Tennessee Democratic Party Chairman Chip Forrester today released the following statement on the two year anniversary of President Obama’s signing of the Affordable Care Act – which to date has helped millions of middle class families, seniors, and young people receive quality affordable health care:
“Two years ago with the stroke of a pen, [...]
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RH Reality Check by Jodi Jacobson, Editor in Chief, RH Reality Check
Rallies were held in Texas yesterday on the eve of the elimination of funding to the Women’s Health Program through the state, and subsequently to all Planned Parenthood clinics because… well, because the far right apparently doesn’t like women to have health care.
So 130,000 more women in Texas will be without health care tomorrow, a state in which access to primary reproductive health care has already been made scarce since the legislature cut funds dramatically last year as well. The cuts will take place because Governor Perry is refusing federal funding that otherwise would go to these clinics. Perry, and other opponents of women’s health care in Texas, claim there are “lots of alternatives” to the clinics now providing low-income women–mothers, students, employees–with health services, but as Andrea Grimes reported for us last year, those alternatives just don’t exist.
And as Grimes reported, the 2011 state family planning cuts left 180,000 women without access to contraception and reproductive health services like pap smears and breast cancer screenings.
“The Women’s Health Program serves an additional 130,000 women, bringing the total number of women without access to basic reproductive health care to 310,000,” writes Grimes. “Some estimates put the number closer to 400,000. The Texas Legislative Budget Board has estimated that this will result in up to 21,000 additional births in the state–children born to families who are already in need of government assistance and who would otherwise have sought to avoid an unintended and unwanted pregnancy.
But the anger at these cuts in Texas and across the country is building and even women on the right are fed up. Today, according to the Austin Chronicle, GOP legislative aide, Allison Catalano, who began working for Texas state legislator Myra Crownover last summer, resigned her post, citing Crownover’s support for the cuts to women’s health funding.
In a letter to Crownover, Catalano wrote that she decided to resign her position because of “recent decisions made by you, Representative Crownover, along with other legislators” related to the draconian cuts to the women’s health budget.
According to the Chronicle, in 2010, Planned Parenthood clinics, which make up only 2 percent of all WHP-funded clinics across the state, served 46 percent of the roughly 183,000 program enrollees.
Although the program had always been designed to exclude abortion providers from participation, lawmakers in 2011 directed the Health and Human Services Commission to come up with a new definition for affiliate that would define PP clinics that do not provide abortion care, and were already participating in the WHP, as affiliates of other PP clinics that do provide legally-protected abortion care, but that weren’t actually serving as WHP providers. The feds have said this tinkering in order to exclude an otherwise qualified provider is prohibited by federal law (Title XIX, to be specific).
Hundreds of supporters of women’s health funding rallied tonight in the Texas state capitol to protest the cuts.
“Whether tonight in Austin, or earlier this week in Midland, or in Fort Worth in the pouring rain, women’s health supporters throughout the state are saying loud and clear that Governor Rick Perry needs to stop playing politics with women’s health and women’s lives,” said Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and native Texan, at the rally. “Women don’t come to Planned Parenthood health centers to make a political statement, they come because they need health care, and it’s time for Governor Perry to stop taking health care away from Texas women.”
Carole Belver, Executive Director and Health Services Director of Community Action, a local Medicaid Women’s Health Program provider, reminded attendees that Governor Perry already slashed the family planning budget by more than two-thirds, which will take health care from another 160,000 women per year. These cuts also affect services including Pap tests, clinical breast exams, and birth control.
State Representative Dawnna Dukes, member of the Texas House Appropriations Committee, articulated the skepticism shared by Texas political commentators, editorial boards and government officials about Governor Perry’s fiscally questionable recent comments that he would reject the federal contribution to Medicaid Women’s Health Program – a contribution that covers 90 percent of the cost – and expend an additional million of state funds to create a new program in order to exclude the largest single provider of women’s health care.
“Governor Perry wants us to pay more for less health care. Governor Perry is slashing education — laying off 25,000 teachers, administrators and other school staff due to a ‘fiscal emergency’ – but suddenly says he can find ‘flexibility’ to score political points,” said Representative Dukes.
