82% of Americans think our health care system needs a “major overhaul.” On top of that, over 90% of Americans [pdf] think the next President and Congress should improve the quality and affordability of health care.
With the worsening economy continuing to be the top issue for most Americans, this hope for change isn’t hard to understand. American health care spending is projected to reach a full 1/5th of our GDP by 2015, which means by then, we’ll be spending twenty cents of every dollar we make on health care. Health care premiums have risen 86% between 2000 and 2006 while wages only rose 20%, putting the strain on working families. Health care costs continue to be the #1 cause of bankruptcy in America.
Americans are paying $217 million for health care per hour. Meanwhile, insurance industry profits have risen 1,000% in the past five years.
According the to Government Accountability Office, health care reform is necessary to keep our country on the right track:
“Rapidly rising health care costs are not simply a federal budget problem,” the GAO report says. “Growth in health-related spending is the primary driver of the fiscal challenges facing state and local governments as well. Unsustainable growth in health care spending also threatens to erode the ability of employers to provide coverage to their workers and undercuts their ability to compete in a global marketplace.”
Quite simply, with rising health care costs (including $50 billion per year to pay for insurance industry advertising) being born out by working families and American businesses, health care is a top economic concern. To keep American workers at their best, and to keep American business competitive in the world, something has to change.
Nancy Pelosi has recently declared health care expansion to be #2 on her list of legislative priorities, right after ending the Iraq war. In the past month, tens of thousands of Americans have told us they want quality, affordable health care for all. Now it’s time to ask Congress.
So, Congress, which side are you on? Are you with us for quality, affordable health care for all? Or are you with the insurance companies, working to preserve our broken system?
We’ve set up a quick and easy way for you to contact your Members of Congress and ask them if they support our vision for health care reform. Just click here and enter in your phone number and address. Choose the elected official you want to talk to and in a few moments, we’ll call your phone and connect you automatically.
Over the next few weeks, we want to make 100,000 calls to Congress, asking every Member which side they are on. We need your help to do it, so please click here to call!
Once your done with your call, tell us what happened so we can keep track of where Congress stands. As of today, we’re proud to announce Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), are with us. The rest, so far, are unknown. You can see the full list here.
Health care is a priority for the American people. It’s a priority for Nancy Pelosi. It’s up to us to make sure it’s a priority for Congress as well. Please take a moment, call your Members of Congress, and ask them which side they are on.
Oh, and if you have a blog or website, you can help spread the word about this campaign by embedding the widget you see above on your site. Just copy and paste the code below:
This telephone website thing is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen. I love it.
It’s really, really difficult for the cowards in the D.C. bubble to pretend that 300 million of us out here in the real country, are not paying attention, and that we’re not angry as hell at what conservatism has done to America — when we jam their phone lines!
Brilliant. It’s easy for them to ignore our emails. Just as easy as it’s easy to ignore a stack of petitions. But thousands of phone calls to these lemmings is a beautiful and rude awakening.
Bravo to everyone involved.
Thanks J, we’re proud of the tool as well.
But of course, tools are only tools. Glad you called and gave your Members a piece of your mind. It’s going to take a lot of us to move mountains here.
There has been a vigorous debate within the healthcare movement over the timing and tactics of our shared goal–which is a national healthcare plan offering universal coverage.
That debate in and of itself is a great moment; we’ve left behind the question as to whether or not to our society needs to guarantee healthcare, now we’re just wondering how to get there.
But how to get there? Some–like our friends at HCAN–support the creation of a public buy-in to Medicare, in the hopes that it will overcome the nefarious insurance companies and indirectly usher in the single-payer reforms that are working elsewhere.
Others–such as the California Nurses Association, Progressive Democrats and most of the grassroots reformers within the labor movement and within the healthcare reform movement, along 91 members of Congress–endorse John Conyers’ HR 676, which explicitly and swiftly moves the nation along to single-payer reforms.
It’s really a question of how best to rein in insurance companies: set up a competitor, or take them on head-on.
If you are a supporter of John Conyers’ HR 676, and of HCAN, feel free on your call to demand that your Congressperson endorse HR 676 and supports guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model, similar to the European systems.
[http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/publications_show.htm?doc_id=692682 The Commonwealth Fund just release a study finding that 101,000 Americans die prematurely every year because our system doesn't hit the benchmarks that the European systems do.]
In their names, it’s time for healthcare change we can believe in!
There is a lot of misinformation out there concerning HCAN and the single payer movement.
HCAN has no problem with single payer. A properly designed single payer plan fits within our principles. More importantly, we will not work against the single payer movement. However, we do support other options.
We do not endorse HR 676, but we do not endorse any legislation at this point. Right now, we only support a set of principles that we believe apply to a lot of folks in this movement, supporters of HR 676 included. We want health care to be affordable. We want a guarantee of quality and access. We want it to be available to all. And we have a common enemy in the insurance industry.
As for our plan being a “public buy-in to Medicare,” again, we are supporting no specific plans at this point. We believe getting Congress to agree to our principles will set the stage for legislation in the fall.
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Things could start to happen really fast. It is absolutely essential that we keep open the lines of communication among all our fellow supporters of universal health care.
We are at the point where concrete proposals can move at any time. Barack has talked about removing pre-existing conditions limits. How does that fit into our plans? What about SCHIP? We cannot be divided as we were in the Clinton Plan.
All parties need to communicate. We must speak in unity. As a 30 year veteran of this struggle who has worked with all the networks at one time or another, I don’t want to be having this same conversation 15 years from now. For the record, this is exactly what I said during the bitter fight over the Clinton Plan 15 years ago. Think of all those who have died from lack of healthcare since. In their memory, we need to win big now!!!!! Jann Campbell Veteran of Healthcare Wars
Get the appropriate license. ,