Healthcare-NOW

Can We Count on You to Call Congress?

The Co-Chairs of the National Fiscal Commission have proposed carving up Social Security and Medicare like a Thanksgiving turkey. They want to increase the retirement age to 69, deeply cut benefits for middle-class workers, reduce annual Cost of Living Adjustments, increase healthcare costs to patients, and reduce Medicare reimbursements to providers. We need your help…

Health Activists Say “We Need to Make Health Care a Right for All People!”

Report Back from Healthcare NOW!’s Strategy Conference in Philadelphia on November 13 and 14, 2010 Healthcare-NOW! members renew support for national single-payer health care to make health care a right for all, start plans for divestiture campaign from private health insurance, and urge support for advanced state single-payer movements in Vermont and California. (Philadelphia, PA)…

What 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?…

Let’s Save Medicare!

The Deficit Commission just released the chairman’s mark to propose how to reduce the national deficit, a problem integrally linked to the rising cost of healthcare. Among its draconian ideas, the cochairs proposal would require Medicare recipients to pay more out of pocket costs for the services they receive–meaning higher copays. Studies show that cost…

Wendell Potter on “Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out”

From Democracy NOW! – In the wake of the midterm elections, Republican lawmakers are vowing to repeal or defund the Democrats’ landmark healthcare reform bill that President Obama signed into law earlier this year. A health insurance insider-turned-whistleblower argues that, instead of repealing the law altogether, Republicans will ultimately settle for gutting the law of…

Medicare for All Co-Sponsors Returned to Congress by Big Margins

From PDA – As AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka has said, this election was about jobs. This election was also about health care and the progressive change that was promised but not delivered. The voters punished the corporate Democrats who helped block legislation to help working people, the unemployed, and those without health care. The Republicans…

Report Calls United States to Account for Failing to Meet Basic Human Needs

In a report published in advance of the United Nations hearing on the U.S. human rights record, advocacy groups called the U.S. government to account for regularly washing its hands of any responsibility for making sure that its people are not ill-fed, ill-housed, and of ill health. Together with seven collaborators and over forty endorsing…

Being 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…

Non-binding ballot measure pushes ‘Medicare For All’

By Edward B. Colby for the Dedham Transcript – DEDHAM, Mass. — Leo Stolbach says he’s working to advance a single-payer health insurance system for Massachusetts because he sees what’s happening to patients now. “Patients are getting shortchanged. And this fallacy that we have the best health care in the world, that’s wrong. It isn’t.…

Massachusetts doctors snub state’s health reform as model for country, pick single-payer system instead

BOSTON – For the first time the Massachusetts Medical Society has asked doctors what they think about health reform in its annual “Physician Workforce Survey” of 1,000 practicing physicians in the state, and the results may strike some as surprising. A plurality of the physician respondents, 34 percent, picked single-payer health reform as their preferred…