Julisa McCoy, a college student from the Rio Grande Valley who currently relies on Planned Parenthood and the Medicaid Women’s Health Program to access preventive health care, also spoke at the rally.
“In my county alone, four clinics were forced to shut down, several employees were laid off, and 15,000 women were displaced from their health care provider: Planned Parenthood,” said McCoy. “The Texas Medicaid Women’s Health Program plays a vital role in the health and livelihoods of women in this state, as does Planned Parenthood. Governor Perry’s ideology has no place in my health care, or the health care of more than 130,000 other women like me in this state.”
This is, perhaps, the answer sought by Beverly McPhail, a provider at the Houston Women’s Resource Center, who asks, “What will it take for Texas women to rise up?”
Read the full story as published @ RH Reality Check.
Related: Don’t LET Them Mess With the Women of Texas: It’s Time to Rise Up!!
Rep. Mike Stewart
“Veterans’ healthcare is the moral responsibility of the American people. But under Mitt Romney’s disastrous proposal, America’s veterans, who have risked their lives to protect our country, would be left to fend for themselves on the open insurance market.
“Tennesseans believe in honoring our commitments—especially to our veterans. That means ensuring proper treatment and care for all our former service men and women—a commitment that every American president has honored since the VA Department was founded in 1930.
“A voucher is a coupon, not a commitment. These brave men and women volunteered to put on the uniform and fight for our country. They shouldn’t have to fight a privatized system for their healthcare the rest of their lives.
“Tennessee veterans deserve better. Unsurprisingly, this is the same Mitt Romney who wants to turn Medicare into a voucher program, who wants to let homeowners hit rock bottom, and who made a fortune breaking up American companies and shipping jobs overseas.”
Latino voters support the Affordable Health Care Act, but do not support the mandate to purchase coverage, according to a poll released Thursday.
Conducted by ImpreMedia/Latino Decisions (IM-LD) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico, the poll reveals “that 50% of Latino voters support the Affordable Health Care Act and only 29% support its repeal,” adding that “59% of these voters are not well disposed toward one of the law’s regulations, which makes it mandatory for them to purchase insurance if they do not have coverage. They are against it.”
Poll results also indicate that:
The Latino Decisions poll adds that 17 percent of “Latino voters do not have insurance coverage,” while over 30 percent of “Latinos in general” do not have health insurance.
Latino workers and families in the U.S. are among the largest beneficiaries of federally funded health insurance.
A report released by the National Council of La Raza and Families USA released in August indicates that “Medicaid and its sister program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), buffer millions of Latinos and other vulnerable Americans from uninsurance.” The report shows that between 2007 and 2009 almost 3.8 million Hispanics living in Florida received medical insurance under federally funded Medicaid and/or the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, said that Latinos are two times more likely to be uninsured than non-Hispanic whites, adding that Medicaid covers at least half of Hispanic children across the country, providing the preventative care they need. The report explains that without Medicaid the uninsured rate for Latinos would climb to 32 percent.
A report issued by the Kaiser Family Foundation (.pdf) in June 2010 states that “no major health program or issue can be considered today outside the context of the nation’s new health care reform law.”
The Kaiser report adds that under the Affordable Care Act, “access to affordable health coverage will be improved through a significant expansion of the Medicaid program, the creation of new health insurance exchanges, and reforms of the private health insurance market. The major expansion of Medicaid and health reform’s reliance on the program as the foundation for coverage of low- income people give Medicaid both a much larger and a distinctively national coverage role going forward.”
The Families USA/La Raza report adds that Latinos would be major beneficiaries of this Medicaid expansion.
Advocates celebrate, but critics warn: A few details—like, er, funding—have yet to be worked out.
Mon May. 30, 2011 3:15 AM PDT
As Gov. Peter Shumlin took his spot on the granite steps of the Vermont State House, a row of people fanned out behind him wearing bright red t-shirts proclaiming, “Health care is a human right.” The slogan sounded noble, and wildly unrealistic. Until the governor spoke
“We gather here today to launch the first single payer health care system in America,” began Shumlin, a Democrat who has been governor barely four months. “To do in Vermont what has taken too long: have a health care system, the best in the world, that treats health care as a right, and not a privilege.”
