role is critically important!

11. Read a Summary of the Legislation (H.R. 676) and some of the books on our RESOURCE PAGE

12. CALL CONGRESS Free 1-866-338-1015 Do it NOW!

13. Organize...In Your Community We are planning 1,000 HEALTHCARE TRUTH HEARINGS and other events in Congressional Districts nationwide. Call us if you want to get involved. 800-453-1305. Check our home page to see a calendar of events that you can be involved with.  

14. Call on CHAIRMAN Rangel and Congressmen Pete Stark and John Dingell ALONG WITH House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi to hold hearings on H.R. 676.   Make up cards to send to them and pass them out everywhere. See and download the Pelosi card on our home page.    Call Congress: 1-866-338-1015.  Speak to their staff people who are in charge of "healthcare."

14. Read Dr. King's statements about resistance to war and the need for healthcare and all human rights in his speech at Riverside Church.  Visit Our Martin Luther King Page.

15. Become a sustaining member of Healthcare-NOW, contribute $100 and receive a free book, "Healthcare Meltdown," an MLK, Jr. poster and the "Improved Medicare for All" pamphlet. Click donate now:

16. Organize a healthcare truth hearing.  Call us if you want help.  1-800-453-1305  Or see

http://www.healthcare-now.org/truth_hearing_how.html

17. Write to the Media. Find your Media Outlets HERE.     

Sign up for our Rapid Response network TO SEE ARTICLES THAT NEED A RESPONSE:  joykal1@aol.com  Write the presidential candidates and ask them to support single payer.

19. "Improved and Enhanced Medicare for All -- How It Would Work" 

Learn How it Will Work: Sliding Scale Contributions -- Everybody contributing...  
H.R. 676 - Everybody contributes to a national healthcare system based on their income. See flyer on the way costs are broken down. How much would it cost YOU to have a comprehensive national healthcare system for everybody? Order bulk copies from: 1-516-938-1441  prioritypress@optonline.net.   Also look at the summary of the legislation and financing plan HERE.

20. Get involved in our 2008 "Sicko-Cure Road Shows" traveling through 10 states during the current year. Contact Tom Knoche at 1-856-833-1369.  Or email knocheberg@aol.com

21. Help raise funds and plan the next batch of Road Shows, demonstrations and memorials to those who've died at the hands of theinsurance companies.  Call our office to volunteer.  1-800-453-1305

23. See and Use Barbara Smaller and John Jonik cartoons throughout the site.  A gift to Healthcare-NOW from Barbara Smaller, famous "New Yorker" Cartoonist and healthcare activist and John Jonik, volunteer artist and activist. 

24.Wherever you are, work with veterans who are trying to get healthcare coverage for all.  We helped to keep the excellent endangered Veteran's Hospital in New York City open.  See photo below.

26. See News Stories on all of these healthcare issues: NEWS page http://www.healthcare-now.org/news.php to research the issues and for materials to use in your articles, research papers, flyers, coalitions, your community and school.

27. Register to vote!

28. Get Help for Speaking and Score Points in the Healthcare Debate (See Below)

Take action in support of healthcare for all including stopping the attacks on veteran's healthcare.

 

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

 

SPEAKING HELP...

10 Questions: About Health Care
Posted by Katie Couric  (Excerpted)

Interviewing Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group.

1. If you could change ONE thing about our health care system, what would that be?

The financing. Instead of hundreds of profit-seeking health insurers, money should be collected and bills paid by a single government payer.

At present, insurance company overhead and the paperwork that inflicts on doctors and hospitals wastes more than $350 billion a year — money that could cover the uninsured and eliminate co-payments and deductibles for those who currently have partial coverage. Progressive income taxes would be paid, just as we now do for other financially socialized benefits such as libraries, the police, schools, Social Security and, in the health area, for Medicare. Because of the huge administrative savings, a single payer system could cover everyone without expending any more dollars.

2. Most people agree that the costs are out of control. What can be done about that?

By far, the fastest growing element of cost is wasteful health administration. The number of doctors increased 2.5-fold from 1970 to 2005, largely in proportion to growth in the population. The number of registered nurses grew a bit more slowly. But the number of health administrators increased 26-fold during the same interval.

