Private Health Insurance – Healthcare-NOW

Horror Care: How Private Health Care Is Shortening Our Lives

By Paul Buchheit for Common Dreams – Steven Brill's article in Time Magazine about the cost of private health care is likely to make most of his readers very angry. Angry about the prices we pay, about the lives that are devastated, and about the fact that we're one of the few developed countries without…

‘Single payer’ still their goal

By Bennett Hall for the Corvallis Gazette-Times – Shortly after noon on Friday, state Rep. Michael Dembrow stepped to the microphone and addressed a crowd of about 150 people gathered on the steps of the Oregon Capitol in Salem. “You look so healthy,” he told his audience. “You must all have good health insurance.” The…

Single-Payer is Inevitable

Progressives and Conservatives Agree By Rob Stone, MD – “The new health care legislation is a step toward elimination, by slow strangulation, of private health insurance and establishment of government as the ‘single payer.’” – George Will, in his weekly newspaper column, Sunday July 11, 2010 Everyone loves to pick on the Affordable Care Act…

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…

Denial of Care Profits: $73 million for CIGNA’s retiring CEO

By National Nurses Movement – It’s hard for most of us to imagine a lifestyle supported by a $73 million retirement bonus. It’s even harder to imagine a whole nation’s healthcare controlled by those who have benefited so wildly from denying healthcare to those who need it. But Cigna’s Edward Hanway knows well what it…

Nine arrested at sit-in targeting Sen. Schumer

Health professionals, patients demand expansion of Medicare Chanting “55 is not enough, Medicare for all,” 9 protesters were arrested at a sit-in at Sen. Schumer’s office in mid-town Manhattan this morning. Referring to Schumer’s push to lower Medicare age eligibility to 55, advocates for Medicare-for-All state that opening it up to only one portion of…

PHIMG Stays On The Move

From the Private Health Insurance Must Go! Coalition – On Tuesday, Nov. 17, during the evening rush-hour, two dozen activists organized by the Private Health Insurance Must Go! Coalition (PHIMG) demonstrated peacefully in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal to demand “Medicare for all.” A broad cross section of people: workers, the middle class, the disabled, immigrants,…

Between You and Your Doctor: The Bureaucracy of Private Health Insurance

On September 16 and 17, Domestic Policy Subcommittee Chairman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) held a two-part hearing entitled, “Between You and Your Doctor: the Bureaucracy of Private Health Insurance.” The hearing examined how the bureaucracy of private health insurance companies affects the medical care of patients. The Subcommittee heard testimony from: Mr. Mark Gendernalik Father of…

Giving Single-Payer a Second Look

By Rep. Anthony Weiner – As President Obama prepares to address the nation about his vision for health care reform, we should not overlook the last, best truly transformative change to our health care system: Medicare. We have been staring so intently at the lessons of 1993 that we may have forgotten the universal rule…

Healthcare Debate Heats Up

Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines looks at the US health care system, expose its cracks, and uncover the forces that are spending millions of dollars every day to influence the debate over the US health care reform. Part One Part Two