Progressive Democrats Sonoma County

On this call we heard from Vic Edgerton (Legislative aide for Congressman Dennis Kucinich), Donna Smith (Co-Chair for our Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign) and Ali Thebert (Chapter Organizer/Communications Assistance for PNHP)

Legislative updates and lobbying strategies for passage of the Kucinich Amendment, Rep. Weiner’s amendment and Sen. Bernie Sanders bill for single payer are discussed.

Click Here to Listen

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
September 17, 2009

The AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation representing 11.5 million workers in 57 international and national unions, has endorsed a single payer health care system as the best way to guarantee healthcare to everyone. The unanimous vote in favor of Convention Resolution 34, The Social Insurance Model for Health Care Reform, came immediately after President Obama had addressed the Convention last Tuesday.

The resolution states: “The experience of Medicare (and of nearly every other industrialized country) shows the most cost effective and equitable way to provide quality healthcare is through a single-payer system.” It continues: “We reiterate our longstanding call for congressional leaders to unite behind such a plan.”

Michael Lighty, Policy Director for California Nurse’s Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee on Grit tv.

CLICK HERE to view the video

Thursday, Sept 10th RALLY
5:15 pm
Old Courthouse Square
Santa Rosa

Ed Note: – PDA & PDSonoma support single-payer healthcare, as called for in HR 676. We continue to stand with Physicians for a National Health Program, CNA and Healthcare-NOW in support of single payer, expanded Medicare for All & we urge everyone to take every opportunity to distribute these new PDA Support the Weiner amendment flyers.

Doctors and Medical Professionals Rally for Health Care Reform.

All are invited to stand together with doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers calling for meaningful health care reform and one that includes a public insurance option that would ensure that everyone, no matter what their employment status, income status, or preexisting conditions/illness status, has access to quality, affordable health care.

Bring signs (with BIG LETTERS so passing cars can read them!)

By Rep. Anthony Weiner
The Huffington Post
September 7, 2009

As President Obama prepares to address the nation about his vision for health care reform, we should not overlook the last, best truly transformative change to our health care system: Medicare. We have been staring so intently at the lessons of 1993 that we may have forgotten the universal rule of successful lawmaking: “keep it simple.”

During the eleven town hall meetings I’ve held around my district, I’ve had some direct experience with the anxiety this debate has produced. Much of the fear comes from two groups: those who have Medicare and don’t want it changed and those who have never had a government-run reimbursement system like Medicare and are worried about the impact it will have on their quality of care.

In both cases, a calm, reasoned and vigorous defense of the American single-payer plan is just what the doctor ordered.

Read the rest here

August 27, 2009
Questions for Senator Conrad
By Deborah Dobish

Within the health care reform debate, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, at the urging of Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) is likely to include formation of health care cooperatives as a way to create competition with insurance companies and hold down costs. Admittedly, the details of what Sen. Conrad has in his mind are not published anywhere, to my knowledge, but one has to wonder if he really knows co-ops——their structure, their method of creation and the ease with which private capital in the United States has undermined them and marginalized them.

Dennis Kucinich Saturday, August 22, 2009, Cleveland Ohio. The Single-payer Healthcare Movement: Washington and Across the Nation

CLICK HERE TO WATCH

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO

SPRING VALLEY, CA — A dozen ultra-rich protesters pulled up in their stretch limo and stole the show at a Town Hall Meeting hosted by Congresswoman Susan Davis (D-CA) in Spring Valley, California on Saturday, August 29, 2009.

The group, which reportedly consisted of individuals made incredibly rich on US health care industry profits, seemed to delight in engaging with other protesters in the Free Expression Zone. And the super-rich protesters were a hit from the moment they entered the meeting, as cheers and a steadily rising applause indicated strong support from many of the meeting’s hundreds of attendees.

Important Town Hall Meeting August 31st – please attend:

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey will hold a public town hall meeting on health care reform Monday evening, Aug. 31st from 6-8 PM at the Petaluma Veterans Memorial Hall, 1094 Petaluma Blvd. South. After brief introductory remarks, Woolsey will spend two hours answering questions and listening to the opinions of her constituents.

See http://woolsey.house.gov/

CLICK HERE!

By Russell Mokhiber
August 14, 2009

Join PDA’s Healthcare for All Issue Organizing Team (IOT);
learn more here .

Published by Common Dreams

He’s a union buster.

He believes that corporations should not be criminally prosecuted for their crimes.

He has just launched a campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system.

And he’s the CEO of Whole Foods.

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Real healthcare reform? You decide

It cannot be denied that MoveOn has done some commendable work, but on the issue of healthcare reform, we don’t see eye to eye.

On Monday, MoveOn.org sent an email, entitled No Regrets. It read:

The email explained that MoveOn, in their effort to pass Obama’s reforms, needs to raise $210,000 this week to carry on its fight against the right wing nuts showing up at town hall meetings. That’s PDA’s annual operating budget!

Now ask yourself, “Which organization has been leading the fight for ‘real’ healthcare reform?”

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http://pdamerica.org/misc/spreport.pdf

Dear Mitch Stewart & OFA,

I am glad you are still Organizing for America — we need the activated grassroots energy that swept Mr. Obama into office to keep things moving forward. But I have to share with you things that are really bugging me in the “Health INSURANCE Reform” debate — the first one is just that, the language you started using.

