Mt. Sterling physicians, Dr. Edward Roberts and Dr. Robert Toon, sponsored a September 12, 2023, showing of the documentary, “The Power to Heal,” at the Gateway Regional Arts Center in downtown Mt. Sterling. The film, narrated by Danny Glover, describes how the passage of Medicare in 1965 became the vehicle by which an active civil rights movement, in less than four months, transformed the nation’s hospitals from our most racially and economically segregated institutions into our most integrated.

Publicly funded Medicare not only brought care to our nation’s seniors but it ended segregation in hospitals with its insistence that only hospitals certified as in compliance with civil rights law could receive these funds.

Following the film, Paul Hoppe and Kay Tillow of Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care and Dr. Roberts engaged with the audience in a lively discussion entertaining the possibility that Medicare could once again be the basis of transformation to a more just health care system. A local doctor told of the privatized Medicare Advantage plans’ refusal to authorize payment for tests essential to care. Many signed the petition in support of the national, not-for-profit, single payer system–an Improved Medicare for All plan–advocated by Physicians for a National Health Program.

“The Power to Heal” is based on a book by David Barton Smith. Listen to the interview with David Barton Smith on Single Payer Radio.

Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care offers to show the hour long film to any organization that is interested. Please contact nursenpo@aol.com, 502 636 1551, to make arrangements.

Further information on the documentary can be found here.

On July 30, 2023, Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care hosted a showing of “The Power to Heal” in celebration of Medicare’s 58th birthday. The film, narrated by Danny Glover, tells how the 1965 passage of the Medicare law, together with a dedicated grass roots civil rights movement, ended the widespread segregation of US hospitals. Hospitals had to be certified as open to African Americans and integrated before that could receive Medicare money.

Medicare not only brought health care to seniors but more justice to the nation.

KSPH calls for a further transformation of Medicare to end profits in health care and enact a national, single payer system–an Improved Medicare for All.

Thanks to Paul Hoppe who supplied the technical expertise for the film projection as well as the cupcakes imprinted with a Medicare Card and to Charlie Casper and Harriette Seiler who did the work to make the event a success. Thanks to Ralph Hearn and the KYARA for spreading the word, to Mark McKinley for the Radio Show with David Barton Smith, and to Steve Katz who traveled from Lexington to be with us.

KSPH offers to show the film anywhere in Kentucky. We are currently working on arranging a showing in Mt. Sterling. Please write or call: nursenpo@aol.com (502) 636 1551.

Representative Pramila Jayapal has introduced into Congress the Medicare for All Act of 2023, a national single payer bill.  Physicians for a National Health Program is circulating a letter inviting organizations to sign on to show support for the legislation.

We encourage you to ask your organization, and other organizations, to sign on to the letter.

Here’s the direct link to the form where organizations can sign on to support.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfQri5MMtcYckbwc4Ub8eiohFZ0cmLFVF3-NTpvAdDY2j3r2A/viewform

(The form has a link to the full letter as well, so they can read through that before signing.)

In solidarity for single payer,
Kay Tillow, Chair, Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care

Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care invites you to join us in celebrating Medicare’s 58^th Anniversary with a free showing of the documentary The Power to Heal narrated by Danny Glover.

In less than four months Medicare transformed the nation’s hospitals from our most racially and economically segregated institutions into our most integrated. Hospitals, which had for a half century selectively served people on the basis of race and wealth, were forced to care for all.

Medicare not only brought health care to our nation’s seniors but it ended segregation in hospitals with its insistence that only integrated hospitals could receive these funds.

Join us:

“The Power to Heal”

Sunday, July 30, 2023, 2:00 pm

Louisville Free Public Library

301 York Street
Louisville, KY 40203

(Medicare Birthday cupcakes will be served.)

As we celebrate the birth of the Medicare program as a force for racial and health care justice, our country’s health care needs another transformation–not just for seniors but for all ages.

We demand the passage of an Expanded and Improved Medicare for All.

Join us as we renew the struggle to win national, not-for-profit, single payer health care for the nation.  

Remove the profiteers and make health care a human right. 

Support Improved Medicare for All.  Everybody in, nobody out!

Sponsored by Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care, www.kyhealthcare.org, 502 636 1551, nursenpo@aol.com. 

