Guaranteed Healthcare

All across the nation, our allies in the fight to extend a progressively financed, single standard of high quality care for all are holding events to celebrate the 45th anniversary of Medicare. Four more than four decades, Medicare has helped millions of Americans protect their health and their wealth during retirement and during disability – the poverty level among the elderly dropped significantly in the years following the passage of Medicare. (READ MORE and TAKE ACTION!)

New census data released Tuesday confirm a huge spread in the rate of uninsured from state to state and the big difference in impact that can be expected as a result of the health-care overhaul recently passed by Congress.  

By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 28, 2010

All insurers are required to set aside a certain portion of premiums for future claims that have not yet occurred and/or not yet reported over the expected term of the policy. Back in April I wondered if insurers were shifting some of their earnings into reserves in order to inflate their medical loss ratios — which measures the percentage of premiums that are actually spent on medical care — and keep their reported profits artificially low (remember, they keep insisting that insurer profit makes up just 4% of national health care spending).

Think Progress
By Igor Volsky

The legislative battle over the health care overhaul ended months ago, but it is hard to tell from the intense effort now under way by insurance companies to retool a critical provision.

The New York Times
By REED ABELSON

Our last four posts have examined the PPACA from the perspectives of the four main goals of health care reform — cost containment, affordability, improved access and quality of care. Here we draw these goals together in asking whether this legislation delivers enough to be worth the $1 trillion investment over the next 10 years, and whether it will really work.

In our last three posts, we examined how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) stacks up against the goals of reform for cost containment, affordability and access to care. Here we consider what its likely impact will be on the quality of care, the fourth major goal of the reform effort.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) is being touted by its proponents as moving the country to near-universal coverage and a great step ahead in U.S. health care. But what does this really mean? Are the many barriers to care almost a thing of the past?

In our last post, we looked at some of the uncontrolled drivers of rapidly rising health care costs despite all the assurances of our politicians supporting the new health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act of 2010 (PPACA).

The passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Act of 2010 (PPACA), our new health care legislation, in March was hailed by its supporters as an historic event of the magnitude of Social Security and Medicare. But four months later, it remains controversial, with repeated polls showing three large groups of divisive opinion, including those who would work to repeal it and others who believe that it will make no difference. The Democrats have launched a $125 million PR campaign to defend the new law amidst growing signs that many Democrats facing re-election are failing to get political traction on the issue. (1) (Allen, M. Dems launch $125 M health campaign. Politico, June 7, 2010)

By Donna Smith

Sometimes, Washington, DC, can be a pretty stuffy place.  It’s not just all the business suits and the clickety-clack of high-heels down the marble hallways as staffers rush to and fro doing the bidding of their Congressional members.  It’s not just the daily drone of anemic cries for civility from both sides of the political aisle  in the midst of economic recession, planet endangering climate change, the latest corporate contamination in the Gulf or on Wall Street or in our healthcare system.  It’s just stuffy here much of the time.  The people are often as dead serious as the issues.

But this week, during National Nurses Week, the stuffiness lifted.  A rush of light, fresh, clean and energizing energy came to DC clad in 1,000 bright red scrubs worn by the registered nurses of National Nurses United and their affiliate unions, the California Nurses Association, National Nurses Organizing Committee, the Massachusetts Nurses Association, United American Nurses, and the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals. 

By Donna Smith

We Americans like to bomb moms.  Whether it’s in a far away country where we send our children to kill other mothers and their children or whether it’s here at home where we drop economic and cultural and sexist bombs on moms, we definitely like to bomb moms.

Then we like to show the First Lady tearfully honoring her own mother from a position of power and privilege in beautiful party dresses in a china and lace-draped dining room in the White House– like a well choreographed ballet of national proof one day every year that we love our mothers.   Doesn’t really matter which First Lady we chat about here.  Each of them plays their dutiful role in the annual Mother’s Day dance of pride. 

Inasmuch as the national healthcare reform effort did not produce a result that will provide the basic human right to healthcare to all in the United States, the work of reaching that goal remains ahead. Those of us who support a single-payer system as the only way to assure true universality for healthcare rights have not stopped our work following the passage of national health insurance reform. And many of us working on single-payer are doing so in our individual states rather than waiting for a national resolution to the escalating health crisis in the United States.

(Link directly to and sign Declaration of Health Independence and Security, before reading more: http://pdamerica.e-actionmax.com/takeaction.asp?aaid=4651)

In Wayne, Pennsylvania, on April 10, 2010, in conjunction with a regional conference of the Progressive Democrats of America, citizen representatives of 14 states gathered and decided to begin a more coordinated collaboration aimed at passage of state-based, single-payer health reform legislation. An additional four states expressed interest in moving forward with the shared collaboration between states.  

By Donna Smith

When you see the faces of the members of PASNAP (Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals) on strike at Temple University Hospital and perhaps most especially when you see the faces of their children walking on the picket line with them, you embrace the reality of why these brave RNs and other health professionals were compelled to strike.  This strike is about providing the best possible care for the patients at Temple and doing so in a way that is supported by the health professionals who have given decades of service to the community and to the institution. (story and ACTION item continued next page)

By Donna Smith

PHILADELPHIA – “Should I care if someone else is being exploited?” asked Kate Harkins, 21, of Schuylkill County, PA, who is a junior majoring in American Studies at Temple.  “If we don’t stand up for those workers now, then down the road when we are workers, conditions will not be changed, and we will not be heard.”

As the bells on campus tolled just after noon on Wednesday, protesting students walked to Bell Tower Plaza along Polett Walk with T-shirts that read, “My nurse was a scab,” and they staged a die-in to protest worker exploitation.  Students from Temple University’s Student Labor Action Project said they held the protest in support of the striking nurses and health professionals at Temple University hospital just two subway stops up the Broad Ave – Orange Line from the tree lined campus where they study.

Speaking for Controlled Healthcare Insurance Corp., the incomparable Ernestine tells a patient, “Life itself is a pre-existing condition. Our prescription for it: Don’t get sick!” That’s the only way to stay ahead of the insurance companies who’s only concern is profits. As Ernestine says, “It takes big bucks to run an insurance company, medical care is the least of it.”