Obamacare Issues Beg the Questions that Single-Payer Answers

By Donna Smith for Common Dreams – In recent days, many of us have read and tried to follow the reports that Congressional offices are engaged in discussions about how to make sure their health insurance coverage available under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) remains affordable for Congresspersons and their staff members. If you’d like…

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Aetna Builds Empire: One Denial at A Time

By Donna Smith – It’s a business. It’s big business, and it’s all about the money. When plans for Aetna to purchase Coventry Health for $5.7 billion surfaced this week, all I could think about is where people like me – Aetna’s insured – figure in the business models. I’m not a patient in their…

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Insurance Companies Gaming the System

By Donna Smith – Has your insurance company called you recently to ask you to sign up for a wellness or disease management program? Has that same company told you it’s a free service to policyholders and promised you that they do not share the information with the departments and people who administer your benefits…

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Praying for Health Care Sanity

By Donna Smith – I admit it. I pray. I know there are intellectuals who are above such frivolity and for whom the showing of any belief in a power greater than one’s self and one’s intellect is the ultimate sign of weakness and inferiority. I don’t care. I am not weak, and just because…

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Fool’s Gold: US Healthcare System Cheats Patients

By Donna Smith – In case any one of us needs reminding, the profit-driven healthcare system in America is broken. Driven by its primary motivation to make money, there is little that compels those currently in control to care about patients like you and me. We are most assuredly a necessary component of the healthcare…

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Quarter-Million Dead and Not Counting

By Donna Smith – After this past weekend of horrific storms and tornadoes, it was clearly appropriate for our elected officials to declare a federal disaster in some areas. With the designation comes some federal money and help for the storm-ravaged areas and residents. Few would quarrel with our government stepping up and stepping in…

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Video: Michael Moore & Donna Smith: Still Sicko

From GritTV.org – “Sooner or later people are going to realize that decisions about whether one lives or dies should not be predicated on ‘How much money can I make off this?’” says Michael Moore, looking back at his film Sicko with Donna Smith of National Nurses United. They both note that it’s the health…

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Forbes 400 or the SiCKO 12?

By Donna Smith – It’s a club I will never be in. Michael Moore told us about them this week. The Forbes 400. The richest 400 people in America. They own more stuff and have more cash and assets than half of the rest of us (roughly 150,000,000+ people) combined. But I had to dig…

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Super Bowl Commercial for the Dead Patients

By Donna Smith – I’d love to see a Super Bowl commercial Sunday that stated the facts about how many Americans will die on Super Bowl Sunday this year because they didn’t have access to the healthcare they needed. 123 will die on Sunday, and perhaps a photo of one of the dead every 12…

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Oh, For Civil Healthcare in America

by Donna Smith – Ah, we must be more civil. No more taunts. No more tirades. No more gun crosshair targets, no matter how innocently placed on our graphics (though I am not sure gun crosshairs are ever really innocent in placement). We’ll be more civil in our discourse. In light of the tragedy in…

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