TrickyBuddha Studios

Health Care Wanted: Dead or Alive
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
by Dennis Kucinich

The masquerade is over! The “public option” is … dead.

Health care reform is now a private option: WHICH FOR PROFIT INSURANCE COMPANY DO YOU WANT? You have to choose. And you have to pay. If you have a low income, under HR3200 government will subsidize the private insurance companies and you will still have to pay premiums, co-pays and deductibles.

The Administration plan requires that everyone must have health insurance, so it is delivering tens of millions of new “customers” to the insurance companies. Health care? Not really. Insurance care! Absolutely. Cost controls? No chance.

You will next hear talk about “co-ops.” The truth is that insurance company campaign contributions have co-opted the public interest.

I need your help to spread the word and rally the nation around true healthcare reform which covers everyone and maintains fiscal integrity without breaking our nation’s bank! Your contribution will empower our efforts to continue to fight for the single-payer, not-for-profit health care bill, HR676 “Medicare for All,” which I co-authored with John Conyers.. The bill now has 85 sponsors in the House.

The hotly-debated HR3200, the so-called “health care reform” bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform. It is a convoluted mess. The real debate which we should be having is not occurring.

Removing the “public option” from a public bill paid for by public money is not in the public interest. What is left is a “private option” paid for with public money. Why should public money be spent on a private option which does not guarantee 100% coverage nor have any cost controls? A true public option would provide 30% savings immediately which would then cover the 1/3rd of the population who presently have no healthcare.

Unfortunately, under HR3200, the Government is choosing winners and losers in the private sector; proposing to spend public funds on subsidizing insurance companies who make money not providing health care. This process wil insure only one thing – the expansion of profits. Gone is the debate over cost.

As a result of current negotiations, the Medicare Part D rip-off will continue for another decade, further fleecing senior citizens. Drug importation has been dropped, so no inexpensive drugs can be accessed from other nations.

Instead we are told the pharmaceutical companies will accept a 2% cut in the growth rate of their profits – this they call cost control!

If the matter were not so serious, it would be farcical: The executive branch pretends that the proposed health care reforms are something they are not. The legislation is being attacked for something it is not. Congressional leadership and the White House defend the legislation, pretending it actually is the very proposal that is being attacked. But it is not.

A commonsense government health care reform policy would insure that every single American has full access to healthcare by expanding Medicare to cover everyone under a Single Payer System. We are already paying for a universal standard of care, it is just we are not getting it.

I need your help to spread the word and rally the nation around true health care reform which covers everyone and maintains fiscal integrity without subsidizing insurance and pharmaceutical companies and breaking our nation’s bank!

My voice in Congress will continue to challenge the special interests who do not want single payer to succeed. I need you to join me in combating the special and corporate interests who spend millions to try to win this Congressional seat. With your help WE will win again. With your help I will continue to represent your concerns, be YOUR VOICE in the United States Congress, and be the voice for health care for all Americans!

Please contribute $25, $50, $100 in support of my campaign. Please contribute now.

With your help, we can accomplish ANYTHING in America. Persistence, dedication, truth and courage will lead the way and win out in the end.

We usually go to bed late and wake up… later. But occasionally a wrench is thrown into our heteroclitic sleeping patterns.

For instance, today: the office wanted to do an AM inspection of the place, and for that to work we’d need to preempt that with an even-earlier smuggling of our three kitties — before the office opened (we live directly across from them). But, we couldn’t leave too early because we didn’t want to inconvenience “Aunt Lisa and Uncle Jared”. So we waited until both of them were out of their house before our kitties went dark and waited for the heat to give up the chase.

Situations like these don’t cause problems for other people, but again we have odd hours. Candice sensibly suggested going to bed early and waking up early and going about it that way but I knew it wouldn’t work for me. We’ll go to bed at 5am and I’ll lay there until 6am or 7am or 8am sometimes. For an early-t0-bed and early-to-rise deviation to work, I’d have to be zonked by, say, 2am — if I want to be up and happy for 7am or 8am.

I decided it’d be easier for me to stay up through the night. I do that “now and then” and it’s never too much of a challenge, nor was it this time. I didn’t wake up particularly rested yesterday, but I got through today without any problems or naps.

We dropped the cats off, had our inspection, went to the post office, picked the cats back up, and then returned home. After, I kept busy with my workout, Facebook, and finishing off Prince of Persia. Speaking of PoP, I thought maybe I had overdosed a bit to beat it so soon after I started playing, but according to one of my achievements I beat the game in “under 12 hours”. I found that odd since I thought I had dillied. And dallied. But maybe it was just one or the other.

Anyway, here’s to a short night of dinner (pizza!) and bed.

Every time I get a little cynical or pessimistic about politics, I see something positive. Kucinich makes me happy. I’m glad we have politicians like him to fight for the people.

Kucinich Amendment to Health Care Bill Passes!
July 18th, 2009 – 1:04am

Dear Friends,

With your support, your phone calls, your emails, we won a major legislative victory today for a state single payer health care option in the House of Representatives in Washington, DC. The House Education and Labor Committee approved the Kucinich Amendment by a vote of 27-19, with 14 Democrats and 13 Republicans voting yes.

The amendment propels the growing single payer health care movement at the state level. There are at least ten states which have active single payer efforts in their legislatures. They are California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington. The amendment mandates a single payer state will receive the right to waive the application of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which has in the past been used to nullify efforts to expand state or local government health care.

Under the Kucinich Amendment a state’s application for a waiver from ERISA is granted automatically if the state has signed into law a single payer plan. With the amendment, for the first time, the state single payer health care option is shielded from an ERISA-based legal attack. Now that the underlying bill has been passed, as amended, by the full committee, we must make sure that Congress knows that we want the provision kept in the bill at final passage!

The state single payer option was one of five major amendments which I obtained support to get included in HR3200. One amendment brings into standard coverage for the first time complementary and alternative medicine, (integrative medicine). Another amendment drives down the cost of prescription drugs by ending pharmaceutical industry’s sharp practices manipulating physician prescribing habits. An amendment stops the insurance industry from increasing premiums at the time when people are not permitted to change health plans; and finally an amendment imposing a requirement on insurance companies that they disclose the cost of advertising, marketing and executive compensation expenses (which generally divert money from patient care).

Please make sure you post this message on your social networking site, ask all your friends to get involved and encourage everyone you know to sign up at www.Kucinich.us so we can build full momentum behind this movement for real health care.

Let’s do this!
-Dennis