Another rapidly growing cost is the price of prescription drugs. Unlike all other developed countries where prescription drug prices are negotiated or controlled — and as we do for the Department of Defense and for the Veterans’ Administration — the costs for everyone else in this country are largely out of control and, for many, unaffordable.

The single payer approach could cut paperwork costs drastically, and force drug prices down. MORE

3. What works in our system? What doesn't?

Our system of medical education and our medical research are as good as most places in the world. But, because of the enormous expense of U.S.
medical schools, much higher than most countries in the world, many students from poorer economic backgrounds are less likely to go into medicine.

The success of U.S. medical research would not be possible without the huge public subsidy through the NIH, now funded at more than $28 billion a year, another example of a progressively taxed, financially socialized benefit for everybody.

As discussed above, the current multiple payer financing is unaffordably wasteful and forces a larger and larger proportion of the
$2 trillion we spend on health each year to fund people who are not, in any remote way, delivering medical care. They are not doctors, nurses, pharmacists or other health care providers but, in many cases, health care deniers whose job it is to fight with each other (insurance administrator vs. hospital administrator or doctor’s office
administrator) to deny payments or even coverage for needed health services.

4. People come to this country from all over the world and get great medical care. But so many Americans slip through the cracks. What can be done to close this gap?

In what has been described as medical tourism, the United States, with its large pharmaceutical and medical-device industries and high-tech hospitals, has traditionally been a destination for patients, primarily those affluent enough to pay out-of-pocket, or those who have generous insurance coverage that extends beyond their countries of origin.

But recent years have also seen a flow in the opposite direction, with large numbers of American patients traveling abroad in search of less expensive and often more luxurious health care, frequently surgery.

The problem of Americans “slipping through the cracks” because of being uninsured or underinsured can only be dealt with by providing universal health coverage for all people in this country.

5. We hear a lot about the number of uninsured Americans. Just how many are there?

At the time of a government survey in 2006, about 43.6 million people in the United States, or 14.8 percent of the population, had no health insurance. But about 54.5 million people in the country, or 18.6 percent of the population, had no insurance for at least part of 2006.

An even larger problem is the growing number of people who are underinsured. Illness and medical bills cause about half of all bankruptcies, and three-quarters of these people forced into medical bankruptcy had health insurance coverage — at least when they first became ill. In many cases people cannot afford policies with optimal coverage, or they choose a policy with a relatively low premium but a massive deductible, often thousands of dollars a year. Such inadequate coverage keeps them from seeking care because of the unaffordable out-of-pocket expenses.

Conservative estimates are that about 100 million people in this country — one third of our population — are either uninsured or underinsured.

6. What's the lowdown on managed care? HMOs? Single payer?

In its origins, managed care was dominated by excellent not-for-profit HMO models such as Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, located in Seattle. The market is now dominated by large, non-local, for-profit managed care companies, whose quality of care has been shown to be significantly worse than that of the non-profits.

Single payer means the government collects the money and pays the bills. By having all people in this country covered by a single payer health system, not just those on Medicare, our current expenditures for health — in excess of $2 trillion a year — could go much further and all but eliminate the serious problem of one out of three people being uninsured or underinsured.

In Canada, for instance, people can choose any doctor or hospital they wish to go to, unlike the increasingly restricted lists of doctors that managed care companies in this country allow.

7. What role should the government play in providing Americans with health care? What role should the marketplace play?

The government should guarantee that everyone in this country has health insurance by collecting the money and paying the bills, cutting out the pick-pockets in private industry.

The role of the marketplace — and this includes for-profit health service entities such as HMOs, hospitals, nursing homes and kidney dialysis centers — has been succinctly stated by my colleagues, Harvard professors and doctors Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein. They co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, which now includes more than 14,000 physicians, medical students and health professionals who support single payer health insurance.

In an article eight years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine, they wrote: “In our society, some aspects of life are off-limits to commerce. We prohibit the selling of children and the buying of wives, juries, and kidneys. Tainted blood is an inevitable consequence of paying blood donors; even sophisticated laboratory tests cannot supplant the gift-giving relationship as a safeguard of the purity of blood. Like blood, health care is too precious, intimate, and corruptible to entrust to the market.”

