Vermont House passes Single Payer Healthcare bill

By ThinkProgress

Last night, the Vermont House of Representatives debated and approved by a 92-49 a bill that would create a single payer system in the state. Shumlin praised the move as making Vermont the first state where health care will be a right and not a privilege:

“After hours of debate, the Vermont House of Representatives approved a bill that would create a single-payer health care system in Vermont. It passed 92-49. In a meeting right after the vote, the house speaker, the governor and others who worked on the bill called it a historic moment for Vermont.

“Become the first state in the country to make the first substantive step to deliver a health care system where health care will be a right and not a privilege,” said Gov. Peter Shumlin.”

CBO Director Says Obamacare Would Kill 800,000 Jobs

By Jeffrey H. Anderson
The Weekly Standard

Testifying on Thursday before the House Budget Committee, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Doug Elmendorf confirmed that Obamacare is expected to reduce the number of jobs in the labor market by an estimated 800,000. Here are excerpts from the exchange:

What if Everyone Had Medicare?

By Henry Abrons
San Francisco Chronicle

Replacing our dysfunctional patchwork of private health insurers with a single, streamlined system of financing, would save about $400 billion annually in unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy. That’s enough to cover all of those now uninsured and to provide every person in the United States with quality, comprehensive coverage, writes Abrons.

Obama Democrats vs Tea Party Republicans: Fake Fight over Fake Reform

By Bruce A. Dixon
Black Agenda Report

There are real fights and there are fake fights, engineered to distract attention away from the real deal. The shouting match between Obama’s Dems and the Tea party Repubs is one of those fake fights. The health care legislation passed by the Obama Democrats is incomparably worse than anything they could have passed right after the presidential election, and significantly worse than anything Democrats could have passed at midyear 2009. The president and his minions have delayed as long as possible to guarantee the worst, not the best bill for patients, and the best deal possible for Big Insurance, Big Pharma and Big Medicine.

Pro-single-payer doctors: Health bill leaves 23 million uninsured

A false promise of reform

By Physicians for a National Health Program

As much as we would like to join the celebration of the House’s passage of the health bill last night, in good conscience we cannot. We take no comfort in seeing aspirin dispensed for the treatment of cancer.

Instead of eliminating the root of the problem – the profit-driven, private health insurance industry – this costly new legislation will enrich and further entrench these firms. The bill would require millions of Americans to buy private insurers’ defective products, and turn over to them vast amounts of public money.

A Civilized Riot: A Movement for Health Care Justice

By Jeanine Molloff
TruthOut

Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Florida) has been waging his own war on corporate insurance forces determined to maintain the fiscal “slaver’s whip” by proposing a straightforward public option plan through the existing Medicare network. Rather than the 2,000-plus-page proposal endorsed by the president; Grayson’s bill is a robust … 4 pages.

In short, he proposes to extend Medicare benefits to anyone from birth to age 64 with a simple “buy-in. ”

Slaughter House Rules: How Democrats may ‘deem’ ObamaCare into law, without voting

New York Democrat Louise Slaughter chairs the House Rules Committee

Wall Street Journal Opinion

Nancy Pelosi: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” [Vote first, read later?]

The (Louise) Slaughter House Rule is a procedural ruse to let each House vote on a different version of a bill, resulting in some arbitrary hybrid, defeating one of Madison’s core checks and balances.

We’re not sure American schools teach civics any more, but once upon a time they taught that under the U.S. Constitution a bill had to pass both the House and Senate to become law. Until this week, that is, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi is moving to merely “deem” that the House has passed the Senate health-care bill and then send it to President Obama to sign anyway.

What’s behind mandatory private health insurance

By BrassCheck TV

Did you think it was strange that the weasels in Washington came up with MANDATORY private insurance as a solution to the health crisis?

