Will the new healthcare legislation get the job done?

Health care reform would be useful.
But the watered-down insurance
“reform” we got on March, 21,
2010 is simple surrender.

This gift to the insurance industry
allows the same profiteers
to call the shots, set the prices,
and keep their antitrust exemption.

We will still have 18 million or more
Americans with no access to
healthcare. The bill contains
language that may restrict
womens' access to reproductive
health services.

The public option and a provision
to establish federal oversight of
premium hikes were both stripped out
of the bill by transnational insurance cartels.
There is no way to control costs.
This means they will go up.

This president and Congress "settled"
for a privately run, for-profit system.

Insurers can’t wait to gain 31 million
new customers, and they will set
whatever price the market will bear.

We still need single payer
to make real headway.
Dennnis Kucinich is one
of the co-authors of H.R. 676,
which would create a single-payer,
Medicare-for-all, non-profit health
care system. It currently has 78
co-sponsors. We must continue
to advocate for such a system.

The profiteering must end.
The bill which was just passed
will not make that happen.

Here is what the doctors say:

"...the president's proposal would
ship hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars
to the private health insurance industry in the
form of subsidies," Young said.

"And to help finance this, it would impose a
new tax on health benefits of workers,
especially those in high-cost states.
Its individual mandate would force millions of
middle-income uninsured Americans to buy
insurers' skimpy products - insurance
policies full of gaps like ever-rising co-pays,
deductibles and premiums. Such policies
already leave middle-class American families
vulnerable to economic hardship and medical
bankruptcy in the event of a serious illness like
cancer...Even so, at least 23 million people
would remain uninsured. We know that being
uninsured raises your chance of dying by about
40 percent," he continued, citing another recent
study. "That translates into about 23,000
unnecessary deaths each year. As physicians,
we find this completely unacceptable...
In short, this proposal is an insurance company
bonanza, not good, evidence-based health reform.
The president would do better by abandoning the
insurance and drug companies and instead taking
up the single-payer approach."

http://pnhp.org/
http://www.jwjpdx.org/campaigns/page1-general-info
www.Writingresource.info/healthcare
http://health-careresource.blogspot.com/

Why Dennis held his nose and supported the bill..

in solidarity and with best regards,
Tim Flanagan
tflanaga@pcc.edu
editor@writingresource.org

Box 22, Lake Oswego, OR 97034
Affiliated with the KBOO Labor Radio Collective,
Jobs with Justice, AFT, & The Portland Alliance
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