----- Original Message ----- From: Marilyn Clement To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Pause for the holidays; then intensify and accelerate the campaign for Healthcare-NOW! What do we want? Healthcare! When do we want it? NOW! December 11, 2007 Dear Healthcare-NOW People: This letter comes from me on a cold December morning, but with the warmest of greetings and thank yous to you for all of your work during this past year for a patient/doctor controlled single payer healthcare system devoid of insurance and pharmaceutical greed. We want guaranteed-choice healthcare for everybody - not compromised by state by state political compromises, but national, for all of us. And now is the time. When we started working toward this goal about four years ago, we were told that there was no way. The Republican president and the Republican controlled House and Senate would never pass or sign a bill providing a national, single payer healthcare system that would exchange profits for kindness and concern for the needs of fellow human beings. Then we got a Democratic group that also has refused to remove the obscene insurance company profits and denials from the healthcare system. They promised to reverse Medicare Part D, but instead they have left it in place, a private system hauling money out of Medicare by the truckload. They offer incremental steps with no possibility of a national non-profit healthcare system in sight. But we have not stopped. We are going to win this because you and the other people in this country want and need it to happen. We hear people say "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." By that, they mean we shouldn't jeopardize the politicians who are unwilling to make change that would endanger profits. They mean we should continue to let the insurance companies be in control, but with some new regulations, paying them billions more to continue to block a real national healthcare system.the plan they prefer is called "individual mandate" where everybody will be forced to purchase insurance in the billions of dollars from the same criminals who have received hundreds of billions and stolen healthcare from (and killed) millions of people in the last seventy years - the last time we had a serious effort to get a non-profit healthcare system in place. What we have to say is, "Don't let the bad be the enemy of the good." The system we have is BAD. The systems being proposed are BAD. Don't think about the uninsured (even though they are about one/third of the people in desperate need of change.) Add up the people, millions of them, who have "insurance" which is not really secure. They suffer and die from denials, co-pays and deductibles, lack of prescription drugs and necessary treatments - according to the American Patients for Universal Healthcare. Here are the statistics: "82,700 people in the United States have died because of insurance company denials and rejections, a reflection of their continually increased profits, since the beginning of the Iraq war." (APUHC) And more people are dying every day from these same denials. Some people call it, "Death by spreadsheet." But we know that is the only way to increase their profits - to deny as many claims as possible. Here's a holiday song, a present, thanks to blogger, nightowl724, on the Daily Kos. You should click on his/her site and sing along on a number of Christmas carol parodies of the insurance and pharmaceutical drug industries: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/10/20268/049/616/420432 Invest, Ye Merry Businessmen "Invest, ye merry businessmen, In healthcare industries! Remember these superior Stock opportunities! To make a haul, it's happy hour, With Medicare Part D! O tidings of profit enjoy! Profit enjoy! O tidings of profit enjoy!" But we Healthcare-Now people have to reject these tidings. We must fight the very idea of privatization --healthcare as a profit-making business. Get ready to work for healthcare. Donate money if you can. Pledge if you can. Organize! Please, please go to our website and click "Donate NOW." www.healthcare-now.org Your contributions and pledges are the bulk of our funding. Those of you who pledged this year have been the single most important force that has made it possible for us to go on. Only one sizeable foundation has supported us along with the doctors and the nurses. Most foundations are sticking to the safe Beltway line that we really can't do this so we shouldn't really try.or we should do it in small incremental steps, (over the next eight years) keeping the insurance companies making profits and denying healthcare, but trying to control them. How can we organize to win during the coming year? Here are some of our plans: I. More Road Shows --Look at the Road Show we've just completed. (Check it on the website) Tremendously successful tour for 33 days across 11 states visiting 24 Congressional Districts - met with Congressional staff and Congress Members themselves to explain how we can get a great single-payer, doctor/patient controlled healthcare system. It would belong to us and all of us would have guaranteed healthcare for life prepaid through our own premiums to our own system without any profits, advertising costs, and excess administration being taking out. Be sure to check our website and particularly H.R. 676 on the menu up top so you will understand how this would work and how we would pay for it. II. A National Conference exposing the idea of "individual mandate" in Massachusetts where the Heritage Foundation germinated this idea with Governor Romney and it was first put into law. Our conference, together with a wide coalition of groups, plans to help people get clarity about how bad it is to force people