by Paul Glover

For ninety-nine years the campaign for universal health coverage has relied on conferences, panel discussions, petitions, and rallies. These vent moral indignation but lack power.  Today, 51 million Americans without medical insurance and 30 million Americans paying for inadequate coverage will not get prompt affordable health care through polite legal means.

That’s because Congress and insurance companies are now significantly owned by multinational investment firms. Thus policy is made in remote boardrooms that maximize profit and minimize people. These stuffed suits and their puppets have no concern for suffering Americans, slick advertisements notwithstanding.

Therefore, to take effective control of medical care, the uninsured and our allies have begun organizing to damage the profitability of insurance investments, while building a new American health system.

The League of Uninsured Voters (LUV) embraces the American tradition of rowdy confrontation that ended slavery, gained votes for women, won the eight-hour workday, pressed for social security, demanded civil rights, secured AIDS funding, and established the nation.

Through LUV, we uninsured take leadership to expand Medicare to all. Liberal campaigns need our initiative, because moral indignation is less powerful than desperation. Richard Kirsch, director of Health Care for America Now said, “We would never want to organize the uninsured by themselves because Americans see the problem as affordability,” according to an AP news article. We 50 million uninsured, though, see the problem as life-or-death.

This week I am in Denver at a different kind of Health Care Reform rally. Community Health Coalition activists from across the nation are meeting with one another and with the bureaucrats who write and enforce the regs. We are learning how health care reform regulations will be rolled out, what they will mean for our country, and how to incorporate them into our organizing practice.

“Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You’re thinking of Jesus.”-John Fugelsang

Probably the most tweeted and Facebook-shared quote of the week, this quip from actor, comedian, and spiritual progressive John Fugelsang gives voice to a particularly ironic feature of the current political debate: Many of those who hurled insults at the legislators who voted for health care reform will, on this Good Friday, be mourning in church services over the death of a revolutionary healer whose uncompromising generosity and compassion got him killed.

On Good Friday, Christians remember the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, an event that over the years has become so sentimentalized, personalized, and spiritualized that its political significance has been all but lost, except perhaps among those of us most desperate for hope of an alternative to the violence, exploitation, callousness, and domination of our own current social order. But then, Jesus has always spoken most powerfully to the nearly hopeless and desperate.

Cross-posted as a Morning Feature at Daily Kos.

Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other luminaries are skewering Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) for crowing about his insertion of a new IRS rule into the Health Care Reform Bill after first voting against HCR. Because he has publicly mocked and blocked HCR (along with other Repubs), and because the importance of his new rule is only appreciated by hospital financing aficianados, his announcement had the loft of a lead comforter.

I love Rachel Maddow. I wake up every weekday at 5:00 am to her podcasts. And I am no fan of Chuck Grassley. But I am ecstatic about the Grassley rule. You will be too, once you understand it.

The delightfully wacky HCR (Health Care Reform) circus caravan rolls on.

As of March 11, 41 Senators had either signed or issued statements of support for a letter to Harry Reid initiated by Alan Grayson and the PCCC urging passage of the Public Option through reconciliation. For the first time, the Public Option is looking like a very real possibility.

Only three Dems have come out absolutely opposed (not including Liebermenace who, perhaps as a ploy to reinvigorate his flagging attentometrics, is playing coy). The Dems can lose up to six fence-nesters and still pass the Public Option. “And how,” you might be tempted to ask, “has Alan (The-GOP-healthcare-plan-is-die-soon) Grayson, an outspoken House Freshman, managed to get 41 Senators to support his letter despite White House efforts to back-burner the entire endeavor?”

Simple! The PCCC conducted a series of statewide polls demonstrating tremendous support for “socialized Medicine” among Democratic and Indie voters!

Gotta luv that guy! Maybe Rahm should try to twist his arm in the shower. Or at least poke him in the chest.

Image courtesy of FlickrCC/janinsanfran.

