Pasadena, CA, May 2009
Rev. David Bos of Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care speaking at the Presbyterian Seminar for Single Payer Health Care and HR 676. Rev. Bos is a leader in the Presbyterian movement to educate and advocate for a single payer national health care plan.
Louisville, May 2009. Members of Kentuckians for Single Payer Healthcare preparing a mailing to 3,200 members and supporters announcing the upcoming demonstration, “Patients Not Profits” and the Presbyterian-sponsored seminar for HR 676, “Making Health Care Happen.”
Come, Demonstrate!
We the People Demand HR 676!
11:30 am to 1:00 pm
5th and Main
downtown Louisville
across the street from Humana
Map
Expanded and Improved Medicare for All.
HR 676, a bill introduced into the US House of Representatives by Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), would institute a single payer health care system by expanding a greatly improved Medicare system to everyone residing in the U. S.
HR 676 would cover every person for all necessary medical care including prescription drugs, hospital, surgical, outpatient services, primary and preventive care, emergency services, dental, mental health, home health, physical therapy, rehabilitation (including for substance abuse), vision care, hearing services including hearing aids, chiropractic, durable medical equipment, palliative care, and long term care.
HR 676 ends deductibles and co-payments. HR 676 would save hundreds of billions annually by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private health insurance industry and HMOs.
This is part of a national week of action, May 27 to June 3, with events planned in over 20 cities. Check out the other events at Healthcare-NOW.org.
On Wednesday, April 29, 2009 a group of 30 interested citizens met at the Downtown Library in Lexington, Kentucky to hear Dr. Ewell Scott, a Morehead internist and recent recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Kentucky Medical Association, lead a discussion of how market-based private health insurance has failed the United States. He said the United States National Health Care Act, HR 676, a bill in the US Congress, can address our current economic woes, as well as provide quality health care to 48,000,000 uninsured and an equal number of underinsured Americans. Dr. Scott explained to the audience details of the wastefulness and inhumanity of the current profit-based system. For example, in Morehead, Kentucky, Dr. Scott’s private practice must deal with 34 separate insurance plans. (There are 17,000 separate plans in Chicago.) He pointed out the huge administrative expense market-based private insurance costs our system, $400 billion annually. Indeed health insurance costs, premiums, etc. soon will consume up to 30% of the average wage.
As a member of his local hospital Board of Directors, Dr. Scott described how he has witnessed his hospital lose $500,000 a month in unreimbursed services, a fiscal drain that could be stopped by a government –financed national health plan. Everyone would get comprehensive health care and all of it would be reimbursed.
Dr. Scott was introduced by Janet Tucker, RN, who along with Jan Ewing, RN is leading the development of a Lexington area chapter of Kentuckians for Single Payer Healthcare. The group will meet again at the Lexington Library, Monday, May 4, at 7:00 PM, Room B. Anyone who wants to improve health care quality and access for all Kentuckians is urged to come to this meeting. For more information please write info@kyhealthcare.org.
The Single Payer Solution to Our Health Care Crisis
You are invited to a presentation and informal discussion of the issues with
Presentation followed by Q and A, plus discussion of how we can win broad public and political support for single payer health care in Kentucky.
Dr. Scott, born and raised in Frankfort, KY, is a Charter Member of the Kentucky Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP-KY). He graduated Cum Laude from DePauw University and from Case Western Reserve University Medical School. Dr. Scott did his Internship in Med-Peds at the University of Virginia Hospital and his Internal Medicine Residency at the University of Virginia. He is Past President of St. Claire Regional Medical Center Medical Staff. He served as President and Medical Director of Morehead Clinic, and he is Clinical Volunteer Faculty at both the UK and U of L Schools of Medicine. Since 1972 and currently, he is in active practice in internal medicine in Morehead, Kentucky.
Dr. Scott is deeply involved in his community, in the Kentucky Medical Association, and in numerous medical, civic, and community organizations. He has lectured extensively on single payer health care.
Event sponsored by: Physicians for a National Health Program-KY and Kentuckians for Single Payer Healthcare www.kyhealthcare.org.
–via The Louisville Courier-Journal
By David Ross Stevens
The Courier-Journal
By now it is almost a cliche to say that America’s health care system is broken. In response, many politicians who are calling for “reform” and “universal health coverage” are not, in fact, clarifying the situation because they include in their new plans the very elements that have busted the system. So the political battle in the first days of 2009 will be over “token reform” or a bold, truly universal type of health insurance.
The challenge is for citizens to get involved. the public must do its part by educating itself about the various alternatives, and letting their representatives in Washington know what they conclude.
How broken is our current system?
Some 47 million Americans are uninsured; another 50 million are underinsured (not fully covered).
About 8.7 million children are uninsured.
Most bankruptcies have a health reason as a major cause, and 68 percent of those people who have gone belly up do have health insurance policies.
The World Health Organization ranks the level of U.S. health care at 37th in the world.
Private health insurance companies, which have doubled the premiums since 2000, have a bureaucratic overhead of 28-31 percent while Medicare operates at 3 percent efficiency. Therein lies a large part of the problem. These companies have an incentive to reduce benefits to patients.
The most persistent solution on the grassroots level is a single-payer system, the single payer being the federal government. This program involves a Medicare-type approach for everyone, but it would be expanded to include dental care, vision care and preventive programs. Overall, it would cost about the same — maybe a little more, maybe a little less — as the present 15 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP). All other industrialized nations with full coverage for all citizens average about half the costs in total medical care.
