Healthcare-NOW! Supports Occupy Wall St. Movement

By Healthcare-NOW!  

October 12, 2011

In 1,368 cities across the country and around the world, people are standing up to the top 1% who collectively have more wealth and power than the lower 99% of the population. These occupations are self-sustaining communities focused on creating a space for free and open dialogue and action on the issues–from healthcare to education to unemployment–that plague the 99%.

Healthcare-NOW! endorses the occupation movement and urges all who can to join them, bringing the message of improved Medicare-for-all as a solution to the crisis of inequality in wealth and in health.

We’re being told by the Super Committee and other politicians that our already too modest safety-net is bankrupting us, but the reality is that Wall Street is bankrupting us. Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are not the problem. Instead of being cut, they should be maintained and strengthened. Single-payer, improved Medicare for all, like H.R. 676, would save millions of lives and reduce healthcare spending by $400 billion per year.

We need to take the single-payer healthcare message to the occupations, as is happening already in many cities (New York City, Denver, Washington, DC, Philadelphia). We need to make sure that improved Medicare-for-all is on the lists of demands.

The Future of Medicare by Tommy Douglas

Canadian Health Care Coalition 

"We can’t stand still.
We can either go back or we can go forward.
The choice we make today will decide the future of Medicare in Canada."
 

The following text from a 1984 speech of my father is in response to Premier Klein and others who would have us believe that Tommy Douglas had a limited vision for the future of Medicare. He saw much further than most governments in Canada today.
- Shirley Douglas, Spokesperson
Canadian Health Coaltion

The Future of Medicare

There’s not any doubt at all that the present Medicare program in Canada is in serious danger of being sabotaged. One danger is extra-billing, which is growing and which has meant only one thing: that we are rapidly developing two types of people in the health care field–those who come under the general program and whose care is paid for out of government funds, and those who pay “a little extra” to doctors who want a little extra.

The state of single payer in the states: Saskatchewan a model

By Joan McCarterFollow
Daily Kos
October 4, 2011

Last week, Daily Kos asked Governor Brian Schweitzer about his plan to pursue a single payer health system for the state, modeled on the system pioneered by Saskatchewan Province in Canada.

"Montana has a population of 990,000 people," he explains. "Saskatchewan has a population of 1,050,000. Their average age is about the same average age of Montana. They're about 10 percent Indian, we're about 7 and a half percent Indian. The other ethnic groups—they're a mirror image of us.... So we have the same ethnic population, we're farmers, we're loggers, we're miners, we're oil developers.... They, in Saskatchewan, live two years longer and have lower infant mortality."[...] "We have an $8 billion health care industry in Montana right now, and 50 percent of it, or $4 billion, is coming directly from the federal government," he continued. "That may be enough so that we can get the rest of Montana in it. We turn to the rest of Montana and say to them we've got this $4 billion, and we're taking care of all these people, and now we've run the rates and if you want to pay into this system, here's how much it's going to be. If you don't want to buy into that system, you don't have to."

"If you want to pay twice as much for Blue Cross and Blue Shield and have their accountants lie to you," the governor said, "you just stay right where you're at. But I think they'll knock our door down."

Leftwords: Defending Public Healthcare

Healthcare News & Opinion by Doug Allan for The Ontario Council of Hospital Unions/CUPE

Visit the site HERE. 

Lifespan shorter in USA than other developed countries

LeftWords
October 6, 2011

World Bank data suggests that the United States has a lower life expectancy compared to the other major developed economies. Canadian life expectancy is now (2009) 2.5 years longer than in the USA. In 1960, before the development of Canada's public medicare system, the difference was a little less, 1.3 years.

Indeed, the USA has fallen behind its long term nemesis, Cuba. Cubans now live 78.9 years, a couple of ticks more than the U.S. lifespan of 78.7 years.

In 1960 (at the beginning of the Cuban revolution) Cuban's lived 5.9 years less than Americans.

The Coming Battle: Healthcare Privatization and the Ontario Election

By Doug Allan
Socialist Project Bullet
October 5, 2011

In the past, capitalists had given many aspects of healthcare a pass in Canada and Ontario. There was a general preference to leave medicare intact from the lower costs it provided employers, especially in export sectors like auto, that gave Canadian companies a cost advantage. But, with the shifting balance of class power and the turn to an ‘age of austerity’ in the midst of the economic crisis, this has changed. With cuts to public healthcare set for the post-election period in Ontario whatever the electoral outcome, that balance is poised to change again with further attempts to privatize and marketize the healthcare system.

The 1990s: Origins of Healthcare Privatization

In the early 1990s, delivery of healthcare in Ontario by for-profit businesses had been centred in the long term care and ambulance industries. Even hospital support services were mostly publicly delivered. Public insurance sufficed for hospital and physician services.