Steffie Woolhandler’s “A faulty prescription for reform” and John Nichols’s “The Missing Voices at the Healthcare Summit” both show why it’s a huge mistake to be “realistic” in reforming the health care system.

In order to be realistic, President Obama and the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate refused to give any attention to a “Medicare for Everyone” approach — the only approach that could actually solve some of the major problems facing health care in the United States. As long as our health care is not about “care” but about profits, there is little chance of arriving at a health care system that will actually serve the needs of Americans. This was the same mistake made by President Clinton in his approach, and it is fast becoming a major reason why Democrats may lose their congressional majority in 2010: people don’t trust a government whose interventions often seem more oriented toward the needs of corporations than the needs of ordinary American citizens, and the only force that is really articulating the resentment people feel at having to pay more and more taxes to fund programs that largely serve corporate power is the anti-government right wing. We need to build a counter-force to that, one which is truly understanding of why people would be opposed to government spending when it is not serving their interests, and the health care plan now being supported by Obama is likely to intensify this right-wing reactionary response to a real problem: the problem of corporate greed and the profit motive distorting medicine and making health about profits not about caring.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in a funk, listening to the debates about the future of health care reform. I am pleasantly surprised by two phenomena: 1] public dialogue around health care is both vibrant and incredibly substantive ; and 2] conservatives have absented themselves from discussion.

I grew accustomed to palliatives and drivel during the Bush years. (Remember when plastic sheeting and duct tape were promoted as public health policy? In the event of an epidemic, we were instructed to wrap our homes in plastic!) I am surprised at the enthusiasm and diversity of our civic dialogue. This is a huge positive change and a sign of our improved civic health.

On the other hand, the Republican Party has descended into utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy. They have determined that the only quick route back to power is to prevent legislative action, then brand Democrats as ineffectual. Their most fervent followers believe America is a white Christian nation under attack. As a result, they are opposing anything and everything. Jack Kemp, the Party’s self-described “bleeding heart conservative” passed away in May after a decade of political exile. As long as the far right wages primaries against Republicans who fail their ideological “purity test,” there will be no new Jack Kemp, no ideas, no discussion within the “big” GOP tent. Alert Democrats can capitalize on their failure to build.

Building the Ship of State

Actual dialogue has been confined to two progressive factions, and it is fueled by a structural question. Out of what material do we build our ship of state?

My friend, the Rev.  Geoff Browning is a campus minister at Stanford University and a peacemaking advocate in the Presbyterian Church’s San Jose Presbytery. He wrote this essay and has given me permission to share it with Tikkun Daily visitors. The title should give you a guess as to where Geoff is going with this one (don’t fall asleep while reading it or you’ll get three visitors……)

I’ve been reading various healthcare diaries from around Left Blogistan searching for a strategy to salvage healthcare reform. The most interesting so far are a pair dealing with polls that surfaced on Daily Kos.

fladem writes about the sudden collapse in support for health care reform as measured in the recent WSJ/NBC poll.

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll coming out later today will show opposition to the health care bill growing — mainly from disappointed liberals, who are very much disappointed to see the public option getting thrown out.

The poll has 47% saying the Obama health care plan is a bad idea, to only 32% who say it’s a good idea…45% say it is not acceptable for a plan to not include a public option. But, 58% would find inclusion of a Medicare Buy in acceptable.

Daily Kos diarist arodb writes about a recent WaPo/ABC poll taken after the defeat of a proposal allowing the re-importation of drugs.

This poll also finds a significant drop in support for health care reform in response to the defeat of an amendment which would have benefited the American people.

But Obama and the Democrats have had decidedly less success convincing the public that their health proposals will bring positive change. More than half of those polled, 53 percent, see higher costs for themselves if the proposed changes go into effect than if the current system remains intact.

It looks to me as if the public is getting smarter and is becoming less willing to have smoke blown in their collective face. Chris Bowers at Open Left urges us to swallow our bitterness and help Obama to pass his sham of a bill.