to buy more insurance from the insurance companies providing them with huge unearned profits (since they don't provide any healthcare), and allowing them to continue denying healthcare to about 1/3rd of our population. III. Increasing the people's understanding that we don't need to spend more money! What we need is to take the profits away from undeserving insurance companies and transfer that money into healthcare. I want them to stop taking our money. I want them to go find something else to do. Okay, I said it and I'm glad! If they come after me, please memorialize me by continuing this most important struggle of the 21st Century. Privatization is the enemy of the good. Privatization of healthcare and the privatization of the army, housing, schools, national security, water and all of our essential public functions is a major enemy of the future of our nation. It is the scourge of the nation. Think about Blackwater and Halliburton and the billions of dollars wasted in New Orleans and Iraq and worldwide. We are paying taxes to pay private profiteers to do our essential services - and they are doing them badly and more expensively with no accountability to us as a people - a crisis for the nation. IV. We are planning a film contest in conjunction with the American Medical Students Association offering a prize for the best short video. Students and others should roll out their video cameras or their webcams and i-phones and go for it. Check with our office for more details. V. We want you to do more Truth Hearings all across the country combining the opportunity for people to tell their stories and share in the strategies for changing this system. These truth hearings are also a mechanism for bringing your Congress Member home to hear from the constituents. You are essential to this strategy! And many people on this list have done one truth hearing already - getting ready for the next one. See how to pursue this strategy on the Take Action pages of our website. VI. We want to do a national memorial event in Washington D.C. and perhaps on the West Coast too remembering the 82,700 recent deaths caused by insurance company denials. We will put out the call to all who have lost a loved one to join us there. VII. We will be doing national strategy days throughout the year including a call-in day on Martin Luther King's birthday in January, Eleanor Roosevelt's birthday, the birthday of Medicare and other significant dates each month. We'll get the details out in advance as to whom you should call or write, the free call-in numbers, and the unified points we all should make. VIII. And we'll be working with people in their local Congressional districts, not supporting individual candidates, but being sure that the candidates all sign a pledge to support single payer healthcare for all. These are a few of the ideas coming from 100 Healthcare-NOW organizers in our strategy conference in Chicago last month. There were hundreds of ideas of how to move forward, and we will be pursuing many of them as best we can. If you want to become a Healthcare-NOW organizer, let us hear from you! The limitations on the size of our staff -mostly wonderful volunteers - can not stop us. This year, we must help people in the Congressional districts hold their Congress members accountable. Get a pledge from them that they will support H.R. 676, the United States National Health Insurance Act. We have 86 Members signed on now. We want them to dance with the people who brought them to the dance (us) in the coming period. If you have a bad candidate who won't support H.R. 676, then find another candidate! Many people are finding new candidates right now. There is also still time to get ready to run for office. How about you? This is OUR YEAR. If we do not succeed in putting forward a responsible healthcare system, clearly on the table, clearly the choice of most voters in this country, in advance of the presidential elections, then we will end up again with a President who is not willing to removing the profit system and refusing to campaign for a real healthcare system that will help save our economy and our people. THAT IS THE TRUTH! So it is up to us. We need a Congress that will be strong and make the president be responsible to the people. We have a lot of good leaders there already who want to do the right thing. We must add to their numbers - and hold their feet to the fire! We need a change. NOW! You and your community - and yours and yours and yours -- are the main cogs in the wheel that can make it happen! Get ready to organize! In your community, across the land! That's the only way we will win. It always has been. - the people doing it in spite of the "leaders." I am profoundly grateful to all of you who have joined us and who are already doing these things. Best wishes to you as the New Year dawns. We need you with your eyes wide open, focused on the dawning of a better future. Healthcare-NOW! Remember 2008 is OUR YEAR! We are waiting to hear from you! Marilyn Clement, National Coordinator -- and all of us at Healthcare-NOW, www.healthcare-now.org ; (donatenow) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1-800-453-1305. Marilyn Clement, National Coordinator Healthcare-NOW www.healthcare-now.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Healthcare-now mailing list List info: http://lists.healthcare-now.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/healthcare-now To Unsubscribe Send email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or visit: http://lists.healthcare-now.org/cgi-bin/mailman/options/healthcare-now/epearlag%40earthlink.net You are subscribed as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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