(A version of this essay was published in the print edition of Roll Call on January 25, 2009. The version below was published at OpEdnews.com on January 17, 2009.)
When hundreds of thousands pour into Washington, DC next week to witness Barack Obama's landmark swearing-in, they'll see red and white yard signs up in windows, on front lawns, and along the city streets promoting the cause of DC statehood.
People across America are already somewhat aware that residents of the District of Columbia are denied many of the rights that all other American citizens enjoy, that some of the US Constitution doesn't apply to the 'federal enclave.' For those of us who live in the nation's capital, the District is America's 'last colony' and 'last plantation,' nicknames that have special resonance in a city whose population is mostly black.
Many of us see the January 20, 2009 inauguration of the first African American President of the United States as a chance to educate the rest of the country about one of the last unfulfilled goals of the civil rights struggle -- achieving self-determination, self-government, and full citizenship for people who live in the 'Capital of the Free World.' For most of the District's population, that means winning statehood.
It's also an opportunity to bring the message directly to the new president, who has expressed his sympathy with District residents and indicated he's ready to make some changes.
Under the District's current status, all laws, policies, and budgets are subject to the review of Congress, which holds the power to veto locally passed legislation and to impose laws that residents don't want. For example, Republican-controlled Congresses have outlawed needle exchange, which has surely led to the loss of many lives to HIV. (The prohibition was canceled when Democrats gained the upper hand in Congress in 2006.) In 1998, Congress overturned a ballot measure for medical marijuana (Initiative 59) that had passed with a 69% majority.
Congress has also imposed zero tolerance laws and a controversial charter school system, prohibited the District from taxing commuters (a source of revenue for all other cities), and demanded construction of a new convention center, to be paid for with a surtax on local businesses, a project that mostly benefited businesses outside the city. In 2001, Congress, through an appointed Financial Control Board, ordered former Mayor Anthony Williams to dismantle DC General Hospital, the District's lone full-service public health facility.
In 1997, Newt Gingrich called the District a 'laboratory' for Republican policies. Congress members have tried to overturn local gun control laws, enact the death penalty, impose a school voucher program, and deny benefits for same-sex couples. They failed to accomplish these goals, but if they had succeeded, District residents would have been powerless to reject them. In no state do Americans suffer such affronts to their right to democratic self-government.
Furthermore, District residents have no voting representation in Congress. While other Americans get to elect a Representative and two Senators, District residents have no say in our national legislature. During the past seven years, young men and women from Washington, DC have risked and lost their lives allegedly to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, in wars that no one representing them voted for or against.
Whether Democrats or Republicans have dominated Congress, we've seen a reluctance to grant District residents these basic rights. For Republicans, the reason is pretty clear -- in a city with over 75 percent registered in the Democratic Party, representation would no doubt increase the number of Democrats in both chambers. Why Democrats have mostly rejected DC statehood is less obvious, but it might have something to do with the influence of Congress members from suburban Virginia and Maryland who don't want to surrender their power to exploit the District for the advantage of their own constituents, blocking commuter taxes and enacting policies that economically drain the city and encourage sprawl.
It's also difficult to shed the suspicion that some members of Congress don't want a new Representative and two new Senators in their midst who will very likely be African American and will cast liberal and progressive votes. There have been no shortage of op-ed columns alleging that District voters, responsible for electing flawed and corrupt pols like former Mayor Marion Barry, simply aren't ready for hometown democracy. No one has declared the (mostly white) citizens of New York and Illinois unqualified for democracy because they elected Gov. Elliot Spitzer and Gov. Rod Blagojevich. With a few notable exceptions, including Mr. Obama, the Senate in particular has remained an Old White Men's Club.
In fact, Democratic politicians have retreated further from the goal of DC statehood, deleting it from the Democratic national platform in 2004 and keeping it out in 2008. The only party to endorse statehood in its national platform is the Green Party, represented locally by the DC Statehood Green Party. The latter, a product of the 1999 merger of the DC Green Party and the DC Statehood Party (founded by Julius Hobson, Josephine Butler, Hilda H. Mason, and other civil rights activists in 1970), has made winning statehood its chief priority.
