Conference of Mayors Endorses HR 676

The U.S. Conference of Mayors today adopted a resolution sponsored by West Palm Beach, Florida Mayor, Lois Frankel, endorsing the passage of H.R. 676, The National Health Insurance Act, Michigan Congressman John Conyers’ bill which expands and improves the Medicare system to cover everyone in the United States under a single-payer national health insurance system. HR 676 would assure universal coverage of all medically necessary services, contain costs by slashing bureaucracy, protect the doctor patient relationship, assure patients a completely free choice of doctors, and allow physicians a free choice of practice settings.

Frankel’s Resolution was co-sponsored by Mayor Wayne J. Hall, Sr., Hempstead, New York; Mayor Carolyn K. Peterson, Ithaca, New York; Mayor John E. Marks, III, Tallahassee, Florida, Mayor Sheila Dixon, Baltimore, Maryland; Mayor Becky Tooley, Coconut Creek and Mayor Ryan Coonerty, Santa Cruz, California.

Mayor Frankel, in association with Floridians for Health Care, Inc., a Palm Beach County based health care advocacy group headed by Rick Ford, local attorney and candidate for Florida State Representative, District 83, and aided by Healthcare-NOW, a national advocacy organization assisting local citizens with their efforts to win endorsements for H.R. 676 from cities, towns, counties and school districts all over the country, have been lobbying Mayors for several weeks to educate them about the resolution and seek their support.

Ford, along with FFHC Board member and Mayors Project Coordinator, Alison Landes, and Boca Raton dermatologist, Dr. Brent Schillinger, attended the Mayors Conference in Miami this past weekend to present the benefits of how a single payer medicare-for-all system would save cities and towns billions of dollars in employee healthcare costs in these hard economic times.

Rising healthcare costs have drained local and state budgets of the resources they need to rebuild, renovate and restore the vitality of their communities. Increasing health benefits costs – averaging 11% a year for cities since 1999 – consume city and county budgets, leaving more and more residents uninsured. Currently, 48 million Americans lack health insurance.

With state and local coffers bleeding, residents face cuts in needed services such as police and fire protection, medical services for the uninsured, road repairs, parks and recreation. HR 676 would save money and control costs by replacing the multiple public and private payers with a single national health insurance program. The national program would negotiate fees with providers, purchase drugs and medical supplies in bulk, and monitor budgets and capital plans for hospitals and other medical facilities. It minimizes risk by combining the whole US population into one large pool of over 300 million people. It would eliminate private insurance, which eats up 30% of every healthcare dollar in profits, marketing and administration. Medicare operates on less that 5% overhead.

Mayor Frankel’s resolution was first considered by the Mayors Conference Standing Committee on Children, Health and Human Services, which approved the resolution unanimously on Saturday and presented the resolution for adoption by the entire Conference at its plenary session on Monday, June 23, 2008. The measure was adopted overwhelmingly by the full Conference.

Finding that HR 676 would guarantee every mayor that all residents and employees of his/her city would be fully covered for healthcare and save billions of taxpayer dollars now spent on premiums to provide less than full health insurance coverage for government employees, the Mayors

“RESOLVED that the U.S. Conference of Mayors expresses its support for The US National Health Insurance Act (HR 676), and calls upon federal legislators to work towards its immediate enactment and further urges the adoption of a process to insure that healthcare providers justify any increase in health care costs.”

1 Comment

  1. tanya marquette on September 21, 2009 at 6:07 am

    so happy to see this prestigious group behind hr 676.
    it is absolutely necessary that we get more media coverage for single payer health care.

    however, what also needs to be discussed is the WHAT of health care, not just the HOW. the medical industry, in its greed, for profit, megalithic has turned health into a commodity to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. this process has led to misrepresented research and the selling of increasingly toxic drugs to the unawares public. the too numerous to list scandals over the past 5 yrs alone has shown how underhanded is the system. prestigious medical journals print articles written by the drug companies but signed by one doctor or another who has been paid thousands of dollars for this service. the Lancet and the JAMA are 2 major worldwide journals exposed for this nefarious process. drugs such as vioxx are exposed for the killing between 40-60,000 people. vaccines are horrific neurtotoxins which are a major cause of autism, the rate of which is 1:150 children today (in 1990 the rate was 1:10,000 children) during this time the enforced rate of vaccination has grown to over 32 vaccines in the first 5 yrs of life, now beginning on the day of birth. vaccines have a long history of causing major health problems and little to no real research on their efficacy. yes, that is right–no efficacy and many disease inducing consequences such as polio, flu, and smallpox, the very diseases they are purportedly preventing.
    that is what the real research shows, including statistics from the CDC and the FDA, the very governmental agencies set up to do this monitoring for us.

    cost effective and healthy alternatives do exist. they have existed for hundreds and thousands of years. they have kept people alive and productive bringing our societies to the numeric numbers we see today.
    nutrition is the most basic medicine. it provides us the means for rebuilding cells and our immune systems. vaccines do the exact opposite. the minimimum fda requirements are just that–bare minimums. research continually shows that our bodies need far more than the minimum for real health. for example, the fda recommends only 60 mg of vitamin c daily. however, we need at least 2000 mg vitamin c daily for real health. and despite the marketing spin of the drug companies, often using the mouth of the fda to promote these falsehoods, vit c in large enough doses will and does cut flu symptoms at a dramatically faster and in a safer manner than any drug on the market. research has shown that vit c, in large does intravenously, can even stop/cure cancer.

    there are many other examples. vit d is another one. this country has been made phobic about the sun. however, it is the sun which creates vit d for us. again the 400 i.u. daily recommended by the fda is way too low for building good health. research is showing that we need a minimum of 2000-2500 i.u. daily for real health. vit d is involved in well over 2000 biological processes in our body and without sufficient amounts of this vitamin we become sick. once again, vit d is a major factor in preventing flu.

    as a side note, the 1918 flu epidemic which is constantly used to scare the public was another engineered recombinant virus given to the army as a vaccine. it was aspirin, and antibiotics that caused the horrific reactions resulting in pneumonia type symptoms which brought people down. however, not everyone with the flu died. in this country alone, those who sought homeopathic care did not die. the records show that homeopaths lost only about 1% of patients and these were were people who came after taking the allopathic drugs and whose health was too far gone.

    any debate about health care that does not include what is health care is nothing more than an argument about whether health care is a human entitlement in the the richest country in the world or whether it continues to get sold down the river by mandating that the uninsured buy useless and unaffordable insurance. it has nothing to do with health care, but only a means for greater profit for a corporate industry with profit as its only motive.

    so keep up the good work, but do expand the dialogue. we need not be timid in asking for what we need. we need to be strong in demanding the human services that we want.