Please call the Speaker of the Assembly John Perez and your Assembly Member to urge a yes vote on SB 810, the California Universal Healthcare Act.

SB 810 would deliver comprehensive healthcare to everyone and it would save Californians tens of billions of dollars. It will do what the national health plan does not — cover everyone and contain health care costs. It will set the standard for the rest of the nation.

On Thursday, August 12, the Assembly Appropriations Committee sent SB 810 to Assembly for a vote. The vote will take place sometime before August 31.

The single payer movement has been an inspiration to the nation by passing SB 810 twice before in our legislature. We want to continue inspiring the nation by passing single payer healthcare a 3rd time.

Speaker John Perez can be reached at 916–319-2046. He is the first Speaker of the Assembly in 6 years to not be a co-author of SB 810. He needs to receive thousands of calls.

Then call your Assembly Member. You can find out who your Assembly member is by clicking here.

See Assembly Member roster below for voting records on SB 810 and their telephone number.

• If your Assembly Member is a co-author, please thank them for co-sponsoring. It is important that legislators know we appreciate their efforts.
• If your Assembly Member has voted for SB 810 in the past, but is not a co-author, thank for voting yes.
• If your Assembly Member has not voted for SB 810, encourage them to do so.

Please let us know if you have called, also if you can help us call activists who are not online, email here for a list or call Don.

We also encourage you make a contribution to the campaign for SB 810.

To contribute online please click here.

Or you can send a contribution to
Single Payer Now
PO Box 460622
San Francisco, CA 94146

Thank you,
Don Bechler
Chair — Single Payer Now
www.singlepayernow.net
415–695-7891

Assembly Co-author Votes We have 34 co-authors and need 41 votes.

The following Democratic members are not co-authors (we must get 7 of these votes):
Arambula
Buchanan
Caballero
Calderon
Carter
Fuentes
Furutani
Galgiani
Gatto
Hall
Hernandez
Huber
Perez J.
Perez M.
Portantino
Saldaña
Torres

Assembly Roster

Return Them to Us by August 23
We Will Deliver Them to Sacramento Legislators

We have only a few weeks to win an Assembly vote for SB 810, the California Universal Healthcare Act. SB 810 must be sent to the Governor by August 31.

This offers a wonderful opportunity to win more voters to support SB 810 and to influence Sacramento legislators.

Please consider ordering five or ten SB 810 postcards today.

Please ask people to fill them out within the next two weeks, and then you can return them to us by August 23rd. We will enter the new supporters to our Action Alert list, sort the postcards by Assembly District, and deliver them to Assembly Members with our request for them to deliver them to the Governor.

Help us spread the message, and if you can, please consider making a contribution to defray printing costs.

To contribute online please click here.

Thank you for all that you do!

Click here to read Interview.

From Healthcare-NOW:

The following text is the testimony that Katie Robbins, national organizer for Healthcare-NOW!, presented to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform on June 30 in Washington.

Thank you for this opportunity to testify. My name is Katie Robbins and I am here on behalf of Healthcare-NOW!, an organization founded in 2004 to support bill H.R. 676, “the U.S. National Health Care Act” or Expanded and Improved Medicare for All. With membership in 50 states, Healthcare NOW has broad support for single-payer health care.

Healthcare-NOW! opposes any consideration of cutting, privatizing or raising age eligibility for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

We seek to strengthen, not weaken, our social safety net. If passed, H.R. 676 would establish a national single-payer Medicare for All system granting everyone in the United States access to comprehensive, high-quality health care using our existing privately run infrastructure and a progressive financing that will guarantee coverage for all necessary medical care without financial or other barriers.

According to Harvard University studies, eliminating the waste of the multi-payer private insurance industry and moving to a single-payer system will save $400 billion a year. More savings are found in cost controls that a single-payer system can provide such as negotiating drug costs and medical equipment, and global budgeting for hospitals.

Since H.R. 676 was introduced in 2003, it has received tremendous support including endorsements by 582 union organizations in 49 states, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 63 local governments which include 10 of the nation’s 30 largest cities, the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Unitarian Universalist Church, the Union for Reform Judaism, the United Church of Christ, and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and the majority of nurses, patients, and physicians.
Broad support for a single-payer Medicare for All system continues even after the new health law has passed. For example, this past Saturday, June 26, America Speaks, a privately run company, organized “town hall meetings” in 20 cities across the country to discuss the nation’s deficit. America Speaks received funding linked to the Peter Peterson Foundation; the same foundation which is also funding staff to this Fiscal Commission. (Peterson is known to be vocally in support of cutting and privatizing Social Security and Medicare.)

