Selling Out Single-Payer

[SHRED]

With "friends" like Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, we don't need enemies.

:grr:


Selling Out Single-Payer
By HELEN REDMOND

“As we roll out new products we will continue to price businesses for appropriate margins. We will not sacrifice profitability for membership.”
– Angela Braly, Wellpoint CEO

At the Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and Citizen Action Illinois sponsored rally in Chicago last weekend, single-payer advocates confronted HCAN leadership and Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) who instead of working to pass HR 676, John Conyers single-payer bill titled the United States National Health Insurance Act, are supporting the so called “public option.”

What the public option plan is, no one can exactly say. There are no concrete proposals spelling out what the plan would include, who could join it, how much it would cost, or how it would be funded. But the details don’t matter, they advocated for it anyway.

In a heated exchange with Schakowsky before the rally, she argued HR 676 (she is a cosponsor of the bill, yes that’s right) has no chance of passing and something has to be passed this year. She lied and said there isn’t enough support for single-payer, but there is for a public option. I and other activists challenged Schakowsky on every assertion and demanded she fight to pass HR 676. We said the insurance industry is going to fight just as hard against a public option as it will single-payer so let’s have a smackdown for single-payer. We argued the passage of HR 676 would guarantee an end to the crisis and finally make health care a human right that could never be taken away. She got pissed and complained loudly to her staff as she walked into the building, “Can you believe she is lecturing me?” I yelled after her, “I’m just expressing my opinion, I’m your constituency.”

The rally was a slick “Sell out single-payer and confuse em’ show” from start to finish, replete with retro 70’s song Ain’t no Stoppin’ Us Now blasting into the auditorium.

MORE:
http://www.counterpunch.com/redmond04232009.html

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[Demeter]

1. Somehow, I Have the Suspicion that Swine Flu Just Made USP Win

When faced with a pandemic, the collective mind concentrates on the first principles:

"Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." --Samuel Johnson

[rocktivity]

2. I'm beginning to like my "Million Single Payer March" idea

more and more and more.

:headbang:
rocktivity