Healthcare-NOW

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion

By Chris Hedges for TruthDig – There is no hope left for achieving significant reform or restoring our democracy through established mechanisms of power. The electoral process has been hijacked by corporations. The judiciary has been corrupted and bought. The press shuts out the most important voices in the country and feeds us the banal…

What Value Do They Add to U.S. Healthcare?

By Donna Smith – Most Americans I know really don’t like to get ripped off. We don’t mind paying for something that is what we thought we were paying for. We just hate the feeling of having been taken. And boy, are we being taken en masse by the private health insurance industry. Doubt that?…

Wendell Potter on “Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out”

From Democracy NOW! – In the wake of the midterm elections, Republican lawmakers are vowing to repeal or defund the Democrats’ landmark healthcare reform bill that President Obama signed into law earlier this year. A health insurance insider-turned-whistleblower argues that, instead of repealing the law altogether, Republicans will ultimately settle for gutting the law of…

Medicare for All Co-Sponsors Returned to Congress by Big Margins

From PDA – As AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka has said, this election was about jobs. This election was also about health care and the progressive change that was promised but not delivered. The voters punished the corporate Democrats who helped block legislation to help working people, the unemployed, and those without health care. The Republicans…

CDC: 59 Million Americans Don’t Have Health Insurance

From Slate – Over 59 million Americans lacked health insurance for some part of 2010, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds—a 4 million-person increase from 2008. The study examined 90,000 people from over 35,000 households across the country and found that the number of uninsured had steadily increased over…

Single Payer Ballot Questions Pass in All Fourteen Massachusetts Districts!

From Mass-Care. Massachusetts voters have, for the second straight election, overwhelmingly affirmed their support for single payer health reform by turning in majority ‘Yes’ votes in all fourteen districts where local single payer ballot questions appeared on November 2. The ballots spanned 80 different cities and towns in a state of 351 municipalities, winning in…

The Post-Election Game Plan: Cut Social Security, Soak the Middle-Class, and Keep Taxes Low For the Rich

By Richard Eskow Original post here. Yesterday the Deficit Commission used the New York Times as a messenger service to tell politicians — and you — exactly what they intend to do if the election goes as expected. It’s all there in black and white: They’ll cut benefits, increase the financial burden on the middle…

Being SiCKO in a Tea Party Nation

By Donna Smith – RENO, Nevada — I ventured backward in my memories to the fall of 2006 and wondered what might have happened differently if the Tea Party ruled this nation. It’s not that I am thrilled with the current state of political reality, but I am worried that if the trend toward more…

Non-binding ballot measure pushes ‘Medicare For All’

By Edward B. Colby for the Dedham Transcript – DEDHAM, Mass. — Leo Stolbach says he’s working to advance a single-payer health insurance system for Massachusetts because he sees what’s happening to patients now. “Patients are getting shortchanged. And this fallacy that we have the best health care in the world, that’s wrong. It isn’t.…

Massachusetts doctors snub state’s health reform as model for country, pick single-payer system instead

BOSTON – For the first time the Massachusetts Medical Society has asked doctors what they think about health reform in its annual “Physician Workforce Survey” of 1,000 practicing physicians in the state, and the results may strike some as surprising. A plurality of the physician respondents, 34 percent, picked single-payer health reform as their preferred…