America Speaks claimed that all options would be considered, yet the materials distributed at the events did not include an option to support single-payer health care as a means of controlling health care costs. Despite efforts to silence support for single payer, many participants demanded the option to vote on a single-payer type health care system, which would ultimately reduce costs by making health care more efficient rather than just cutting services in Medicare and other public sector programs. Participants also voted overwhelmingly for defense cuts and for progressive taxation.
Because cost controls are notably absent from the new health law, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform should listen to what the public is urging them to do, and address meaningful cost control in our health care system, which only a single-payer system can provide, as a means to balance the nation’s budget.

We urge you to address cost controls immediately. Healthcare NOW and our network of supporters and allied organizations urge Congress to work to defeat any bill to cut, privatize or dismantle our social safety net – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We demand the enactment of an expanded and improved Medicare for All, H.R. 676, to fix our economy and our (still) broken health care system.

From Physicians for a National Health Program-California:

A second opinion on U.S. health care reform
Friday, Jul 2, 2010
By Claudia Chaufan MD

In a recent issue in the New England Journal of Medicine, economist Jonathan Gruber praises the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (PPACA) as a “step in the right direction,” even as he expresses a healthy skepticism about PPACA’s capacity to control escalating health care costs, which he recognizes as “key to the long– term viability of our health care system.” Gruber also argues that there is “shortage of evidence” regarding which approach will meet Americans’ health care needs while controlling costs; therefore there is “no consensus” on what works [1].

Had Gruber looked beyond the U.S. borders, however, he would have found plenty of evidence. For instance, he would have found that U.S. consumption of health care as measured by critical indicators — per capita annual doctor visits, length of stay following heart attacks, or length of stay following normal childbirth – is no greater than the OECD average, and therefore cannot justify the extraordinary level of U.S. spending [2].

He would also have found that U.S. prices for medical care commodities and services are significantly higher than in other nations and constitute a key determinant of U.S. overall spending [3], and that such prices are determined by the exceptionally high administrative overhead caused by the system’s fragmented, public-private financing
[4] and by the comparatively limited market power of American patients vis-à-vis their counterparts in countries with national health systems where the government negotiates prices with drug and medical device
companies [5]. And he might have concluded that PPACA will do predictably little to change all this.

Moreover, the international literature would have shown the author the extraordinary international consensus around nonprofit financing to cover medically necessary services [5].

But what about the dramatic expansion of coverage promised by PPACA? Is this not a step in the right direction? The problem is that insurance coverage, as desirable as it may be, is not health care, but
just a means to that end. And the U.S. system is notorious for providing coverage without care. High co-pays and deductibles are significant obstacles to access. Nor does health insurance offer financial security: nearly 78 percent of personal bankruptcies in 2007 that were linked to medical debt involved persons who were insured at
the onset of their illness or injury [6]. PPACA, by allowing the sale of premiums for policies that will cover only 60 percent of health expenses [7], will do predictably little to change this state of affairs.

There is, however, an alternative proposal whose financial and policy soundness are based on decades of international experience and evidence. It would improve and expand Medicare to include all residents in the nation or in one state. That alternative may have to wait until PPACA unravels, as it predictably will [8].

President Obama argued that a model of reform as that implemented by PPACA would allow Americans to build on “what works” [9] – a decades– long experience with employer-sponsored for-profit health insurance.
Maybe paradoxically, however, PPACA will unravel as employers realize that it is cheaper to pay a fine than pay for increasingly more expensive and inadequate policies, and employees enter the individual health exchanges implemented by the new law and find them so expensive that they “clamor for a nationalized health care system” [10].

