House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the first time yesterday suggested she may be backing off her support of the public option. According to CNN, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “said they would support any provision that increases competition and accessibility for health insurance – whether or not it is the public option favored by most Democrats.” When “asked if inclusion of a public option was a non-negotiable demand – as her previous statements had indicated Pelosi ruled out any non-negotiable positions,” according to CNN.
This announcement came just hours before Steve Elmendorf, a registered UnitedHealth lobbyist and the head of UnitedHealth’s lobbying firm Elmendorf Strategies, blasted this email invitation throughout Washington, D.C. I just happened to get my hands on a copy of the invitation from a source – check out this OpenLeft exclusive:
The President did a great job last night making the case to the nation of the need for health care reform. He made the moral case, and every metric indicates that people were overwhelmingly moved to support his plan. That’s the good news for the White House.
Pittsburgh, PA. More than seventy labor organizations have submitted resolutions to the AFL-CIO Convention calling for the labor federation to endorse HR 676, single payer healthcare legislation introduced by Congressman John Conyers (D-MI).
Resolutions were submitted by five national and international unions including the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), the International Alliance of Theatrical & Stage Employees (IATSE), the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), California School Employees Association (CSEA), and the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers (IFPTE).
(note: Progressive Democrats of America continues to fight for national healthcare proposed in HR 676 as the only fair and affordable solution to the nation’s healthcare crisis.)
Congressman Raúl M. Grijalva released the following statement this evening, concerning the President’s address to Congress on health care reform:
“I am pleased that President Obama made the right choice to recognize the importance of a public option as part of the health care reform legislation.
“A public option is the most effective way to achieve our goals of controlling costs, eliminating abuses of patients by insurance company abuses, and providing quality health care to all.
“However, the President needs to be more direct on what the public option means and what it will do for the American people.
Noting that “it has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for healthcare reform,” the president told skeptical legislators from both sides of the political aisle. “I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”
That was one of several takeaway lines of the night.
Another, delivered to members of the House and Senate who have just returned to Washington after an August of brutal town hall meetings, was: “The time for bickering has passed. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action. Now is the time when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together… Now is the time to deliver on healthcare.”
Let’s start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.
The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.
The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.
Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.
Seats are available on the SOAR (Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees) bus to the Labor Day Parade in Pittsburgh. There is no charge.
The bus will leave from Maratta Road and Washington Rd. (behind the Fez) at 7:30 am on Monday September 7. Parking is available. The bus will drop people off at the staging area.
After the parade, the USW will provide a snack at the USW building and the bus will leave from the USW building around 2:30pm.
The Pittsburgh Labor Day parade is one of the largest in the USA. Join us to demonstrate for jobs, healthcare, and the rights of workers to organize.
Reno, Nevada. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the twenty-second international union to endorse HR 676, single payer healthcare legislation introduced by Congressman John Conyers (D-MI).
On August 27th the 38th AFGE National Convention passed Resolution #4003, “Endorsing Universal Health Care H.R. 676.” The resolution was submitted by Local 2157 which represents workers at the Portland, Oregon, Veterans Administration Medical Center. AFGE represents 600,000 federal and District of Columbia workers in a wide variety of agencies, including Social Security, the Veterans Administration, and the Bureau of Prisons.
Betsy Zucker, RN, FNP, and a convention delegate from Local 2157, said after the vote: “AFGE members from around the country overwhelmingly endorsed H.R. 676, Single Payer Health Care, on August 27. Federal workers understand that Medicare-for-All will save money, provide health care to all, and start addressing health care as a human right, not a commodity to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. AFGE supports health care for people, not for profits!”
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 