Read the Full Story Here

CLICK HERE to watch video

Marilyn Clement, a leading progressive activist and organizer whose life spanned the history of the modern progressive movement, died yesterday (Monday, August 3, 2009) after a prolonged illness.

She died as support for the last great “interest” of her remarkable life – — universal health-care — has now become the consensus among people in this country and just as Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she would entertain a House floor vote on the single payer initiative (the option Marilyn struggled for). ......

Link to Original

By Norman Solomon
August 5, 2009

Like soap in a rainstorm, “healthcare reform” is wasting away.

As August began, a leading follower of conventional wisdom, journalist Cokie Roberts, told NPR listeners: “This is evolving legislation. And the administration is now talking about a glide path towards universal coverage, rather than immediate universal coverage.”

Notions of universal healthcare are fading in the power centers of politics—while more and more attention focuses on the care and feeding of the insurance industry.

Consider a new message that just went out from Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, which inherited the Obama campaign’s 13-million email list. The short letter includes the same phrase seven times: “health insurance reform.”

Read the Full Story Here

By David Swanson
August 1, 2009

The U.S. House of Representatives has committed to bringing single-payer healthcare to a vote following summer recess. Stranger things have happened, greater obstacles have been overcome, than what would be involved in winning that vote, winning in the Senate, and compelling the president to sign the bill. We have a moral responsibility to put everything we have into trying; and even a near-victory will advance the cause.

Read More

Progressive Democrats Sonoma County is pleased to present The Single Payer Players in The Sound of Moolah, an original musical melodrama/puppet show about healthcare reform, on Saturday, August 8th, at 2:00PM, at the Rohnert Park Library, 6250 Lynn Conde Way.

The lively puppet show, a take-off on The Sound of Music, invites audience participation. The characters include Dr. Maria, an idealistic young physician; the Von Trappeds, a family struggling with medical expenses; a shepherd with social anxiety disorder; a set of Siamese quintuplets; President Obama; insurance and drug company executives, and more. All of the songs from the original musical have new lyrics, and the words are in the program so the audience can sing along. The show is touring widely around California, and we are fortunate to be able to see it in Rohnert Park.

Attend the Medicare rally in DC or Call Congress; tell your representative to support HR 676, (202) 225­ 3121

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Nine More Go to Jail

By David Sawnson
July 28, 2009, Des Moines, IA

Following a pattern of civil resistance in Washington D.C. and around the country, citizens in Des Moines Iowa on Monday risked arrest to press for the creation of single-payer healthcare, the establishment of healthcare as a human right, and an end to the deadly practices of Iowa’s largest health insurance company, Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Read More Here

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Tuesday, July 28, 2009

PDA and California Nurses Association/Nurses National Organizing Committee request your urgent assistance:

Call CPC Members to preserve
the Kucinich amendment

Our House of Representatives could vote as early as this week on HR 3200, the healthcare reform bill. On July 17, the Education and Labor Committee approved an amendment offered by Rep. Dennis Kucinich that would allow states to pass and implement single-payer plans. This was a huge victory for single payer.

If we are to build on this victory, we must act now to ensure the Kucinich amendment is in the final version of the bill and perhaps made even stronger. There is no time to waste.

NYC, JULY 28 — Between noon and 1 pm, FAIR and local healthcare advocacy groups will deliver a petition signed by over 12,000 people demanding that the TV networks include the single-payer proposal in their coverage of the national healthcare debate. The petition’s signatories include Obama’s longtime physician, Dr. David Scheiner; filmmaker Michael Moore; former MSNBC host Phil Donahue; actors Mike Farrell, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon; and doctors Quentin Young, Stephanie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein of Physicians for a National Health Program.

The petition will be presented to a representative of ABC News, which disinvited Dr. Scheiner from its recent forum on healthcare reform, where he’d been planning to ask Obama a question about single-payer.

Click Here to Read More

Different Voices: the crises in Health Care, the Media, and Education

You can call the studio, (707) 874-1073, to join the discussion

This Tuesday 7/28/09 at 6:00 pm, KOWS 107.3 community radio will host Stan Gold from Health Care for All—California and Progressive Democrats of America. Join us on my program, “Voices and Vision,” for a free-wheeling discussion of health-care legislation, the hottest political topic in Washington and perhaps California. It promises to be a lively hour, including critical information and views you likely haven’t heard on mainstream media. Now is the time to hear alternative perspectives and to get informed.

By Stan Gold
July 25, 2009

The healthcare program that is being pushed by MoveOn.org and Obama is a cruel hoax. Massive financial and medical care failures are being built into the system. It does not control future costs, or provide comprehensive medical care for all Americans, or give patients freedom of choice in selecting medical practitioners.

As long as the U.S. policy continues to be unique in the world,— among industrialized democratic nations,— in insisting on having non-productive “middlemen” (the corporate health insurance industry) come between healthcare funds and healthcare practitioners, — real, permanent healthcare reform is impossible.

By Norman Solomon
July 24, 2009

“I want to cover everybody,” President Obama said at his news conference Wednesday night. “Now, the truth is that unless you have a—what’s called a single-payer system, in which everybody’s automatically covered, then you’re probably not going to reach every single individual. . .”

The same conventional wisdom keeping single payer off Washington’s table has been spinning for various “reform” plans with such accelerated RPMs that at this point the nation’s “healthcare debate” is suffering from a severe case of vertigo.

Read More Here