Healthcare-NOW

When the Health Reform Truth Oozes Out: And it isn’t Just

By Donna Smith – Even the staging of the hand-picked doctors in starched white coats could not keep the truth of the healthcare reform process from oozing out of President Obama during Wednesday’s press event. Not just… “Everything there is to say about healthcare has been said and just about everyone has said it,” Obama…

The Single-Payer Health Debate We Should Have Had

By Bruce Bartlett for Wall Street Pit – There’s been a bit of a debate going on in the blogosphere lately about whether the Democrats should have proposed a more limited health reform plan in the first place. Such a plan might have gotten some Republican support or at least led to less intense Republican…

Sidewalk Summit News Roundup

Sidewalk summits for single-payer healthcare were covered in the news yesterday thanks to the hard work of activists from all over the country. Here’s what we have found so far. Washington, DC – Healthcare Summit Ends in Deadlock; Single-Payer Advocates Excluded – Democracy Now! – Bipartisan Agreement Outside Blair House: We Don’t Like This Bill…

Healthcare Summit Ends in Deadlock; Single-Payer Advocates Excluded

From Democracy Now! – After nearly seven hours of televised debate, President Obama’s so-called bipartisan healthcare summit ended Thursday without any substantive agreement between Republicans and Democrats. Republican lawmakers remained staunchly opposed to using the federal government to regulate health insurance. We speak to Columbia Journalism Review contributing editor Trudy Lieberman and pediatrician Dr. Margaret…

Call for Medicare for All

PLEASE NOTE LOCATION CHANGE FOR EVENT IN WASHINGTON, DC Since the beginning, the discussion on health reform has been flawed because of the exclusion of a single-payer system in the debate. With universal healthcare off the table, so goes a meaningful discussion on controlling costs and improving access to care. On the same day President…

Obama plan leaves millions uninsured, boosts private insurers

From PNHP – President Obama’s health care proposal, preserving as it does a central role for the for-profit, private health insurance industry, is incapable of achieving the kind of universal, comprehensive and affordable reform the country needs, a spokesman for a national doctors’ group said Wednesday. “Regrettably, the president’s proposal is built on some of…

Where’s the Single-Payer Advocate?

By Michael McAuliff for the NY Daily News – Reps. Anthony Weiner and Peter Welch are reprising a question that proved thorny for President Obama’s last health care summit: Where’s the single-payer advocate? Weiner and Welch — single-payer advocates who are not invited, yet — argue in a letter to the President today that someone…

Don’t It Make Your Wide Eyes Cry, Iowa? Another Cancer Patient Grovels

By Donna Smith – Some patient stories just fill me with anger and shame. This one – from Iowa – is one of those stories. By now, we all know the plot. Patient has insurance. Patient gets sick. Patient cannot afford to keep insurance or find insurance that will cover illness. Patient goes without coverage.…

Put Single Payer Back on the Table

By Dr. Quentin Young of PNHP – One year after its much-ballyhooed launch, the Obama administration’s approach to health reform is now in serious disarray. The president’s health care summit on Feb. 25 is being portrayed as a last ditch bid to find some common ground with his “just say no” Republican opposition. He also…

President Obama’s Concession Proposal

By Mass-Care – At 10AM yesterday, the White House released the outlines of President Obama’s health reform proposal “incorporating and improving on ideas from the House and the Senate, along with some new ones,” in anticipation of a summit this Thursday with Congressional Republicans. Many supporters of comprehensive health reform had hoped that the President…