PHIMG Coalition - Grassroot voices demanding Medicare For All!

Staten Island Advance:

Democratic congressional candidate Stephen Harrison said yesterday that single-payer, universal health care is the only way to reduce health-care costs and ensure that Richmond University Medical Center and facilities like it stay solvent.

"The special interests have spread lies about universal health coverage," Harrison said at a press conference outside Victory Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn, which is threatened with closure. "They say it's too expensive. They say single-payer is socialized medicine. It's neither."

Harrison said that GOP Rep. Vito Fossella, whom he hopes to face in the fall, "will never support" single-pay [sic], because members of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries who have donated to his campaign are opposed to it.

"The insurance and pharmaceutical industries control this country's healthcare policy agenda by using their purse strings to influence lawmakers like Fossella," he said.

Quoting the New England Journal of Medicine, Harrison said that single-pay could save Americans $300 billion a year by cutting administrative and staff costs for doctors and insurance companies, and by limiting paperwork. These costs eat up between 11 and 30 cents of every health-care dollar spent, he said.

"There will be one form for doctors, no forms for patients," Harrison said. "Show your card, give the healthcare provider your number and walk out."

Please note: PHIMG does not endorse political parties or candidates for elected office. From time to time, we may inform our membership of local candidates that have made support of single payer and/or HR-676 a central part of their campaign. We recommend that our readers examine the candidate's past record and positions on all issues and form their own independent judgment as to whether that candidate merits their support.

Vice President Dick Cheney's office calls it "outrageous" - but a nurses union is sticking by its eye-popping ad running in 10 different Iowa newspapers today. The ad features a cut-out newspaper article about Cheney's latest hospitalization for heart treatment with the boldface words: If he were anyone else, he'd probably be dead by now.

"What's outrageous is we have an administration that sits on its hands while we have 47 million people who are uninsured...This administration has ignored this health care crisis," says Charles Idelson, spokesman for the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee. "They're indifferent to pain and suffering."

The group is advocating proposed universal government-run health care legislation, one of whose 88 co-sponsors includes Democratic presidential underdog candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio).

A Cheney spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal last week, after word of the ad got out, that "something this outrageous does not warrant a response."

As Idelson points out, "So, actually they did comment." He says his group wanted the vice president - and everyone else for that matter - to be outraged.

"I would hope that they would be," he said, adding, "We actually think the vice president should get quality health care - but let everyone have it."

42 per cent of respondents would prefer a plan that replaces the current health care system with a "single-payer" program where all health care costs are paid by the government, while 41 per cent would choose a plan that maintains the current system where most health care costs are paid by individuals or employers.

If a national heath plan were adopted over the next few years, 19 per cent of respondents expect better care than they currently have, 26 per cent think it would be the same, and 32 per cent predict it will be worse.

When asked whether the U.S. government should guarantee health insurance for all citizens

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The chief executive of Haven Healthcare took millions from the nursing home chain for personal use, including the purchase of a yacht and three apartment buildings in Connecticut, according to a state audit. The actions by chief executive Raymond Termini are a major reason for the chain's financial troubles, John F. McCormick, audit manager for the state Department of Social Services, said in the report Wednesday.

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