I strongly disagree.

I believe that if Obama and Emanuel believe we progressives will stand our ground and if they begin to fear their ability to pass a bill will become endangered, they will find a new solution. In all likelihood, Lieberman will be thrown to the political lions, and progressive features will find their way into health care reform in some way, shape or form. But this won’t happen if we blink.

Normally I would make this brief post a comment and stick it on the end of my last article entitled,“Send Leiberman a Golem for Hanukkah,” but I’m too spitting mad. I have argued for a long time that an imperfect bill is much better than no bill. However, a useless bill is not.

Several blogs including McJoan at Daily Kos, Jonathan Kohn at The New Republic, and Carrie Budoff Brown at Politico are reporting that Rahm Emanuel is pressuring Reid to lose the Medicare Buy-in to quickly cut a deal with Lieberman.

The White House, of course, is denying it.

I don’t care who’s telling the truth. I say we send our golems to Rahm. And call him too. Tell the White House to grow some cojones.

The White House comment line is 202-456-1111.

The switchboard is 202-456-1414. Call ‘em both. Keep their lines tied up.

And their email is http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact.

To send Rahm a golem, copy and paste the following message: “Rahm. Stop blocking REAL health care reform or we will vote you and all your evil minions out of office. Here’s a golem for you. I hope you get the message you evil effing ba$tard.” Copy the embed code that appears in the top right hand corner of the box after the one-minute golem video has played into the message box.

Here’s what he will see:

Rahm. Stop blocking REAL health care reform or we will vote you and all your evil minions out of office. Here’s a golem for you. I hope you get the message you evil effing ba$tard!

Of course, you can send whatever message you like. You can write to him in Hebrew. Just be sure he gets the point. And the golem.

(For anyone who does not know what a golem is, and why a golem would mean something to Rahm, see this morning’s diary entitled “Send Leiberman a Golem for Hanukkah.”

I owe an apology to all you Tikkunistas out there for my prolonged silence on health care issues at such an important time. My organization has received two new health care grants through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and I am snowed under with work. Coincidentally, I am also snowed under with snow which knocked out my internet and made it difficult to retrieve children from various undisclosed locations.

However, I’m back. I hope to blog soon about some of my personal adventures in healthcare reform. And about a few little known and very arcane regulation changes that will make a huge difference.

But tonight I will limit myself to a few very brief words about the Senate’s Health Care compromise. Of course, the devil is in the details and I haven’t seen them yet. But I like the bits and pieces that have leaked out.

Here they are:

The Religious Right is cheering last night’s passage of the Stupak amendment, which threatens women’s reproductive rights by severely limiting insurance companies’ ability to cover the cost of abortions.

“This is a huge pro-life victory for women, their unborn children, and families,” announced the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian public policy group that lobbied hard for the amendment. “We applaud this House vote.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops also played a major role in persuading lawmakers to adopt the amendment, which 64 House Democrats and 176 Republicans voted to attach in their last-minute wrangles over the Affordable Health Care for America Act. John Nichols raised serious concerns about the Catholic bishops’ involvement, writing this in his post for the Nation:

The tortured final negotiations put serious cracks in Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state, as abortion foes such as Pennsylvania Democrat Jason Altmire openly acknowledged that they would not vote for health-care reform legislation unless they were told it was appropriate to do so by Catholic bishops in their home districts.

The health bill, with Stupak amendment in tow, passed the House last night by 220-215, simultaneously paving the way for the most ambitious expansion of health-care coverage since the creation of Medicare, and for one of the worst federal curtailments of abortion rights since the Hyde Amendment, which has denied abortion access to most Medicaid recipients since 1976.