I did. So I did some digging. Here’s a guy who was talking about mandatory insurance years ago and what’s really behind it. (6-min video)

Americans refuse to buy mandatory health insurance that supports corrupt conventional medicine

By Mike Adams

Even if Obama’s health care reform bill becomes law, mandating that all Americans buy health insurance policies for a failed system of “sick care”, I will refuse to comply. I’ve read the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, and nowhere in that document do I find that the federal government has the power to force consumers to purchase for-profit insurance products from private companies.

The very basis of the health care reform bill is, at its core, unconstitutional.

Joe Klein’s Fatuous Fantasy

By Michael Collins

Time Magazine’s Joe Klein is having an allergic reaction to free speech and public debate. The title of his latest column says it all:   The Left’s Idiocy on Health Reform. It’s an ex cathedra pronouncement from a made man at one of the nation’s oldest media properties.

What’s got Joe so worked up?

A Healthy Economy

By Robert C. Koehler

“This amendment starts from the premise that health care is a human right, and that every citizen, rich or poor, should have access to health care, just as every citizen has access to the fire department, the police or public schools.”

And for a moment last week the fog of jargon and compromise lifted on the Senate floor and a vision of what’s possible hovered over the Capitol. We could do this. We could build this kind of society, not just talk about it. We could begin moving beyond the stuck, scared place that keeps us at odds and fighting one another (and much of the world). We could return to the task of creating what economist Riane Eisler calls “the caring economy.”

AmeriKKKan HELLth KKKare

By John Ervin

Senators, Presidents, Money-Mongers ( and other “Health” Pimps ):~~

This is the most gerrymandered piece of legislative crap, as Joe Bageant said, “No health care debate….Mob negotiations to see which Mob will get the biggest chunk of change.”  You legislators that are supporting this HELLth KKKare Heist are as culpable as the Mobs that are running you.  
 

Pro-single-payer physicians call for defeat of Senate health bill

By Physicians for a National Health Program

Legislation ‘would bring more harm than good,’ group says

A national organization of 17,000 physicians who favor a single-payer health care system called on the U.S. Senate today to defeat the health care legislation presently before it and to immediately consider the adoption of an expanded and improved Medicare-for-All program.

Kill the Health Care Bill

By Betsy L. Angert

Kill the Bill or be killed by the Senate Health Care Reform Bill. That is the choice Americans face. Death looms large in the United States today.

The business of health care reform

ISR Editorial

MOST GREAT American fortunes were made by capitalists who used the power of government to gain advantages over competitors or to profit from public resources. For example, the Gilded Age plutocrats—the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Stewarts, the Goulds—built their railroad-based fortunes on the foundation of $100 million in federal and state grants and 200 million acres of federal land grants.

Demand NO Roll Call on HR 676 Single Payer in Current Hostile Congress

By John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich

Join us in suggesting to congressional leaders that this is not the right time to call the roll on HR 676, a single payer, not-for-profit, health care bill.

Freedom Rider: Health Care Deceit

By Margaret Kimberley

The health care fiasco has bared the cowardly underbelly of the Democratic Party, which is putty in the hands of President Obama and his co-conspirators in the insurance industry. The conclusion is inescapable: Barack Obama and the majority of the Democrats never had any intention of bringing reform to health care.

Failure by Design – the ‘Public’ Option

Triumph of the Money Party

Michael Collins

Do you know what the “public option” does or who it covers?  If you’ve had trouble finding out, it’s not your fault.  Reading corporate media coverage provides little or no clue.  It’s hardly ever defined.  There’s a very good reason for the lack of clarity and definition.  But first, a brief summary of the public debate that characterizes just about every public debate we have on critical issues.

If you think that the current version of the public option will provide a choice for a government administered health program, you’re right.  If you think that this option was designed for the general public, then you’re wrong.  It will apply to only some of the uninsured, possibly as few as six million citizens.  It’s a kind of public option.

This guy is still a criminal …

… even if it’s legal.

Blue Dog Democrat Mike Ross of Arkansas

No health coverage tied to 45,000 deaths a year

Kucinich Questions Health Insurance Execs. on Denied Claims