DC Voting Rights or DC Statehood?
Instead of statehood, some of the District's most prominent politicians have campaigned for 'DC voting rights', a plan to create a single voting seat in the US House with no other change in the District's political status. The chief proponent of voting rights is Eleanor Holmes Norton, who already holds a nonvoting US House seat on behalf of the District. The proposed voting rights bill, formally titled the 'DC Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act' (HR 328), has steadily gained bipartisan support. President-elect Obama has signaled that he will sign it if it passes in Congress. Ms. Norton, who has held the nonvoting seat since 1991 and is held in high esteem by many District voters, would almost certainly get the new voting seat.
Statehood supporters have found flaws and traps in the voting rights bill and have warned against confusing representation in Congress with self-government and full constitutional rights. "Don't be fooled -- the voting rights bill is a symbolic piece of legislation dressed up to look like democracy," says Gail Dixon, a Statehood Green Party member, former elected member of the DC School Board, and long-time statehood advocate.
On January 6, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Joe Lieberman (Ind.-Conn.) joined Ms. Norton in introducing the voting rights bill. The attraction for Republicans is that the bill balances the new seat for (Democratic) Washington, DC with a new seat for (Republican) Utah. But it would also give the GOP a slight edge in presidential elections, because the number of electors is tied to the number of US Representatives, and Republicans would thus win a new Electoral College vote. The District already has three Electoral College votes and won't gain a new one.
Furthermore, if it faces a lawsuit, the voting rights bill may be found unconstitutional. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution provides voting representation in Congress solely to states. A decision by a US District Court in 2000 (Adams v. Clinton) held that "the Constitution does not contemplate that the District may serve as a state for purposes of the apportionment of congressional representatives." The Supreme Court reviewed the ruling and offered no challenge.
A report published on February 12, 2007, by the Congressional Research Service noted the bill's suspect constitutionality: "Although not beyond question, it would appear likely that the Congress does not have authority to grant voting representation in the House of Representatives to the District."
Or, to be more precise, the District probably cannot hold a voting seat unless Congress amends the Constitution (requiring ratification by two thirds of the states), makes the District part of Maryland or another state (this is called 'retrocession'), or grants statehood.
The voting rights bill contains a nonseverability clause, but a temporary injunction in the event of a law suit may allow Utah its new voting seat while the District vote would be blocked until a ruling is issued. It's likely that, should the bill fail, Congress will be discouraged from considering legislation expanding democratic rights for DC citizens for decades to come.
At best, voting rights is a temporary measure. In 1997, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the DC Revitalization Act, stripping District government of many powers and functions that had been granted in years past. Even if the voting rights bill were passed and enacted without a legal challenge, Congress would retain power to revoke the voting seat in the House and repeal the District's limited home rule, and may very well do so if a hostile Republican faction regains control in the future. If Washington, DC became a state, Congress wouldn't have any such authority, any more than it can take over the government of California or Connecticut. Except for Southern states after they rebelled, Congress has never rescinded any state's power to govern itself.
Some local democracy advocates have declined to endorse the voting rights bill because the bestowal of a single voting seat in Congress, compared to the three voting seats representing every American who lives in a state, turns District residents into 'one-third citizens.' The voting rights bill thus recalls the 1787 Three-Fifths Compromise that labeled slaves 'three-fifth citizens' for purposes of voting apportionment in Congress -- a stinging insult for a city with an African American majority.
And finally, the voting rights bill does little or nothing to solve the lack of self-government. Let us not forget that political self-determination and self-government, not representation in a legislature, are the true measures of democracy.
Throughout history, colonies in Africa and Asia and conquered European nations like Ireland held voting seats in the legislatures of nations that ruled over them, while they still suffered exploitation and oppression. Many of these colonies, like Algeria, a French possession until 1962, became free only after violent revolutions. Our own Founding Fathers and Mothers in the thirteen colonies fought for independence, not voting rights. Patrick Henry never said, "Give me a vote in Parliament or give me death."
