[NRSKarenRN]

Poll: Most support U.S. guarantee of healthcare
A majority of Americans say the federal government should guarantee health insurance to every American, especially children, and are willing to pay higher taxes to do it, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
New York Times, Mar. 2, 2007

[cincinnatilpn]

do you really believe the "government stays out of your life", as you say is your right? Think about seat belt laws, smoking bans, trans fat bans... All for our greater good, I guess, but are we really "free" any more? I say no. So why not NHS. This would afford everyone access to health care, not just the people who can afford it. We have a lot of people, especially children that go without necessary healthcare due to lack of funds. Anyone who says otherwise might as well call themself Ostrich!
Just my opinion!

[HM2Viking]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070312/rosen
Call it the care crisis.
For four decades, American women have entered the paid workforce--on men's terms, not their own--yet we have done precious little as a society to restructure the workplace or family life. The consequence of this "stalled revolution," a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, is a profound "care deficit." A broken healthcare system, which has left 47 million Americans without health coverage, means this care crisis is often a matter of life and death. Today the care crisis has replaced the feminine mystique as women's "problem that has no name." It is the elephant in the room--at home, at work and in national politics--gigantic but ignored.
Three decades after Congress passed comprehensive childcare legislation in 1971--Nixon vetoed it--childcare has simply dropped off the national agenda.
...
The fact is, market fundamentalism--the irrational belief that markets solve all problems--has succeeded in dismantling federal regulations and services but has failed to answer the question, Who will care for America's children and elderly?
...
As a result, this country's family policies lag far behind those of the rest of the world. A just-released study by researchers at Harvard and McGill found that of 173 countries studied, 168 guarantee paid maternal leave--with the United States joining Lesotho and Swaziland among the laggards. At least 145 countries mandate paid sick days for short- or long-term illnesses--but not the United States. One hundred thirty-four countries legislate a maximum length for the workweek; not us.
...
Universal health care is part of the family friendly organizational transformation of society that progressives are seeking.....

[HM2Viking]

http://newdemocracyproject.org/docUp...tion%20Act.pdf
When the head of ExxonMobil earned $368 million in a year, or more per hour than his workers earned per year—the democracy promise goes unfulfilled. Indeed, the rich today have become the super-rich and the middle-class families feel as if they’re running up a down escalator. Data and trends on economic inequality are clear:
Real median income for men has fallen for five straight years. In 1980, the wealthiest five percent of households had 16.5 percent of all income; in 1990 it was 18.5 percent; in 2000, 22.2 percent.

Between 2000-2006, labor productivity grew by 18 percent, but inflation-adjusted weekly wages rose only one percent.
More than 2000 companies have illegally backdated stock options to boost executive pay packages.
The IRS is eliminating the jobs of almost half its lawyers who audit the tax returns of the wealthiest Americans.
Those with annual incomes of over a million dollars got an $85,000 annual tax rebate because of the Bush tax cuts, while people earning $50,000 a year received
a couple hundred bucks.
The number of poor has increased from 31 million to 37 million since 2000; the number of those without health insurance rose from 41 million to 47 million.

A Nobel-award winning economist called all this “a form of looting.”

The Calcutta-ization of the
American economy is not the result of some “unseen hand” based on market forces—comparable Western economies like Canada, Great Britain and Germany do not see such disparities—but the
result of the purposeful policies, not the unseen hand. Not since the Gilded Age when wealthy businessmen essentially appointed U.S. Senators (before direct elections) has big business held
such sway in America and Washington. Scores of laws—from cutting job training programs, eroding the minimum wage, reversing ergonomic standards, cutting taxes on the rich and social
programs for the poor—contribute to the tilt from labor to capital.
It is beyond doubt that George Bush is redistributing wealth far more than George McGovern was
ever accused of—except up, not down. America is moving further away from Lincoln’s stated goal
that America should be a place where all would have “an open field and a fair chance [for their]

industry, enterprise, and intelligence.”

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070312/green2
Economic Justice
17. Create a living wage. Raise the minimum wage to a living wage indexed to inflation and reviewed biennially.
18. Tax all income equally and eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax. Adjust the tax code to treat labor and capital comparably and end this tax on the middle class.
19. Review corporate compensation. Mandate that only independent directors on a corporate board can vote for increases in executive pay and subject these to shareholder approval.
20. Expand the right to organize at work. Allow employees to form a union if a majority signs recognition cards, and impose penalties on employers who use intimidation and firings to discourage organizing.

[pickledpepperRN]

Myths on Universal Health Care
By Dr. Marcia Angell, Past Editor New England Journal of Medicine

Myth #1: We can’t afford a national health care system, and if we try it, we will have to ration care.
My answer is that we can’t afford not to have a national health care system. A single-payer system would be far more efficient, since it would eliminate excess administrative costs, profits, cost-shifting and unnecessary duplication. Furthermore, it would permit the establishment of an overall budget and the fair and rational distribution of resources. We should remember that we now pay for health care in multiple ways – through our paychecks, the prices of goods and services, taxes at all levels of government, and out-of-pocket. It makes more sense to pay just once.

Myth #2: Innovative technologies would be scarce under a single-payer system, we would have long waiting lists for operations and procedures, and in general, medical care would be threadbare and less available.
This misconception is based on the fact that there are indeed waits for elective procedures in some countries with national health systems, such as the U. K. and Canada. But that’s because they spend far less on health care than we do. (The U. K. spends about a third of what we do per person.) If they were to put the same amount of money as we do into their systems, there would be no waits and all their citizens would have immediate access to all the care they need. For them, the problem is not the system; it’s the money. For us, it’s not the money; it’s the system.

