Posts Tagged ‘health care reform’
Take this action now to pass health reform without Stupak-type restrictions
Read MoreLooks like we’ll be spending another exciting Saturday night in front of the TV watching Congress debating a health care reform. I’m awfully glad women are so important that our bodies and our health seem to be a center of attention. On the other hand, I’m furious that the attention is once again on taking away abortion coverage rather than working to make sure women have access to all the basic health care services they need without Congress telling them what to do about their own lives, especially decisions as profound as childbearing and reproductive health.
It’s urgent that all senators hear from us TODAY AND TOMORROW. I vote in Arizona. My senators are Jon Kyl and John McCain, both 100% anti-choice Republicans who are almost certainly going to vote against the final bill. But still, they need to hear from me and you. Let them feel the heat.
So I’ve just signed this letter to my senators, prompted by the Center for Reproductive Rights which has it all set up so it’ll even figure out who your senators are and send it to them for you. Actually, I made several edits to the CRR letter and you can to if like me you find it too wussy for you. Here is my version–lift anything you want:
Dr. Nancy Tells It Like It Is: Stupak Isn’t Fair to Women’s Health
The Democrats’ Dilemma: Their Own Trojan Horse Kicks Free
Democratic leaders have said that the Stupak amendment’s draconian new restrictions on abortion contained in the House health-reform bill will not appear in the final version. Here why voters who value women’s health cannot sit back and accept such assurances. Re-posted here courtesy of the Women’s Media Center which originally posted it as an exclusive and is rolling out a public and media education campaign to help Stop Stupak. But I think stopping the bad is only the first part of what we need to do…
House Democrats broke into a paroxysm of self-congratulation for passing a health reform bill. By embracing the Stupak-Pitts amendment, however, they entered the women’s hall of shame. They had promised no more limitations based on preexisting conditions. But House leadership allowed a codicil: Except if you are a woman.
The Stupak-Pitts amendment to the health bill is a sweeping ban on insurance coverage of abortion. It expands the 1976 Hyde amendment, which outlaws abortion coverage by existing Federally funded programs, to middle class women participating in the public option, even if they pay from their own pocketbooks. Hyde began a juggernaut of restrictions on abortion and birth control that I’d hoped the current health care debate would rectify.
Headlines blaring, “Abortion an Obstacle to Health-Care Bill,” got it backward. And the biggest obstacle was President Obama’s approach, which meshed all too well with Speaker Pelosi’s: they are both so averse to feather-ruffling that one wonders why they entered the rough and tumble of politics in the first place. No amount of Rahm Emmanuel’s mean-guy interference could have kept this chicken’s eggs from breaking, let alone its feathers in place.
Smart as he is, why didn’t Obama know that when you start from a position of compromise, you’ll end up with a fragment of what you wanted, if that? The public option is too weak to exercise serious cost-cutting control. And now women have been sacrificed, like so much detritus, even though we are 51 percent of the population and (in case they haven’t noticed) 60 percent of Democratic voters.
Read MoreSign petition here to tell Harry Reid: Don’t let Max Baucus kill the public option
I used to kinda like Sen. Max Baucus. During the Bush2 administration, he was one of the best we could go to when we needed to make the Republicans’ legislation less draconian. Now that he is the pivotal leader for health reform, however, he’s acting like the Republicans are still in control. As you can read here and here, he obsessively dumbs down what should be the Democrats’ signature legislation.
Thanks to Credo, sponsored by Working Assets, here is a link to a petition you can sign to urge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to keep pressing for a public option in the health reform plan despite the Baucus bill. More explanation below:
Next week, the Senate Finance Committee is expected to start debating and voting on its health care reform bill. Of the five Congressional committees writing health care bills, this will be the only one not to include provisions for a public health insurance option.
We can’t sit back and let the Senate Finance Committee kill the public option. That is why Open Left is joining with CREDO Action to tell Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to make sure a public option is included when the bill goes to the floor of the Senate.
The next step in the process is for the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate HELP Committee — which passed a public option under the late Ted Kennedy — to combine their bills into a single piece of legislation. This merging is largely determined by the Senate leadership, and so it is important that the Senate leadership hear from us.
Read MoreUncover (the Truth About) Abortion Coverage to End the Deceptive Health Reform Dance
I wrote this commentary for The Daily Beast–please go there to comment and share too!