In the same spirit, groups like the Stand Up! for Democracy in DC Coalition, the DC Statehood Green Party, and the new multi-partisan DC Statehood -- Yes We Can coalition have adopted "DC Statehood Now!" and "Free DC!" as rallying cries. DC Statehood -- Yes We Can has led the effort to place posters throughout the city in preparation for Inauguration Day. With the encouragement of Michael Brown, the District's 'Shadow Senator' (some prefer the appellation 'Statehood Senator'), supporters lined the streets with 8,000 signs by Monday, January 13.
How DC Will Become a State
If a court rules that a voting seat in the House for Washington, DC is only possible through a constitutional amendment, then statehood will be easier to achieve, since it won't require ratification by the two-thirds of states necessary for an amendment.
In 1846, an Act of Congress removed Arlington from the District and ceded it to Virginia, demonstrating that, by simple majority, Congress may alter the borders of the constitutionally mandated federal enclave. Congress may therefore reduce the borders again, this time to encompass only the federal properties (the Mall, the land occupied by the White House, etc.), freeing the rest of the District to choose statehood in a plebescite vote.
Washington, DC (or whatever new name is chosen for the new state) would then be admitted to the union by a second simple-majority vote in Congress, as were all other states after the thirteen original colonies.
Arguments have been made for retrocession to Maryland, but both Maryland and District residents have mostly rejected the idea. Marylanders see Washington as a potential economic drain on their state, while District residents have traditionally favored statehood and balked at absorption into an existing state.
What will the new state look like? Its citizens will get their two Senators and one Representative as well as freedom from Congress's authority. We'll have our first state with an African American majority. Americans all over the US who live in cities, and who are now underrepresented in Congress -- especially in the Senate, since voters from suburban and rural areas tend to prevail in Senatorial elections -- will have permanent voices in both chambers speaking for their interests.
Two years ago, the DC Statehood Green Party and Stand Up! for Democracy in DC Coalition drafted a petition for DC statehood to be sent to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which monitor compliance with treaties that the US has signed and ratified. In 2006, the Human Rights Committee found that the District's lack of voting representation in Congress violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The ruling was the result of a decade of work by democracy advocate Tim Cooper.
DC statehood is attainable, but only if District residents can enlist the solidarity of Americans everywhere. The Obama inauguration will be an opportunity to place the argument for statehood in the national spotlight and persuade visitors enjoying Washington, DC hospitality that, as Gail Dixon has said, democracy for the District "is one of the last major legal civil rights hurdles."
Visitors, along with those watching the event on television and online, can follow up by doing what no resident of Washington, DC can. They can call up their Senators and Representatives and tell them that DC statehood is the right thing to do. Nearly 233 years after the Declaration of Independence, about 143 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and 45 years after the Civil Rights Act, democracy for the District of Columbia is a matter of overdue justice.
For more information about the movement for DC statehood, visit the following sites:
The DC Statehood Papers: Writings on DC Statehood & self-government, by Sam Smith
The DC Statehood Green Party
Stand Up! for Democracy in DC Coalition
DC Statehood -- Yes We Can
Monday, October 12, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
A Green response to Obama's health care speech: Mr. President, make health care a right for all Americans
After President Obama delivered his speech on health care reform before Congress on September 9, we got to hear the Republican rebuttal. As usual, the major media limited the public debate on health care to two sides, the moderate Democrats versus anti-reform Republicans, both of whom are under the influence of the for-profit insurance cartel and other corporate lobbies. Everything else is "off the table," to quote Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus's dismissal when he barred Medicare For All/Single Payer advocates from health care reform round-tables in May.
There are no Green members of the US Congress, although dozens of Greens have run for the US House and Senate in the past and more will run in 2010. Read what a Green member of Congress might have said Wednesday evening, if the media gave the Green Party the same air time as they give Democrats and Republicans....
* * *
President Obama was correct when he said, quoting the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, that health care was fundamentally a moral issue and a matter of "social justice and the character of our country." President Obama understands that we're in a national crisis -- that's why he wants to lead on health care reform.
