Healthcare-NOW

April Newsletter – Nobody Wants to Cut Medicare

We just sent out our latest email newsletter to our list of supporters. If you don’t already get our email newsletters (sent about twice per month), you can sign up for them here. In this latest newsletter we highlight four important articles/issues from the past few weeks: Demand Pres. Obama Protect Medicare Thank you to…

Republican and Democratic Plans for Medicare and Medicaid Misguided

Push for Privatization will Accelerate Costs and Deaths By Margaret Flowers, M.D. for FireDogLake – Leadership in Washington recognizes the damage our soaring health care spending is doing to our entire economy. Although their rhetoric differs, recent budget proposals from both Republicans and Democrats mistakenly place the blame on Medicare and Medicaid. Cuts to and…

What we’re not being told about Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan

The mainstream media has failed to report that the Ryan plan is a privatization program that will hand $30tn to insurers By Dean Baker for the Guardian – The film Casablanca features one of greatest moments in movie history. With Humphrey Bogart standing with a smoking pistol over the body of the dead Gestapo major,…

As If Privatizing Medicare Wasn’t Enough

By Jonathan Cohn for the New Republic – By now, virtually everybody has heard about the Medicare voucher scheme that House Republicans want to implement starting in 2022. Instead of getting comprehensive, government-run insurance, seniors would have to enroll in private insurance, using a federal subsidy too skimpy to pay for adequate coverage. According to…

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…

Pennyrile Area CLC Endorses HR 676, National Single Payer Legislation

“The Pennyrile Area Central Labor Council endorses HR 676” reports Betty Robertson, Treasurer of the council in Hopkinsville in western Kentucky not far from the Tennessee border. With this endorsement all eight of Kentucky’s CLC’s have endorsed HR 676. Betty Robertson had much more to say: “We feel that Americans must fight for better health…

Canada’s Health Care: An Alternate Universe

By Elizabeth Rosenthal – I recently returned from a visit of several days to an alternate universe: Canadian health care. As a physician who has practiced in the United States for 44 years, I have experienced many aspects of our health care system, including its terrible inequities. Although some Americans get very good health care,…

Handout on Threats to Medicare, Medicaid

With the help of some single-payer activists in New York City, we created an educational handout explaining how House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget proposal seeks to eliminate Medicare and gut Medicaid. Ryan claims privatizing Medicare and slashing Medicaid funds are necessary to solve the nation’s deficit crisis, but this handout illustrates how Medicare…

Action Alert: Demand Pres. Obama Save Medicare

Republicans want to privatize Medicare and slash Medicaid to reduce the nation’s deficit. President Obama says he wants to preserve Medicare and Medicaid, but his budget proposal looks to those programs to find savings. We agree that healthcare costs are a serious problem, but cutting Medicare and Medicaid won’t help. Instead, we need to take…

Obama’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’ Hits the Poor and Middle-Class Hardest

The Nation editorial – President Obama’s speech unveiling his deficit reduction plan contained few big surprises—by its very premise, it was destined to preserve the faulty assumptions behind the whole deficit discussion—but some of his words were welcome. The president called Social Security and Medicare fundamental American commitments and, in a rebuke to Congressman Paul…