You may think universal single-payer health insurance is an item whose time has finally come. Opening nationally next weekend, Michael Moore’s SiCKO, the documentary about our outrageous, expensive, irrational anarchic crazy-quilt patch work of health insurance has been the subject of substantial discussion and buzz everywhere. 43.6 Million Americans have no health insurance at all. Perhaps as many as 100 million more have insurance so porous that any illness will clean them out completely. Corporations and public employers which provide health coverage are being drained of cash by the costs of coverage.

Kevin Stack’s NY Times story features a photo of Moore with Congressional supporters of HR 676, the Medicare for all, universal single payer bill. (Where is your Congress Member? Mine, Nydia Velazquez, whom I like, refuses to favor single payer for no reason I understand.) Amy Goodman’s SiCKO article is here. If you need much more Moore visit his website, also do check out his You Tube 640,000+ views as I type. (In addition to Moore, of course, Paul Krugman and Robin Wells have been beating the drum up hill and down dale for single payer universal health care. See, for example, their excellent New York Review of Books essay from March, 2006 here )For a point-by-point back up for Moore see the 6-22-07 Progress Report from the Center for American Progress.

Last Wednesday, The Century Foundation, a reasonable bastion of liberal thought on, among other places, New York’s upper East Side, joined the fray. The occasion was a book talk about Arnold S. Relman’s book A Second Opinion Relman, a former Editor-In-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine has written a clarion call – addressed mostly, it seems to me – to the medical community for, universal single payer health insurance. Relman has lived his life in the elite of the medical establishment and his book may engage a portion of the health care community which, in past struggles for national health insurance, was hostile or stood on the side lines. If you want a very clear discussion about what’s wrong with health care today and how to fix it, read Relman’s book.

The Relman book talk featured a star-studded panel of discussants an audience mostly composed of grizzled veterans of 1992-94 health care struggle which brought victory for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, Newt Gingrich, Harry & Louise (12 years of GOP majorities in Congress) and defeat for the Clintons and the rest of us (Yes, I'm more grizzled on this issue than many). My favorite discussant, Jo Ivy Bufford, MD, the new President of the New York Academy of Medicine was a Clinton health official and a president of NYC’s Health & Hospitals Corporation. Not only was she extremely well prepared and thoughtful, she was ready to bar claims too strong to be true for health care reform: “Less than 10% of avoidable deaths,” she explained, for example, “are attributable to lack of access to health care, while 50% are attributable to risky behavior – the top three being smoking, poor diet and lack of exercise.” Thus warned against overstatement, she took herself, us (as health care advocates) and electeds to task for running from Harry, Louise and the GOP. The key issue to take away from Relman and the rest is this: How to may for national health insurance is a red herring. We are already paying more for our current system of enriching corporations than a universal single payer health insurance system will cost.

That evening, I visited St. Augustine’s Church, 333 Madison Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (Have you ever been there? If you like old (1828), pretty, well build churches, click on their website for some photos and then go visit,) where 30 of so people who actually need health care coverage were planning to take action. Brought together by Latinos for National Health Insurance and Health Care Now So far as I could tell, they were all constituents of my Congress Member. Perhaps Nydia will hear from them. Will your Congress Member hear from you?

Below is my note to Kate Davis Gilman, Nydia Press Person:

Does my Congress Member, Nydia Velazquez, favor or oppose HR 676. When, in February, with other move on members from her district, I asked, Nydia stated she would not sign on as a co-sponsor because she had other health care proposals in mind. She further said that those proposals would be discussed at her small business committee in April. I can understand that it slipped off of her agenda to keep me up on it but --

1) What health care hearing did she hold in April?

2) What bill if any to cover the uninsured has she introduced?

3) What health insurance plan, if any, does she have to take leadership on this issue which -- was ranked as an urgent on by the thousands of moveon members who live in her district?

I was, as an HR 676 supporter, disappointed to note her absence from the photo with Michael Moore in Sat. NY Times.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | | | | |