Healthcare-NOW

Who 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,…

Health Law May Cost Children Coverage as UnitedHealth Ends Plans

By Alex Nussbaum for Bloomberg – UnitedHealth Group Inc. and insurers in Florida and Oklahoma stopped offering children-only health coverage because of the potential added costs of sick youngsters under the new U.S. health-care law, state officials said today. UnitedHealth’s Golden Rule subsidiary won’t sell new policies that cover only children, foreclosing an option for…

Hands Off Our Medicare!

At a time when this nation faces the deepest recession in decades, skyrocketing unemployment, and fiscal crisis in our states, towns, and families, the nation’s safety net is threatened by a select group whose overwhelming majority have historically favoured cutting benefits or privatizing federal social programs in order to balance the budget and enriching the…

Insurers Push Plans That Limit Choice of Doctor

New York Times – As the Obama administration begins to enact the new national health care law, the country’s biggest insurers are promoting affordable plans with reduced premiums that require participants to use a narrower selection of doctors or hospitals. The plans, being tested in places like San Diego, New York and Chicago, are likely…

Report From the US Social Forum

Healthcare-NOW! had a tremendous presence at the US Social Forum, which converged over 20,000 activists for social change into Detroit for 5 days in June. We organized two major events at the forum. First, a workshop attended by about 50 folks from Detroit and elsewhere. Michael Lighty of the National Nurses United broke down the…

Whacking the Old Folks

By William Greider for the Nation – In setting up his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, Barack Obama is again playing coy in public, but his intentions are widely understood among Washington insiders. The president intends to offer Social Security as a sacrificial lamb to entice conservative deficit hawks into a grand bipartisan…

The 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…

Former President Bush’s brother collapses at Wellpoint meeting

From wishtv.com – INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – The WellPoint shareholders meeting in downtown Indianapolis ended much earlier than some disgruntled shareholders would have liked when 71-year-old William H.T. Bush, brother of the first President Bush, collapsed. For the fourth year in a row, in the shadow of WellPoint corporate headquarters in downtown Indianapolis, on the day…

Action Alert: End WellPoint’s Greed

On May 18th, Dr. Rob Stone plans to deliver a resolution to WellPoint/Anthem, the largest health insurance company in the US, calling for it to return to its charitable, non-profit roots at their upcoming shareholder meeting in Indianapolis. WellPoint, like all health insurance companies in the nation, is a parasitic middleman that enriches its executives…

4 million likely to pay health fine

By Kim Dixon – WASHINGTON (Reuters) – About four 4 million people in the United States could be fined for failing to buy health insurance when the health overhaul law is fully in force in 2016, the Congressional Budget Office forecast on Thursday. Most individuals must buy health insurance under the landmark legislation passed by…