I felt that it was way past time for someone to call out the cynical politicians who won’t vote for health reform under any circumstances but are using women’s bodies as a rallying cry to whip up the anti-choice right. Shamefully, President Obama and most of the Democrats are dancing to their tune, and will continue to unless we voters speak out and insist that abortion and other reproductive health care is covered fairly along with other basic medical care.
They named it “The Abortion-Controversy Hoax.” Probably a better, shorter title than mine.
It’s September. Congress will soon return to tackle health care reform, and I can’t help but notice a familiar political two-step. If you want to see whether a politician–Democrat or Republican–can cut a rug, just ask him or her about abortion. They’ll swing around faster than Tom DeLay on Dancing With the Stars.
Partisans on the right mobbed town halls during the August recess to exploit abortion and women’s health, whipping up controversy around President Obama’s health reform plan. Twisted logic and deliberate misinformation abound in a YouTube ad campaign by the Family Research Council, which, along with other anti-choice groups, also launched a paid media blitz claiming Obama’s health reform plan would pull Granny’s plug while covering abortion—ignoring that most of us grannies want to make advance directives and would be quite grateful if our health plans covered the service.
Meanwhile, Democrats were doing a dance of their own and, without Senator Ted Kennedy to lead them toward their higher principles, tried unsuccessfully to waltz away from the hot-button issue with the Blue Dogs to whom they owe their souls and their majority. No wonder voters are increasingly questioning Obama’s plan.
Read MoreA Clear, Reasoned Explanation of the Public Health Care Option
Ultra-right Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) says she’s ready to slit her wrist and become blood brothers (?) in a pact to kill health reform.
Personally, I think Americans would be best served, with universal coverage and lower costs, by a single payer plan. But in the absence of any viable campaign for that, the Obama compromise of adding a pubic option to the mix is the best we can hope for. The public option is well-described in this video by Yale Professor Jacob Hacker. Check it out for useful information and corrections to some of the wildly outrageous claims Bachman and her blood (?) brothers are making.
Read MoreWhat Can We Learn From Health Reform’s Leadership Laboratory?
The health reform debate gives us an interesting Petri dish in which to observe leadership–or not.
Management of controversy always tests leaders. Leaders on the right are typically clearer and more aggressive in delivering their message (whether factual or deliberately untrue, as in the example below) than those on the left. This calm, measured interview with Kentucky Democrat Rep. John Yarmouth talking about what he anticipated discussing with his constituents during the August recess is a case in point on the left side of the political dial.
In contrast, catch demonstrators on the right trying to shout down Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) at his Austin TX town hall in order to shut off any chance of Congress’ reforming the health care system. They know their goal and they go for it.
Read MoreIt’s All About Choices: A Nurse’s View of Health Reform
As Congress prepares to leave for its August recess, the health reform debate is sure to be hotter than ever. C. Stacy Beam has been a nurse for over 15 years with a background in both medical and psychiatric nursing. She holds a law degree from Northeastern University School of Law and is an adjunct professor of clinical psychiatric nursing at Northeastern University’s Boeve College of Health Sciences. She has a longstanding interest in national politics and women’s rights and can be found blogging over at her very fun website, Secretary Clinton. She wrote this post for the Women’s Media Center, where it was originally published.
If health care reform is enacted—and if it works to lower costs and keep Americans healthy—nurses will be a large part of the solution, argues the author. Trust her: she’s a nurse.
When President Barack Obama appeared in the Rose Garden on July 15, 2009, to continue to stress the urgent need for timely passage of health care reform, there was a reason he was flanked by some of the biggest names in nursing today. No other profession is more trusted than the nursing profession, at least according to Gallup’s Most Trusted Profession poll, which nursing has “won ” for seven consecutive years.
At the president’s side were, among others, Dr. Mary Wakefield, the administration’s highest ranking nurse, and Becky Patton, American Nurse’s Association president. The message was clear—for decades nurses have consistently advocated for affordable, quality, equitable distribution of health care services for all Americans. And while much of the health care debate has focused on major stakeholders such as physicians (largely via the AMA), the insurance and hospital industry, labor unions and to a much lesser extent, the health care consumer, it is nurses who can and will be an essential aspect of any health care legislation that seeks to provide cost-saving, quality care, particularly to America’s most vulnerable populations.
Nurses are in a unique position to attest to the consequences of how today’s current health care market has privileged expensive, acute treatments over more cost-saving models that focus on disease prevention, health education and screening. While much has been made of the plight of the country’s almost 50 million uninsured, less has been made of the growing number of under-insured people, who can no longer afford even their employer-based plans or find that their health care needs are not being met despite their current coverage.
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