Posts Tagged ‘Donna Smith’
Will Vermont’s Babies Have a Better Chance?
By Donna Smith – As Peter Shumlin was officially sworn in as governor of Vermont, there was and is great hope that at least in one state we may see passage and implementation of a truly universal, single-payer healthcare system. From Shumlin’s January 6, 2011, inaugural address: “The rising cost of healthcare for Vermont’s middle…
Read MoreWhat 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?…
Read MoreBeing 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…
Read MoreWho Tells the Dead Patient Stories Now?
by Donna Smith – Since the health insurance reform bill passed this past spring, you’d think we suddenly stopped having American patients die and suffer unimaginable horror at the hands of the corporate owned and operated healthcare business system in the United States. No one tells the stories. The reality is that patients were props,…
Read MoreHumiliation and Shame: Part of Being Insured in America
By Donna Smith – Oh, the things we did not fix in the healthcare bill are shocking. Just as seniors falling into the Medicare drug benefit donut hole begin to get the $250 checks meant to calm their fears about our new healthcare legislation, the rest of us would do well to remember the abuses…
Read MoreThe Baucus 8 One Year Later (Video)
On May 5, 2009, 8 health advocates stood up to the members of the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Senator Max Baucus, to expose the exclusion of the health reform favored by the majority of people in America: a single payer/national improved Medicare for All health program. Industry lobbyists were invited to testify before the…
Read MoreEverybody In, Nobody Out: At Temple and Beyond an Injury to One is an Injury to All
By Donna Smith – When you see the faces of the members of PASNAP (Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals) on strike at Temple University Hospital and perhaps most especially when you see the faces of their children walking on the picket line with them, you embrace the reality of why these brave…
Read MoreWhen 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…
Read MoreDon’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.…
Read MoreRepubs, Dems, Blue Dogs and Tea Partiers: Everybody Loves Medicare
By Donna Smith – President Obama keeps torturing himself and the 111th Congress by trying to come up with new ways to work together and a single healthcare reform effort that all could embrace politically, morally and fiscally. He need not struggle so hard, as the leaders in each of the groups clamoring for leadership…
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