8. Is there a model for a health care system that you think works, that we might model our reformed system after?

The model we adopt for our single payer health care system can be crafted from the best elements of existing systems in the many countries, such as Canada and France, that already provide universal health care. All of these countries spend far less per capita than we do in this country, and everyone is covered.

The best models eliminate private health insurers, require that hospitals and other health institutions be run on a non-profit basis, and exercise strict control over the pharmaceutical industry. The multiplicity of state health insurance initiatives, with the exception of California state senator Sheila Kuehl’s bill, which advocates a single payer, are doomed to fail. They are thinly disguised versions of the failing system we have now, one dominated by wasteful private health insurers.

9. The baby boomers are now starting to retire, and people question whether Medicare will be able to handle them. Will it?

At present, Medicare is wasting about ten billion annually overpaying private Medicare HMOs, which have been touted by pro-market enthusiasts as the solution to Medicare’s problems. Doctors and hospitals drain tens of billions more for unnecessary, but profitable, procedures, drugs etc.

For instance, thousands of kidney dialysis patients have been given dangerous overdoses of epoiten because dialysis centers and drug companies have made huge profits from this drug. Similarly, about half of all cardiac stents are unnecessary, leaving the patient no better off, but gaining the hospital about $20,000 per patient. Eliminating HMOs from Medicare, reorienting Medicare payments to minimize incentives for over-treatment (as well as under-treatment), and encouraging primary and preventive care would go far to assuring the long-term viability of the program.

Assuring coverage for people under 65 would also save Medicare money.
When the uninsured turn 65, their Medicare bills are far higher because they failed to get timely care.

Financing Medicare by a much more progressive tax, and improving Medicare coverage to eliminate current co-payments and gaps in coverage for prescription drugs would also broaden support for the program.
Canada’s universal coverage program, which is also called Medicare, shows that national health insurance is the best solution to rising costs.

When Canada’s program began, in 1971, they spent the same proportion of GDP on health care that we did. Now they spend about 40% less.

10. What role will the health care issue play in the election? And is there a political candidate in this broad field who you think has the right idea?

We can not only hope that health care plays a major role in the coming presidential election but also that the ideas put forth are more progressive than those currently being espoused by all of the so-called leading candidates. Representative Dennis Kucinich is the only candidate with the guts and honesty to tell it like it is, instead of pretending that versions of our failed system can work. His support for the current single payer House Bill (HR 676) sets him apart from all the other candidates."

 

 

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Here's the Bottom Line:

Tell Congressmembers: Rangel, Dingell, and Stark Call Congress: 1-866-338-1015

We are Counting on Them for Single Payer! Tell Speaker Pelosi too.  We need her to move forward with Hearings for H.R. 676, (Your job is to keep signing on more Members of Congress as endorsers and to talk with your Senators too.) Be in touch with Healthcare-NOW's Washington, D.C. office, 202-488-5650 or the New York office 212-475-8350 for help in setting appointments with your members of Congress either when visiting D.C. or in your home district. 

We CAN'T accept compromise responses, or mandated purchase of insurance with diminished coverage.   We won't accept incremental excuses that continue to pour more of our personal money and our national treasure into the coffers of the insurance and drug industries. We require a national NON-PROFIT healthcare system that serves everyone.

1/3rd of our people are either uncovered or undercovered for healthcare.  1/3rd of the money we spend on healthcare is wasted on insurance company profits, CEO salaries, marketing, lobbying, stockholders' profits and other non-healthcare extravagances.

We CAN afford a national healthcare system for all children and their parents and grandparents if we create a single payer system -- no insurance companies no unnecessary middleman..  We can afford prescription drugs for everyone if we make Medicare the negotiator on prices and if we are able to purchase drugs as a nation of 300 million -- one big purchasing pool. 

YARD SIGNS for SALE

Order your yard signs from our Resource Page. You could put Healthcare-NOW! on these yard signs as well as your own information. You can also simply make a tax-deductible contribution right now via Secure Donations by Groundspring.  Or make a monthly pledge.  We can't do it without you.

 

 

Take Action Resources

• SAHNC Winter Newsletter PDF