But the President stopped short of asserting that health care should be made a right for all Americans. He said he has "no interest in putting insurance companies out of business." He did not admit the fact that the insurance industry's very existence depends on the power to restrict coverage, deny claims to those with coverage, cancel coverage for people when they need medical care most, and reject people who are high-risk because of low income, age, and prior medical condition. (President Obama related several accounts of such outrages in his speech.) The insurance business plays a middle-man role, exacting huge fees for its profits, administrative costs, overhead, and high CEO salaries, while providing no medical services.
As long as for-profit insurance continues to exist, access to health care remains secondary to corporate middle-man profits. Replacing private insurance and HMO coverage with a plan to make Medicare universal is the only solution.
Since Medicare doesn't function to make a profit, its administrative costs are about three percent. For-profit insurance takes about a 30 percent bite out of health care spending and imposes unwieldy administrative costs and paperwork on doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers. That's why health care eats up over 15 percent of domestic spending in the US, compared to about 9 percent in Canada, which has a Single-Payer system.
What do we get for all this extra spending, under the for-profit insurance status quo? Nearly 47 million Americans have no coverage at all. Even people with coverage are at risk. Most personal bankruptcies are caused by medical costs, and 7 out of 10 Americans bankrupted by medical costs have insurance. Infant mortality rates are higher in the US than in Canada and the UK, and life expectancies are lower, according to the World Health Organization.
America already has death panels -- they're called HMOs and insurance companies. (See this and this.)
This is a terrible waste of human lives, and a waste of money, too. President Obama knows that the Medicare For All / Single-Payer plan is the best solution. He has said so in the past, admitting that if one wanted to provide health care to all Americans, the only solution was Single-Payer (see this and this). But now that he is President, he won't challenge the power and profits of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
The President proposes a solution that would heavily regulate HMOs and insurance firms yet compensate them with huge payoffs. He would improve access to health insurance and reduce the number of uninsured, but at a cost of $1 trillion over ten years, according to preliminary estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. This $1 trillion includes subsidies to businesses to cover their employees. Since Obamacare would exempt 95% of small businesses from the employer insurance mandate, small business employees (many of whom are low-income) will have to be covered elsewhere -- an added expense. President Obama is simply wrong when he says he would not increase the federal deficit to pay for health care expansion.
Obamacare would also impose 'mandates.' The President made this clear when he said "under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance -- just as most states require you to carry auto insurance." The mandate plan would subsidize people who can't afford to purchase health insurance under this new law.
The Massachusetts mandate plan, passed three years ago, has not provided universal health care. The state's individual-mandate health reform law, which President Obama seeks to replicate on a national scale, has failed to cover at least 352,000 uninsured residents.
And Obamacare will protect drug company profits by maintaining the Bush ban on bulk purchasing of prescription drugs.
In his speech, President Obama urged inclusion of the public option. But he noted that the public option would not ever cover more than 5% of the American people. That's not a sufficient public option. We cannot drive down insurance premiums with a program that only covers 10 million people (a number likely to include millions of Americans who are either high-risk or suffer existing health problems). In the end, the President said that the public option is negotiable -- it might be no more than a bargaining chip in talks with Republicans and blue-dog Democrats.
In the end, Obamacare means a giant taxpayer-funded life-support system for private for-profit corporations, while Americans spend more money for less access. Is this necessary?
Insurance, pharmaceutical, and other big-business lobbies pumped millions of dollars into both Democratic and Republican campaigns in the last election to buy influence ($46,002,881 in insurance industry contributions in 2008). Now they're seeing their investment pay off -- just as Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions reaped campaign contribution rewards when the White House and Congress bailed out Wall Street earlier this year.
Media commentators are asking if President Obama can succeed in his bold effort to win bipartisan support. But for those of us excluded from the national debate, including the Green Party and other advocates of universal health care, bipartisanship too often means that Democrats and Republicans alike are serving the demands of corporate lobbyists instead of the public interest.
Whether Obamacare passes or Republicans, town-hall hecklers, and radio ranters succeed in blocking health care reform, the result will be a victory for insurance companies and other powerful corporations and a defeat for the American people.
The Green Party says: We can either protect insurance and drug companies and their profits, or we can save American lives and dollars by enacting Medicare For All / Single-Payer national health care. We demand Single-Payer.