A single-payer system is best outlined in congressional bill HR676, which would set up the National Health Insurance (NHI) program. What it is not is “socialized medicine.” England and Spain have socialized medicine, wherein the doctors and hospitals are all employees of the federal government. Under HR676 the present system would stay; doctors would remain private vendors and would submit their bills to one payer, the U.S. government, not to the 1,500 private health insurance companies. Patients would still choose their doctors. (More about HR676 later)…
Health Care Rally
Nashville, Tennessee
October 6, 2008
Garrett Adams, MD, MPH
Physicians for a National Health Program
www.PNHP.org
Hello Nashville! Nashville, home of my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents. Nashville, where I was born and where I learned the essential skills of providing medical care for children.
Congratulations on hosting an historic Presidential Debate.
Five years ago an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled, The Physicians Proposal for a National Health Plan, changed my life. When I endorsed this plan, I was one of 8,000 physician endorsers. Today we are over 15,000 physicians, medical students and health professionals who support single-payer national health insurance in the Physicians for a National Health Program, a non-profit research and education organization.
Senator McCain, Senator Obama, and all candidates for public office, I speak for physicians today to protest a national health care payment system that yearly snuffs the life of 22,000 Americans,
A system that yearly puts over a million Americans into bankruptcy – three quarters of whom faithfully paid insurance premiums.
A system that enriches shareholders and corporate executives, rather than pay the medical expenses of sick patients.
A system that wants to insure young healthy people and to deny coverage to the sick and elderly in order to maximize profits.
A system that pays multimillions to its executives.
A system that offers bonuses to employees that can find loopholes in policies that will allow cancellation or denial of claims.
A system that does not insure people with pre-existing illnesses.
A system that allows a faithful worker whose illness forces him or her to lose their job, to also lose health care coverage and the ability to get future health insurance.
A system that forces people to choose employment, based on availability of health benefits and to remain in jobs they don’t like just to keep their “benefits” – health care hostages.
A system whose profits rely on increasing premiums, deductibles, and co-pays, and insuring healthy people while denying medical claims for the sick.
A system with no control over health care costs. We soon will spend one of every five dollars on health care, more than twice the average of other developed nations, all of whom provide universal national health care, yet we rank 37th worldwide in our system’s efficiency.
A system that allows the pharmaceutical industry to charge Americans 40% more for drugs than other countries charge.
Now listen to this, Senators McCain and Obama — A system that is carefully shielded and supported by politicians, who are rewarded with millions for their election campaign chests.
There is a cure for this sick health care system. The cure is surgery – Surgery, to remove the health insurance companies and to exert control over the pharmaceutical industry.
The health insurance industry is the problem with our health care system. It has not done, and it cannot do, anything positive for the delivery of health care in this country. For-profit, market-based health insurance is a failed and unsustainable experiment. It cannot work. When an experiment fails, the wise course of action is to abandon it and to begin a new plan.
The Declaration of Independence guarantees to American citizens the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Without health care we have none of these. A responsible government should provide health care to its citizens, just as it provides fire protection, police protection, and education. Americans deserve good health. We deserve to be and we can be a healthy nation, but not so long as we carry the added weight of the health insurance industry in provision of health care.
To cure our health system we need to operate, to excise the profiteering aspects of it; we also need to fill a prescription. The prescription is House Resolution 676, sponsored by Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, a bill now in the US Congress that will provide comprehensive universal health care in the US, publicly financed, but privately delivered, guaranteeing complete free choice of doctor and hospital. The bill has 93 co-sponsors, more than 20% of the Congress, the most support of any health reform bill in Congress.
Passage of single payer national health insurance legislation is politically feasible.
HR 676 has been endorsed by the Kentucky and New Hampshire Houses of Representatives, the New York State Assembly, dozens of cities and counties from Baltimore to San Francisco and from Warren County, Tennessee to majority-Republican Rensselaer County in New York state.
Churches have endorsed single payer national health insurance. The Presbyterian Church, the Unitarian-Universalists, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, the United Church of Christ, all have formal statements endorsing single payer NHI.
Recently the US Conference of Mayors, representing over 1,000 cities with populations over 30,000, unanimously adopted a resolution in support of HR 676.
Union support for HR 676 grows daily and includes 39 state AFL-CIO federations and 116 Central Labor Councils.
Fully two thirds of Americans support this plan, as well as the majority of physicians.
Numerous federal and state studies have demonstrated the economic necessity and viability of single payer plans.
Today you and I are part of a new American movement to demand our government jettison all forms of profiteering in the provision of health care. That health care financing become public. That all Americans receive comprehensive, medically necessary health care free from financial barriers. Incremental change will not work. We need a transformational change.
This is a movement of the people as surely as the women’s suffrage movement that gave women the right to vote, the civil rights movement, or other human rights movements.
Join the movement. We need you. We need your voices and your feet.
Listen to us, Senators McCain and Obama! Listen to us! We say
Health Care for All Now!
Can you hear us?
Health Care for All Now!
Health Care for All Now!
On Monday, Oct. 6, the evening prior to the Presidential Debate at Belmont University, a healthcare rally was held in Nashville, Tennessee. The rally was sponsored by a broad coalition including Tennessee Health Care Campaign, SEIU, TN AFL-CIO, USW, Tying Nashville Together, Tennessee Alliance for Progress, Healthcare-NOW Nashville, and others.
Speakers include Dr. Garrett Adams of PNHP-Kentucky. Below is a video of Dr. Adams’s speech.
Large, high quality video of speech: Download (220 MB)