Myth #3: A single-payer system amounts to socialized medicine, which would subject doctors and other providers to onerous, bureaucratic regulations.
But in fact, although a national program would be publicly funded, providers would not work for the government. That’s currently the case with Medicare, which is publicly funded, but privately delivered. As for onerous regulations, nothing could be more onerous both to patients and providers than the multiple, intrusive regulations imposed on them by the private insurance industry. Indeed, many doctors who once opposed a single-payer system are now coming to see it as a far preferable option.

Myth #4: Claims the government can’t do anything right.
Some Americans like to say that, without thinking of all the ways in which government functions very well indeed, and without considering the alternatives. I would not want to see, for example, the NIH, the National Park Service, or the IRS privatized. We should remember that the government is elected by the public and we are responsible for it. An investor-owned insurance company reports to its owners, not to the public.

http://www.house.gov/conyers/news_hr676_4.htm

[ingelein]

Who Really Wants Health Care Justice?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...ctPlus&list_ui
"US Healthcare is at a crossroads........
It faces many challenges --the most evident being unsustainable cost increases and diminishing accesss. For decades , attempts at reforms have been unsuccsesful. One reason our traditional approaches have not worked is that we who serve have not brought to those efforts sufficient reflection concerning the deeper, VALUES level attitudes concerning reform."

[pickledpepperRN]

Originally Posted by rngreenhorn

I guess that "product" would be roughly 50% of your hospital's revenue.

Well I know it is a balance.
We thought it was bad when hospitals and doctors provided more care than was necessary. I remember being concerned with so many tests and people admitted for a check up.
Now the insurance companies delay and deny needed care. It took 18 weeks for me to start treatment after an injury. I couldn't work because the pain made critical thinking difficult and I couldn't move my arm. Taxpayers paid me to be on disability.
Some die waiting for authorization for tests and treatments the physician ordered. Other doctors don't tell patients about specialists or therapies they fear will be denied.

Of course public administration won't be perfect. But we will have a health care system. One beholden to the patients not the shareholders.
It will take us citizens monitoring it to keep it from wasting our money or denying us care.

[HM2Viking]

Originally Posted by ZASHAGALKA

I have the perfect idea for expanding healthcare coverage by gov't further up the poverty line.

Most districts in this nation fund a hefty chunk of education through property taxes. Let's create a national voucher system that allows parents to opt out with a voucher at near 60% of the value of public education with all the excess tax proceeds going to a healthcare pool.

If we allow parents to opt out of the system with a 5,000 dollar voucher, to be given to the private school of their choice with a mandate that it must cover 80% of the cost of tuition (parents would only have to pony up a grand a year), then for every parent that chooses to opt out of the public education system, we could take the 4,000 dollar savings to gov't and pool it into an 'insurance' fund that expands further up above the poverty line. The more parents that opt out, the more people get covered.

~faith,
Timothy.

http://www.tc.columbia.edu/equitycam...on%20Pieces%20
In the field of education, politically conservative reformers and their well-funded think tanks passionately advocated free-market philosophy as the best way to force public schools to improve. They called for charter school laws to deregulate what they saw as an overly regulated public education system. They wanted more public money in the hands of private and independent school operators. They claimed that these more autonomous schools could do a better job with less money and thus force the public schools to either compete or go out of business.
...
Now the national test scores support what state-level studies of charter schools have suggested for years -- that free-market principles are not what is needed to improve public schools. Carrying out market-based school reform on the cheap requires people with the experience to educate children, the business acumen to run an autonomous institution, the political connections to raise the private funds needed to keep the school afloat, and the ability to forsake their personal life to work six or seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day. It turns out that there are a limited number of people who can or will do charter school reform well. Thus, most charters schools hire younger, less experienced teachers and have high rates of teacher and administrator burnout and turnover.

Or health care for that matter.....

[rngreenhorn]

Originally Posted by spacenurse

Well I know it is a balance.
We thought it was bad when hospitals and doctors provided more care than was necessary. I remember being concerned with so many tests and people admitted for a check up.
Now the insurance companies delay and deny needed care. It took 18 weeks for me to start treatment after an injury. I couldn't work because the pain made critical thinking difficult and I couldn't move my arm. Taxpayers paid me to be on disability.
Some die waiting for authorization for tests and treatments the physician ordered. Other doctors don't tell patients about specialists or therapies they fear will be denied.

Of course public administration won't be perfect. But we will have a health care system. One beholden to the patients not the shareholders.
It will take us citizens monitoring it to keep it from wasting our money or denying us care.

I hope you are right. I hope our citizens can control this monster. Karens article in the New York Times has me convinced that universal health care is inevitable. Most Americans don't feel their health care should be their responsibility.

I think I need to take a break. This whole subject has got me down in the dumps.

I just recently got my RN license (hence greenhorn). I just bought my first house. I feel I am finally on the right track in my life. And part of this "upward mobility" is due to my better than average salary as a nurse.

I may not be "progressive" or an "intellectual" but neithor am I a "cold hearted greed demon." I am proud my recent choices to better my life. I am afraid that my salary and all my hard work will suffer. I'd hate to start over again in order to provide health care for "the common good."

According to the 2006 1040 tax booklet: 37% of my tax dollar went for medicare/SS, and 20% went to "other social programs." I don't see how in the current political climate we can fund a national health program without raising taxes, alot. How many people are on medicare vs. how many people are in the US?

Something has got to give. And I feel it will be the middle class who suffers. I pray I am wrong.

Cheers--- I think I'll go have a German beer! Or maybe two.

[HM2Viking]

Medicare for all is a better plan...