Many newspaper articles are downplaying the sweeping nature of the Stupak amendment, failing to signal the ways in which it goes far beyond the Hyde Amendment (a version of which is already part of the House bill in the form of an amendment by Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif.) and could cause masses of women to lose abortion coverage that they already have. Here’s the alarming analysis of the situation that Rep. Jan Schakowksy issued during yesterday’s debate:

Everyone knows that a meal in an expensive restaurant will probably taste better than a meal in a cheap restaurant, that a $5000 sofa will probably look better than a $500 sofa, or that a $500,000 house will probably be in a better location and be better built than a $50,000 house. Why is it then that Obama’s supporters are so convinced that cheaper health care will be better health care? There are at least four reasons to question their assumption.

First, medicine is not a hard science like physics or chemistry. It has a hard science dimension, but it is also a clinical practice, more akin to art in some ways than science. That means doctors sometimes have a “feel” that a certain test may be called for, even though the official protocol may not allow it. In other words, the doctor/patient relationship is at the core of health care and needs to supersede insurance companies as well as “outcome” studies aimed at cutting costs. Of course, the counterpart to that is that doctors need to be salaried, and not paid on a fee-for-service basis. So far as I know, this is not addressed in the present health plans.

The battle for health care reform remains fluid. Various proposals have been working their way through Congress. At each stage of the process, a different sort of concerted action is required to insure a meaningful bill and a robust public option. We have reached another critical juncture, and your help is badly needed.

After sitting on its hands for months, Senate Finance finally passed a bill out of committee last week, enabling the process to move forward. At this point in the Senate, the Finance proposal (which is the weakest and perhaps most expensive of all the draft bills) must be merged with the bill drafted by the Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) Committee. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be key to our success.

Here are some facts, links and tools that will help you to contribute to our effort.

1) The bills will be merged behind closed doors by a small team composed of three Senators and a few top White House Aids. Politico reports that Reid is limiting participation to Senator Chris Dodd (who helped usher a bill through HELP), Senator Max Baucus (of finance), himself and the White House. Senator Dodd has been outspoken in his support for the public option. Senator Baucus has been notable for his obstructionism and chumminess with insurers. If we want to influence the bill, we need to focus on Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid.

2) There is already an organized means of doing so. Reid is currently polling poorly in Nevada which has been hard hit by the recession, and which is ranked among the bottom ten in terms of health care provision. Congressman Alan (“the Republican Health Care Plan is to die quickly”) Grayson recently delivered a petition with 90,000 signatores (and presumably, 90,000 potential donors to a primary challenge) to the office of Harry Reid. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), a project of ActBlue and the originators of the petition, are raising funds to air television ads for the public option in Nevada. Here is one of their ads:

You can donate in order to air this ad in Nevada here.

And, if you have a few moments, you can watch Alan Grayson and PCCC deliver their petition, which demands that Reid revoke the chairmanship of any democrat who does not vote to block a fillibuster of the public option:

You can also call Harry Reid’s office directly to inform him, that if he does not produce and pass a bill with a robust public option, you will donate money towards a democratic challenger in the next primary. His phone number is 202-224-3542.

Happy calling! (And don’t forget to pass this link along to all of your friends!)

An article authored by Eli Zaretsky entitled A Bill to Cut Health Care Spending appeared yesterday on Tikkun Daily, ostensibly to assist in the creation “an independent left.” Zaretsky argues that the current health care proposal is actually an effort to cut spending by eliminating Medicare. Not only is his premise blatantly false; it is a repetition of right wing talking points introduced by the insurance industry to kill health care reform.

We at Tikkun should be asking ourselves, “Do I want to demonstrate my left-leaning independence by repeating everything Glenn Beck says?”

I had the good fortune to travel to Washington, DC., and interview Senator Jeff Bingaman on September 18 about Medicare for All, the Baucus Bill and other topics related to health care reform.

Everybody’s favorite diarist, Land of Enchantment, was kind enough to edit my video and post it on YouTube.

Thank you LoE for putting up with me and editing the video which is embedded after the fold. A summary (not a transcript) of Parts One and Two follows the videos for the YouTube impaired.