References
1. Gruber, J., The Cost Implications of Health Care Reform. N Engl J Med: p. NEJM p1005117.
2. Peterson, C.L. and R. Burton, U.S. Health Care Spending: Comparison with Other OECD Countries. 2007. Order Code RL34175(September 17)
http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34175_20070917.pdf (Accessed November 10 2007).
3. Anderson, G.F., et al., It’s The Prices, Stupid: Why The United States Is So Different >From Other Countries. Health Affairs, 2003.
22(3): p. 89–105.
4. Woolhandler, S., T. Campbell, and D.U. Himmelstein, Costs of Health Care Administration in the United States and in Canada. The New
England Journal of Medicine, 2003. 349(August 21): p. 768–75.
5. White, J., Competing solutions: American health care proposals and international experience. 1995, Washington D. C: The Brookings
Institution.
6. Himmelstein, D., U. , et al., Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study. The American Journal of
Medicine, 2009. 122(8): p. 741–746.
7. Dorgan, B., The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act.
http://dpc.senate.gov/dpcdoc-sen_health_care_bill.cfm , 2010. Democratic Policy Committee.
8. Angell, M., Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing? Physicians for a National Health Program, 2010:
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/is_the_house_health_.php (May 17, 2010).
9. The New York Times, Obama’s Health Care Speech to Congress. 2009: p.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/us/politics/10obama.text.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print (Date accessed September 12, 2009).
10. Helderman, R., Gingrich in Va.: A Republican Congress could defund health care law. 2010: The Washington Post. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/05/former_speaker_of_the_house.html .

Claudia Chaufan, M.D., Ph.D., is assistant professor at the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco. She teaches sociology of health and medicine, sociology of power, public health, comparative health care systems and sociological theory. Dr. Chaufan is also vice president of Physicians for a National Health Program-California (http://pnhpcalifornia.org/).

From PDA:

The Assembly Health Committee today approved the California Universal Health Care Act, authored by Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco). The bill guarantees all Californians comprehensive, universal health care while containing ballooning health care costs and improving the quality of care and delivery of health services statewide.

“Our state is being bankrupted by out-of-control health care costs, and small businesses and families are struggling to pay premiums that rise as much as 40% every year,” said Senator Leno. “California´s single payer plan remains the gold standard for health care reform, and is the only proposal that will truly contain health care spending and provide universal coverage for all.”   

The California Universal Health Care Act creates a private-public partnership to provide every California resident medical, dental, vision, hospitalization and prescription drug benefits and allows patients to choose their own doctors and hospitals. This “Medicare for All” type of program works by pooling together the money that government, employers and individuals already spend on health care and putting it to better use by cutting out the for-profit middle man.

California currently spends $200 billion annually on a fragmented, inefficient health care system that wastes 30% of every dollar on administration. With Senate Bill 810, that wasteful spending is eliminated. The bill creates no new spending, and in fact, studies show that the state would save $8 billion in the first year under this single-payer health care plan.

“All other industrialized nations spend far less on health care than we do, and in return their residents receive higher quality care,” said Senator Leno. “California families and employers can no longer afford to foolishly waste 30 cents of every dollar on a health care system that focuses on minimizing claims and increasing profits instead of maximizing the health of the people.”

SB 810 is sponsored and supported by a broad coalition of patients, nurses, doctors, teachers and school employees, small businesses, faith community members, retirees, local governments and school districts. These groups represent more than 2 million Californians. The bill is also sponsored by the California Nurses Association, California School Employees Association, Health Care for All California, California Physicians Alliance, California Teachers Association, California Council of Churches, League of Women Voters, California Health Professional Student Alliance, California Consumer Federation, California Alliance for Retired Americans, Single Payer Now and Progressive Democrats of America.

“California has the chance to lead the charge toward true healthcare reform that provides coverage to all,” said Allan Clark, California School Employees Association President. “SB 810 will go even further than federal reform to guarantee medical care to every Californian. That’s the kind of change we need.”

“Now, more than ever, we need to improve the delivery of our health services so we can guarantee care for every patient, and do so in a humane and targeted manner,” said Geri Jenkins, co-president of the California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee. “The only way to achieve that for our state is through passage of SB 810, which will make sure that our patient care dollars are actually spent on patients—instead of on insurance company executives and their outsized bonuses.”

The California Universal Health Care Act is nearly identical to legislation (SB 840) introduced in 2007 by former Senator Sheila Kuehl. The California Legislature passed SB 840 in 2008, but it was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Author Graham Walker’s animation, “Single-Payer: Answers and Facts about Health Care for All,” is a great introduction video.

(more…)

The Bloomington Alternative’s article “Pushing WellPoint back to nonprofit?” has an interesting approach in the Hoosier state.

Excellent piece by Dr. Quentin Young in the Ethiopian Review, “Where We Are Now on Health Reform.”

San Francisco Bay Area television station KTVU ran coverage, “Health Care Debate Heats Up; Protesters Rally For Single-Payer,” of the June 22 2009 demonstration for single payer when DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius came to San Francisco.