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The Kucinich Amendment !

Lobbyists are spending over a $ million a day to keep Americans from getting the health care we need and deserve by pressuring our senators and representatives to kill even what's called the "public option"-- the choice for what would be the equivalent of Medicare--out of the legislation.

Louisiana Congressman Boustany (R) has gone on news shows to say that he's working with Blue Dog Democrats in the House who are, as he euphemistically refer to them, "business friendly" to work on an alternative to a public option. The medical and insurance industry are terrified that the public will find out what they've been missing and denied all along, and once the public option is made available people will like it as much as the French do that they're pulling out all the stops to deceive the public and keep the greedy palms in Congress greased.

Obama's health care bill he'll be talking about in a public address this evening is deeply flawed. He has, as usual, pandered to the interests of Wall Street and big business, but the public option within the bill is at least a start, if it can survive. But better than that, Dennis Kucinich has written an amendment that was passed by the House Committee on Education and Labor (27-19) that provides for states to have the option to set up their own single-payer system. There will be a big effort to kill this amendment, and we have to make sure it survives intact.

Please listen and watch the audio and videos below, and pass it and other information on to your family, friends, and contacts, and ask them to contact their congressmen and senators to let them know that we expect the single-payer option and the Kucinich Amendment to be passed. We also need to contact our state legislators to get their support as well.

Here's the phone number of the Capitol Hill switchboard: 1-877-851-6437 (be patient, someone will eventually answer).

I've already called Senator Mary Landrieu's New Orleans and Washington offices. I asked if she had decided to represent her constituents or big business. The answer is of course that she represents her constituents, which I was easily able to refute once told she didn't support the public option. I explained in so many words that that meant that she's actually a fascist whore and isn't actually representing Louisianians at all. (Truth be told, there would be no French Quarter today had her father Mayor Moon Landrieu had his way and given urban renewalists what they wanted, which was to run the interstate highway along the river!) Everyone is but a major surgery or catastrophic illness away from losing everything they have. This is a human rights issue, and it's one we can finally win.

We owe it to ourselves, each other, and everyone else to win single-payer, universal health care.

If you're not in the U.S. and want to support us, you can write to Mary Landrieu and tell her she needs to show that she cares about Louisianians more than she cares about the special interests. You might also remind her that it would be nice if she tried to prevent children from being orphaned by not supporting the illegal wars and munitions (she's big on worldwide adoption).

Here's the tart's website message page. You might need to put in her Louisiana address in order for the message to be accepted (many only accept messages from their constituents. You could say you're occupying her New Orleans office.

Hale Boggs Federal Building

500 Poydras Street

Room 1005

New Orleans, LA 70130

http://landrieu.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm

http://www.truthdig.com/podcast/item/20090717_dennis_goliath_podcast/

Posted on Jul 17, 2009

AP / Charlie Neibergall

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, here addressing the 2008 Democratic National Convention, has made a career of taking on big foes.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich talks about winning a big victory for health care reform, grilling Hank Paulson over the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch merger, and the battle against crony capitalism.

Listen!

http://www.truthdig.com/podcast/item/20090717_dennis_goliath_podcast/

How Dennis Kucinich May Save the Health Reform Battle

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on July 17, 2009, Printed on July 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/141404/

Editor's note: this originally appeared on AlterNet's blog, PEEK.

No time today for a lengthy analysis of the Tri-Committee health bill. My quick-and-dirty take is this. Those who think the bill is a wonderful progressive victory with a robust public option are wrong, and, on the flip side, the charge that it's a "bailout for the insurance industry" is totally divorced from what the bill would actually do if passed.

It is the most progressive, comprehensive and significant health care legislation to come down the pike since Medicare was passed in 1965. If it were enacted as written, it'd go a long way to solving a lot of our problems (but by no means all) and wouldn't break the bank in the process.

But it also fails some of the basic criteria that most progressives have long said is a red-line that can't be crossed. First and foremost, it doesn't have a public option that can compete with private insurers and result in significant cost savings.

It has a public plan in which -- as far as the statute goes (it can be expanded in 2015 but there's no mandate to do so) -- only 9-10 million people will be eligible to enroll by 2019. Similarly, the publicly-administered exchanges are projected to cover about 30 million by that year. (These relatively small insurance pools will be able to bargain in concert with Medicare to some degree, so their power will be magnified, but still...)

That greatly limits the potential for cost containment. What it does is bend the curve of projected cost growth downwards, and cover about 2/3 of the uninsured. But we'll still have 3-6 % of the population uninsured and being treated at the ER. And while bending the upward curve down a few notches is a very good thing, it doesn't get us where we want to go -- not when you consider that we pay ~~$2000~~ upwards of $4,000 more for every American than the OECD average each and every year.

But it's more than just the costs or the people left out. Crucially important is that the public plan won't be big or effective enough to serve as a living example of the kind of large-pool public exchange models federal employees now enjoy. And that means it won't be a back-door to a European-style health care system. This is really key. As I wrote last week about the divide between single-payer advocates and those pushing a public insurance option:

The divide that does exist in progressive circles is tactical, not ideological. Most of those pushing the public option would, if they had their druthers, enact a single-payer system. But they recognize that the two commercial enterprises that have spent the most on political lobbying in recent years are the "disease care" and insurance industries.

Like single-payer advocates, they believe that a large insurance pool with extensive government regulation and some subsidies afford the greatest potential for (near) universality and cost containment.

And they think that given the choice -- given a demonstration that this approach works better than having a fragmented system of private insurers -- most people will eventually opt into the public plan, and we'll end up achieving something approaching a single-payer system -- although an American-style variation -- through the back door.

Obviously, a public insurance plan for which 10 million are eligible to enroll isn't going to serve as an example of the efficiency that comes with a single-payer type system. And the fact that they designed a pretty good public option for which most of the public will be ineligible to enroll (and that wouldn't have as much potential for cost savings as one would hope) was enough to make me consider opposing it. Howard Dean told me recently that he thought a bill without a robust public option wasn't worth passing, and I agree.

And that's where Kucinich, a supporter of single-payer, comes in. He's trying to save the whole promise of this project.

On Friday, an amendment he authored was added to the House bill that allows states to create their own single-payer systems instead of adopting the federally-run exchange system. The original bill allowed states only to enact their own exchange system -- it was a nod to federalism -- with the proviso that if a state (think a deep red one in the South) refused to adopt the plan, the feds could step in and set it up.

The Kucinich amendment is really key. If it were to survive the legislative sausage-making and be enacted into law, the we might expect a progressive state to take advantage of the opportunity and enact a single-payer system in the coming years. And, if those of us who have been pushing such an arrangement are correct, the result will be greater access and better outcomes at a lower price tag for that state's residents.

And then we can move from an often ill-informed argument over the Canadian or British systems to a debate in which we can hold up a model in which millions of real Americans see very tangible benefits from an actual single-payer system in action.

Thanks, Dennis! Now let's see what comes out of the Senate.

Note: I'll have more next week on the good, the bad and the ugly in the new health care bill.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

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