I had the opportunity to interview New Mexico Congressman Ben Ray Lujan in his Washington office on Thursday September 17. Limited internet access while traveling, unfamiliarity with mp3 files, Rosh Hashanah and the complete failure of our household plumbing conspired to prevent me from posting the interview and transcript until today. I apologize in advance for the poor sound quality.

And I must add the following disclaimer: I am not a hard-nosed professional reporter, but rather a constituent of Congressman Lujan. I like the policies he supports. What follows is a friendly dialogue about health care between a Congressman and a constituent.

Several main points of interest emerged.

1) Over the recess, despite the hysteria about death panels and birth certificates and forced government circumcision, five new co-sponsors signed on to HR 676, the Single Payer Bill. Congressman Conyers’ office confirmed that five had signed on during the recess. I was told that they had become supporters of Medicare for All as a result of public pressure from constituents. I looked up the Library of Congress list of co-sponsors and could not find anyone who signed on during the recess. I will continue to investigate to confirm the claim. If this is true, it indicates that despite a media storm of negative publicity, support for Medicare for All continues to grow.

President Obama told Congress he would not sign a health care bill that added any amount to the national debt — a criterion he does not use when considering escalating war in Afghanistan or bailouts to banks.

In a recent article for Tikkun, Dr. Arnold Relman argues that there is no way to meet that criterion unless health care reform includes eliminating the profit motive from medicine, including licensing doctors so that they get a fixed salary each year rather than, as now, making profits from prescribing more tests, procedures and visits that increase their incomes. He writes:

There are two interrelated critical issues in health reform right now: how to extend and improve insurance coverage, and how to control the unsustainable rise in health care expenditures. Virtually all of the current legislative attention is focused on the first issue but, notwithstanding claims to the contrary, none of the proposals now on the table offers any credible solution for the control of rising costs. Without control of health cost inflation, the present system will not be viable much longer.

Thursday Night is Health Care Change Night at ePluribus Media and Daily Kos. This week, new diarist evelette posted a lyrical account of her own reckoning with death in her diary, (linked above) When Health Care Works.

When evelette learned she was suffering from cancer, she was given three choices:

1. Undergo a single mastectomy with or without reconstruction;
2. Undergo a double mastectomy with or without reconstruction;
3. Do nothing and hope for the best.

Fortunately, thanks to state subsidized health coverage in New Mexico (partially socialized medicine), evelette was able to make the right choice for her. Her decision has deepened her already strong relationship with her boyfriend, and also with her friends and co-workers, and brought new joy into her life. You can find out how that happened by reading her diary.

On streetprophets, diarist ramara (who is also a cancer survivor) reflected on her joy at playing Beethoven’s eroica a year after her kidney was removed. She wrote a D’Var Torah about “First Fruits” as her offering of Thanks. The D’Var Torah blossomed into a weekly series. To celebrate the return of “First Fruits,” she reposted her diary last night.

I hope these diaries inspire a joyous and fruitful Labor Day Weekend.

Please check out this diary by Connecticut Man1 at ePluribus Media, a great site for original collaborative citizen journalism.

Connecticut Man1′s friend, Matt Black of Shoq Value, took his video camera up to Canada and interviewed real Canadians about their health care system. Though Matt tried to find people with horror stories to report, everyone seemed beyond satisfied. Nobody talked about long lines or rationed care. Everyone interviewed chose their own doctor.

But the best part was their collective response to a question about co-pays.

Connecticut Man1 also presents a terrific graphic juxtaposing the American “mainstream” opposing the public option (22%) against “the left of the left” (72%) who clamor for one.

Connecticut Man1′s diary is a perfect complement to Craig Weisner’s Tikkun article below. Please read both over coffee and wonder how it has become possible for the average American to be completely inundated by misinformation.

One would almost think we have resurrected Pravda.

You can follow me on Twitter at @laurenreichelt.