Moments later, the governor made history, signing a law that sets Vermont on a course to provide health care for all of its 620,000 citizens through a European-style single payer system called Green Mountain Care. Key components include containing costs by setting reimbursement rates for health care providers and streamlining administration into a single, state-managed system. To move to single-payer, the state will need a waiver from the federal government, which under the federal health care reform law would become available by 2017; Vermont is asking the administration to let it get there even faster, by 2014.
The push for single payer system in Vermont was built slowly and methodically over the last decade, but has moved with remarkable speed since Shumlin took office in January. A few weeks after the new governor’s inauguration, the Democratic-controlled Legislature convened a rare joint session to hear from Dr. William Hsiao, a Harvard economist who has been involved in designing health care systems in seven countries. Last year, the legislature commissioned Hsiao to analyze the costs and benefits of various health care options, ranging from single payer to a fully privately managed system. The soft-spoken economist told a packed state House that a single payer plan would be about 25 percent cheaper for consumers, businesses, and the government than the current system of private health insurance, saving about 0 million in just the first year.
The data emboldened Shumlin, the legislature, and the single-payer advocates who had organized throughout the past decade, even as Shumlin’s Republican predecessor dismissed their ideas. Last fall, Shumlin had campaigned on twin themes of job creation and health care reform, and he often cited his experience as the owner of a successful travel business. (“I know firsthand that the biggest obstacle to job growth is the 10, 20, 30 percent increases in insurance premiums.”) He slammed the current “unsustainable system that will … bankrupt us.”
Single payer advocates have been a constant and visible presence around the state. The independent Vermont Workers’ Center launched its “health care is a human right” campaign in 2008—inspired, said health care organizer James Haslam, by the desperate calls the Center was receiving on its workers’ hotline. “It was becoming more of a health care hotline,” he said. The group’s members went door to door, conducted numerous forums for legislators and organized health care rallies that drew thousands.
Health care providers also spoke up. Dr. Deb Richter, a family physician, moved to Vermont in 1999 from upstate New York, where she despaired at seeing her patients getting sicker and even dying as a result of problems with health insurance. As chair of Vermont Health Care for All, she gave 500 talks around the state, and helped bring along many reluctant health care providers. Richter was beaming when I saw her in the State House lobby last week. “I feel ecstatic,” she told me. “It’s like giving birth.”
Shumlin, a wiry, hyper-energetic lawmaker who often insists on shaking every hand in the crowd, staked his gubernatorial candidacy on single payer. It was a bold and risky move. The former president of the Vermont Senate, he was narrowly elected governor last fall after winning a five-way Democratic primary by some 200 votes, and defeating a popular Republican Lieutenant Governor by just 2 percent. Shumlin pointedly ignored the national Democratic strategy of tacking to the center, and instead championed progressive issues, from abortion rights to closing the state’s lone nuclear plant, to health care reform. I asked him why he’d hitched his star to single payer.
“It’s first of all a huge jobs creator, secondly we can’t sustain the current system – we are spending money faster than we are able to earn it,” he told me before heading outside to sign the bill. “So we think it’s an economic development issue as well as a human right.” But when I asked whether Vermont might a national model, the governor sounded a humble note. Major questions – such as how the program will be funded—have yet to be worked out. “You know, we are launching an ambitious effort here,” he said. “We want it in place by 2014. But I don’t think we should ask anyone to follow us until we figure it out. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Opponents have focused on the unknowns in the reform effort. Not a single Republican in the House, and only one Republican in the Senate, supported the bill. Republican Rep. Patti Komline, assistant state House minority leader, told me, “When people ask questions like how much is it going to cost and who’s gonna pay for it – they say, ‘Well this bill is more fact finding and information gathering.’ Which doesn’t make it very historic.”
Physicians for a National Health Program has also been ambivalent about the bill, saying Vermont’s law “is much more modest in its actual reach than a single-payer plan would be.” Richter, a past president of the organization, responded, “You have to think positive and continue to take action to try to get to next level and the next step. Some of the criticisms are over details that haven’t yet been worked out.”
