Health Care

To the tune of Maggie’s Farm

I ain’t gonna buy mandated health insurance
No, I aint gonna buy mandated health insurance
Well, I wake up and I’m coughing
Feel my sides and moan in pain
I got declined for operations
And it’s drivin’ me insane
It’s a shame the way we treat the working poor
I ain’t gonna be insured no more.

I ain’t gonna buy mandated health insurance
No, I aint gonna buy mandated health insurance
Well, it hands you a nickel
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By David Swanson
http://afterdowningstreet.org/letstatesdoit

The health insurance bill currently under consideration in Congress would forbid states from providing their residents with healthcare. An amendment correcting that problem was passed in committee last July and then quietly removed. A new campaign is asking the Democrats who voted for that amendment to withhold their votes on the bill until it is reinstated.

Several states’ legislatures are close read more

By David Swanson

California keeps passing bills for state single-payer healthcare, but Ahhhnold won’t sign em, and Jerry Brown who wants to be governor doesn’t seem to want it badly enough to make a commitment on healthcare. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is encouraged that their current governor has said he probably will sign a single-payer healthcare bill, and the legislature just might pass one. But Minnesota has an angle neither of these other states can claim: a serious candidate for read more

Kathlyn Stone has done what I should have done and collected my recent postings on state level single-payer healthcare on her blog.

The question isn’t if a state will enact true health care reform before Congress, but which state and when.

Forget Congressional action on meaningful health care reform. It’s clear that whatever national health care legislation is passed, its main intent will be the preservation of a for-profit system.

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By David Swanson

I’ve been writing about various states just beginning campaigns for single-payer healthcare. Pennsylvania is on the cusp of completing one.

They claim to have the best legislation, which will provide everyone with healthcare, pay for it, and in fact save people and businesses money, as well as getting around the federal restrictions Congressman Dennis Kucinich read more

By David Swanson

Canada did not create a civilized healthcare system nationally until its provinces led the way. Clearly Congress is dragging behind the states in our country, and it is through state successes that we will eventually compel the U.S. government to provide our people with this basic human right.

Hawaii has a single-payer healthcare system. California’s legislature has passed a single-payer bill three times but not yet found a governor to sign it into law. Single-payer read more

By David Swanson

What the liberal activist world is doing for healthcare bears a striking similarity to what Christianists do for billionaires. Supporting tax breaks for the richest three-percent of Americans because you hate gay people or women or blacks or sex does not at first look much like supporting a “public option” for three percent of the poorest of Americans.

But both shape national policy around a supposedly national program that in reality will benefit only some small read more

By David Swanson

A bill to create single-payer healthcare in California has passed that state’s senate for the third time now. Californians just need to persuade a governor to sign it. Single-payer healthcare bills are advancing in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and a growing list of states, including New Mexico, where State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a long-time supporter of single-payer healthcare, is running for Lieutenant Governor.

Now North Carolina house candidate Marcus read more