During the hard right government of Conservative Mike Harris, there was a significant development of for-profit long term care facilities. The Harris government also embarked on two other major attempts to privatize healthcare: [1] the creation of public-private partnership (P3) hospitals where for-profit corporations would finance new hospital facilities and operate the hospital support services, and [2] the establishment of for-profit diagnostic clinics for MRIs and CT scans.

Saskatchewan Doctor's Strike settled - Time magazine 1962

Canada: Condition: Fair

Time
Friday, Aug. 03, 1962

After it was over, Britain's Lord Taylor, a bluff Labor Party peer and an architect of the British National Health Service, last week gave Saskatchewan a doctor's order. "This province has had a major operation," said he. "I prescribe for it absolute rest." The major operation was the settlement of the bitter, 22-day strike of Saskatchewan's doctors, who closed their offices rather than practice under the Socialist government's new compulsory medical insurance scheme.

Largely mediated by Lord Taylor, the settlement let each side claim moral victory. The government won the doctors' agreement to North America's first comprehensive, tax-supported state medical insurance plan. But by their stubborn fight, the doctors won modifications in the plan removing what they had feared as political controls over the practice of medicine. In the key concessions, Saskatchewan's Premier Woodrow Lloyd made clear that the doctors could practice inside or outside the scheme, agreed to let the province's two major doctor-operated voluntary insurance plans continue in business, and expanded the doctors' representation on the medicare plan's governing commission.

The weary Taylor hailed the agreement as a model for what he hopes will come to the rest of Canada and the U.S.—and, following his own prescription for a rest, headed off to fish in the seclusion of northern Saskatchewan.

T.C. Douglas' December 1959 Speech

Medicare: A People's Issue

“If we can do this – and I feel we can – then I would like to hazard the prophecy that before 1970 almost every other province in Canada will follow the lead of Saskatchewan.”
- Tommy Clement Douglas, Provincial Affairs radio broadcast, 16 December 1959

As the 1950s drew to a close, Saskatchewan stood at a crossroad. Funding of medical care was a mixture of direct patient physician payment, public programs or voluntary and commercial plans. The CCF, first elected in 1944, had consistently advocated universal health care, yet only one of the province’s health regions had successfully implemented such a plan. They would soon be looking for their fifth mandate from the people and felt the time was right to make the final push.

On 16 December 1959, Premier Douglas speaking in a dramatic provincial affairs radio broadcast, outlined his party’s health care policy. Douglas outlined the five principles on which CCF medical care would be based:

• A portion of the cost of the program would be paid directly by the people on a prepayment basis.

• There would be universal coverage-everyone would have to join.

• There must be high quality of service.

• This must be a government-sponsored program administered by a public body responsible to legislature.

• The plan must be in a form acceptable both to those providing the service and those receiving it.

Douglas also announced the creation of a ten-member Advisory Planning Committee on Medical Care. Three persons would represent the medical profession, three the government, three the public and one the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine.

The health care issue would dominate Saskatchewan politics for the next two years. The CCF would win the election and pass the Medical Care Act which would create a crisis culminating in the “Doctor’s Strike” of 1962.

Former Albertan doctor with public and private system experience favours public health care

Politicians pushing privatization not doing their jobs.

Public Values
September 23, 2011

Dr. Robert Ross

Dr. Robert Ross is well qualified to pass judgment on the private, for-profit delivery of health care, having experienced systems in Canada and the USA. Returning to Canada to care for an elderly parent allows Dr. Ross to compare systems and offer unconditional support for public health care. He writes in the Edmonton Journal.

"It is said that one measure of a society's evolution is how it cares for the old and infirm. On this measure, my home province fails miserably.

I have just returned from the Canmore Hospital where my father was admitted with a fractured hip.

He is 94 years of age, still relatively mobile and of comparatively sound mind so I don't expect miracles, but I do want enough hospital staff to physically help with care when he is in severe pain and requires my assistance just to transfer from bed to chair, or use a commode while maintaining some degree of dignity..."

For the complete article, please click HERE.

60 UK hospitals facing closure due to PFI debt

Public funds to be taken out of NHS to support private deals. 

Public Values
September 22, 2011

England's National Health Service (NHS) is set to suffer cutbacks as hospital closures put extra strain on the system, reports Daniel Martin of the Daily Mail. Trusts operating hospitals are unable to pay debt accumulated through the private financing [PFI=Private Funding Initiative] of building the hospitals.

"Hospitals could be forced to close as they buckle under the huge debt left behind by private finance initiative deals, the Health Secretary warned yesterday. 

Andrew Lansley said 22 NHS trusts are facing major financial difficulties because they cannot afford to repay huge annual fees for building work carried out under Labour. 

In some cases, the repayments account for a third of their entire budget — putting pressure on finances and threatening front-line patient services. Mr. Lansley said Labour had left the Health Service with an 'enormous legacy of debt'…"
 
For the complete article, please click here.