Organized opposition to Vermont’s health reform was relatively muted in the last few months, and was mainly led by insurance agents. But advocates are bracing for an influx of national money and media. “There are definitely people who want to see this fail. We cannot let that happen,” said House Speaker Shap Smith. “We need to work together to show the way for the entire country.”
Shumlin’s early success on health care has caught the attention of. In April, Congressional Democrats asked Shumlin to appear opposite Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker before a Congressional committee. In a rebuke to Walker, Shumlin talked about his approach to Vermont’s fiscal challenges. “I don’t start with collective bargaining, and I don’t start with my public pensions. I start with the true costs. In Vermont—and this is true of most of the states of the country—health care is my biggest rising cost.”
On this muggy late-May day, Shumlin reveled in the success of his signature effort. He walked over to shake hands with a group of University of Vermont medical students, conspicuous in their white lab coats. Therese Ray, a first year medical student from Denver, told me that as a result of single payer, “I will absolutely stay in Vermont.” Another med student, Larry Bodden from New Orleans, said he grew up in an uninsured household. “My family had a deep seated fear of having to go to the doctor because we didn’t have insurance. I look forward to Vermonters not having that fear.”
Gov. Shumlin suddenly called for the several hundred people who had gathered to come closer as he signed the bill. “Everybody in,” he shouted.
“Nobody out!” came the reflexive reply, a call and response version of a slogan of the grassroots single-payer campaign. Shumlin chuckled, then made the single-payer bill the law of the Green Mountain State.
David Goodman is a contributing writer for Mother Jones and coauthor of Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back. For more of his stories, click here.
NASHVILLE – Tennessee Democratic Party Chairman Chip Forrester said Stephen Fincher lied to voters by saying that he would keep his private health insurance so taxpayers wouldn’t have to pay for his health care.
“It has only taken one month in Washington for Stephen Fincher to break his most personal campaign promise,” said Forrester. “Fincher stood before the people of the 8th District and repeatedly vowed he would not accept taxpayer-funded health care. He was very specific in saying he would keep his Farm Bureau policy.”
Forrester released a link to video of Fincher making the promise at a candidate forum in Dyersburg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjqCAvWOToc
Earlier this week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released the names of 15 Republicans who did not accept their government health care while they were attempting to repeal health care reform. Jesse Ferguson of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee noted that Fincher was not among them.
“It didn’t take long for Representative Stephen Fincher to go Washington. Representative Fincher is accepting government funded health care, despite continuing the push to repeal the health reform benefits for middle income families,” said Ferguson. “Representative Stephen Fincher apparently believes that repealing health insurance reform and putting insurance companies back in charge of our health care may be good for his constituents, but it’s not good for his very own family. Representative Fincher is the worst kind of hypocrite – one who looks out for themselves instead of their constituents.”
In the video, Fincher says, “I’m gonna keep my same health insurance that I got right now with Farm Bureau. It’s not your responsibility to pay it.”
“Representative Fincher was obviously willing to say anything to be elected,” Forrester said. “The people of the 8th Congressional District deserve better than a public official willing to blatantly lie in order get their vote.”
Slate columnists and self-described “liberal Republican” (read: former Republican) Will Saletan wrote that Speaker Nancy Pelosi won and the Republicans lost the midterm elections. He makes a pretty good case, too.
Majorities come and go. Health care reform is here to stay. As Saletan puts it, “a party that loses a legislative fight against a middle-class health care entitlement never restores the old order … In 30 years, Republicans will be accusing Democrats of defunding Obamacare.”
The full quote:
A party that loses a House seat can win it back two years later, as Republicans just proved. But a party that loses a legislative fight against a middle-class health care entitlement never restores the old order. Pretty soon, Republicans will be claiming the program as their own. Indeed, one of their favorite arguments against this year’s health care bill was that it would cut funding for Medicare. Now they’re pledging to rescind those cuts. In 30 years, they’ll be accusing Democrats of defunding Obamacare.