Co-sponsored by the Kentucky Alliance for Retired Americans. 

“The Power to Heal” is based on a book by David Barton Smith. Listen to the interview with David Barton Smith on Single Payer Radio

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that oversees those national health care programs, has the dubious distinction of being light years ahead of other government regulators in excusing fraudulent conduct. CMS doesn’t just allow healthcare companies to repeatedly commit fraud and abuse with fines amounting to a tiny fraction of the profit; CMS goes much further.

CMS formally authorizes the violation of anti-corruption laws by granting “fraud and abuse” waivers to the corporate entities involved in experimental programs within its Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI or Innovation Center).

It’s true. CMS has an official webpage named “Fraud and Abuse Waivers” that lists the programs entitled to their absolution.

Full story:

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/healthcare-privatization-medicare

Summary: CMS is proposing a 10-year comparison of primary care payment models (fee-for-service and capitation, with support for care delivery systems). At first glance, why not? On closer scrutiny, this is another delay for an experiment in our current flawed system that will yield limited and equivocal results. Let’s focus on real reform.

Making Care Primary (MCP) Model, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, June 8, 2023

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D. and Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.

…Real reform can’t be off the agenda for the next decade, while we wait for this and other tweaks to our broken system. This CMS proposal requires a response from us. We already have a great start: Medicare for All legislation in both the Senate and the House (Thank you Sanders, Jayapal, Dingell, and the many others). We need to go to the streets, not with guns, but with our placards and loud, passionate voices! And this time, let’s not just go home when the shouting is done. Let’s complete the job!

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

Speakers:

Toni Gilpin, who wrote the book on the union at International Harvester in Louisville

Senator Gerald Neal whose father was a leader of that Local Union 236

Thurs., June 8, 2023, 6:00 pm, IUE-CWA Hall, 5153 Poplar Level Rd., Louisville

The Farm Equipment Local 236 in Louisville came to represent, Gilpin argues, “the most perfect embodiment of the FE’s ideology.” Part of this was quantifiable, as the radical FE’s commitment to shop-floor militancy, including a liberal reliance on walkouts to win grievance disputes, was on full display at the IH plant in Louisville, where “wildcat” strikes became commonplace. But it was also evident in Local 236’s adherence to what could be called “lived solidarity” – the belief that day-in, day-out collective struggle against management, involving Black and white workers together, was essential to undermine racism and forge the class cohesion necessary to take on rapacious capitalists.

The combative, and extraordinarily united, Local 236 membership, moreover, took their fight for equity beyond the plant gates and into the community, challenging segregation in Louisville’s parks, hotels and hospitals. I illustrate all this through the stories of various Louisville FE members, including Jim Wright, who was Black, and Jim Mouser, a white man; both became leaders within Local 236 but also close friends who regularly spent time together outside of work, often with their families, at a time when interracial socializing in Louisville was a rarity.

How the FE’s linkage of workplace militancy and antiracism succeeded at transforming Harvester workers in Louisville, often in profoundly personal and heartfelt ways, is a moving – and timely – story, I’d say. https://www.lawcha.org/2021/10/12/toni-gilpin-on-her-new-book-the-long-deep-grudge/

Kay Tillow

May 11, 2023 5:40 am

(Getty Images)

Congressman James Comer, of Kentucky’s 1st District and chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is much in the news these days. The oversight committee is supposed to ensure the efficiency, effectiveness and accountability of the federal government and all its agencies.  Comer has been investigating everything from Chinese money laundering to Hunter Biden’s laptop to the origin of Covid-19.  Those may, indeed, be serious concerns, but there is a domestic health care issue that requires urgent attention.

Kentucky health care advocates have asked Rep. Comer to look into an issue central to the nation’s health and financial wellbeing.  Private, for-profit Medicare Advantage (MA) plans are siphoning billions from the Medicare Trust Fund while they delay and deny care to seniors and the disabled.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the government agency that oversees Medicare, is also in dire need of a thorough investigation. From 2008 to 2023 Medicare Advantage insurers collected $124 billion in overpayments, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Panel. As terrible as it is to think of profiteers ripping off Medicare funds, it’s even worse that these Advantage plans are cheating on the care they owe to the patients.