More:
Politicians have tried and failed for decades to enact universal health care. This time, they succeeded. In 2008, Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress, and by the thinnest of margins, they rammed a bill through. They weren’t going to get another opportunity for a very long time. It cost them their majority, and it was worth it.
And that’s not counting financial regulation, economic stimulus, college lending reform, and all the other bills that became law under Pelosi. So spare me the tears and gloating about her so-called failure. If John Boehner is speaker of the House for the next 20 years, he’ll be lucky to match her achievements.
Will Republicans revisit health care? Sure. Will they enact some changes to the program? Yes, and Democrats will help them. Every program needs revisions. Republicans will get other things, too: business tax breaks, education reform, more nuclear power, and a crackdown on earmarks. These are issues on which both parties can agree. Which is why, if you’re a Democrat, you deal with them after you’ve lost your majority — not before.
7/31/09 – by Hugh Curran
There is much debate about health care yet little consideration for the ethical implications, especially the appropriateness of profit motives in the health care industry.
Americans do not seek to make a profit from education (kindergarten to grade 12), fire or police departments, yet people seriously listen to “industry” lobbyists who believe this to be a right in health care.
The philosopher Martin Buber defined “evil” as resulting from “indecision.” Where health care is involved there is a good deal of indecision, but this indecision is largely the result of disinformation by those who profit from health care.
If we begin with the understanding that the health of the whole country contributes to the health of each of us, we can ask if private interests, wishing to maximize profit, should be the arbiters of the public good.
They are investor-owned businesses that design health care systems that benefit their investors. From recent polls we know that two-thirds of the public would prefer a system with a public option.
More than 60 percent of physicians wish for such a system.
Unlike the propaganda of corporate representatives, a public option in health care would provide free choice of physicians for the patient.
Lobbyists shamelessly portray the Canadian system in a negative light although I have yet to meet a Canadian who would be willing to adopt the American model. In fact, no country that has a public option would change to the American model for the simple reason that they know that a health care system based on profits would deny insurance to those who are most in need.
According to the World Health Organization, the U.S. ranks low in two of three main categories associated with health care: preventive care and cost of care. It is true that in a couple of categories the U.S. excels, such as surgery and medical technology, but there are many other criteria for good health, especially in the area of preventive medicine.
In France, whose general health care system is highly regarded throughout the world, providers satisfy the three categories: They provide easier access to medical facilities; life spans are longer; there is lower child mortality, and there is guaranteed health care from cradle to grave financed through tax revenues. The government’s role is to make sure that the whole population has access to care. It protects patients’ rights, helps to work out policy and is the responsible party where health safety is concerned.
Despite this, it is not a single payer.
America now pays out 17 percent of its gross national product on health while France, Canada and England pay less than 10 percent. The trillion-dollar additional cost that has been under discussion in Congress is based on a 10-year cycle that amounts to 0 billion per year.
Compared to the trillion-dollar bailout of banking interests on Wall Street and the trillion-dollar war in Iraq and the continuing hemorrhaging of the auto industry, this is a reasonable amount.
The real reason there are such vehement arguments over public options versus private plans does not involve which is superior but which approach has the most to lose. Large corporations, whether HMOs or pharmaceuticals, are intent on creating indecision and doubt in the minds of many Americans concerning universal health care. Most medical professionals, including the 3 million-member American Nursing Association and the American Medical Association, have endorsed health care plans with public options.
But with all the lobbying taking place by corporate interests there is a real danger that the public option will be removed. This would be a major setback for both working and unemployed Americans. At this moment 14,000 people per day are losing their health care because of the current downturn in the economy.
Democracy cannot long survive if the gaps between rich and poor continue to increase and continue shifting us toward a small wealthy minority and a disappearing middle class. Health care is the largest cause of bankruptcy among the elderly. It bleeds and depletes the resources of families even when one person suffers a serious accident or illness.
Although we pay twice the amount per capita as do other developed countries, the results are that we are less healthy. Let us support a public option based on the common good.
Hugh Curran of Surry is an adjunct professor in peace studies at the University of Maine. He previously was the director of a Down East homeless shelter.
Rachel Maddow Tells You What And Why…
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