What would we get if Single-Payer legislation were passed?
• Single-Payer covers every American regardless of employment, income, ability to pay, age, or prior medical condition. Everyone is guaranteed quality health care, including prescriptions: Everybody in, nobody out. Under Single-Payer, no American will face financial ruin because of illness or injury.
• Single-Payer is less bureaucratic than private insurance. Health care decisions are made solely by patient and physician. Single-Payer allows us to choose our physician, health care provider, and health care facility, without needing an approval from a government or insurance company bureaucrat.
• Single-Payer will cut health care costs by as much as a third and reduce what we pay for coverage. Health care will be funded at the federal level and administered at the state level. Working Americans will pay far less than what we now pay for private health coverage, because Single-Payer eliminates the profit-making insurance and HMO middle-men. By pooling risk among all of us, everyone would pay the same percent of their income -- replacing the current system, in which sick and poor Americans pay proportionally more.
• Single-payer will reduce paperwork for physicians and hospitals, one reason why thousands of MDs, other health care professionals, and medical students have endorsed single-payer. Physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers will compete to serve the public in a Single-Payer system, raising the quality of health care.
• Health care rationing? With private insurance, medical treatment is rationed according to your ability to pay for coverage. With Single-Payer, insurance company profits are abolished and health care is rationed according to need, with medical emergencies and serious illnesses receiving top priority.
• People of color (with or without coverage) and poor Americans have suffered the worst treatment under the status quo, and thus have the most to gain from Single-Payer. (See Cynthia McKinney's article "How Did We Get From There to Here? (100,000 Unnecessary Black Deaths Per Year)." )
• Single-Payer will boost our ailing economy and provide relief for businesses large and small, because it cancels the high expense and administrative burden of employer-based health benefits. Single-Payer will relieve cities, towns, and school boards from the cost of providing health insurance to employees, allowing responsible officials to reduce their budgets and lower local property taxes.
• Single-Payer gives government and citizens a common stake in preventive, holistic medicine and sound food policies to keep costs down while promoting greater public health. Greens support reorienting health care from expensive technology and pharmaceutical-based disease management to an integrative promotion of healthy lifestyles and alternative therapies, including therapies that have been used effectively for thousands of years as well as new ones that come from our increasing understanding of mind-body interactions. And we need to look at the incentives the US government currently provides. As Dr. Andrew Weil said in a recent interview with Larry King, "You can't have the government telling us to eat more fruits and vegetables and at the same time, through its subsidy program, ensuring that fruits and vegetables are the most expensive things in grocery stores and all the unhealthy stuff is the cheapest." (Larry King Live, CNN, September 10, 2009)
• Single-Payer is not socialized medicine. It is social insurance for health care. Under Single-Payer, private physicians and hospitals remain private. After treating a patient, instead of sending a bill to one of several hundred insurers, HMOs, or agencies (each with its own different and complex requirements), they send the bill to a single agency (hence 'Single-Payer') and then get paid. Calling Single-Payer socialism is like calling the defense industry socialism because Lockheed-Martin gets 96% of its revenue from government contracts.
For all these reasons, the Green Party supports Single-Payer/Medicare For All. It has always been in our national platform -- and Green candidates and elected public officials are firmly behind the demand for passage of HR 676, Rep. John Conyers' bill to expand Medicare to cover everyone. Greens take no corporate contributions and we don't take orders from any insurance, drug, or other corporate lobby.
We demand that Democrats make good on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pledge to bring HR 676 to the House floor for a debate and full vote up or down after Congress's August recess. Such a vote will require new studies by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congressional Budget Office on the cost of Single-Payer. Earlier GAO, CBO, and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) studies revealed that moving to a Medicare For All system would not increase federal spending but would save about $400 billion annually, or $4 trillion over ten years -- enough to cover nearly 47 million Americans uninsured and eliminate co-pays and deductibles for everyone.
We demand a televised national debate between advocates and opponents of Single-Payer, so Americans can hear the truth about universal health care.
We demand that the White House and Congress -- and the media -- acknowledge that a majority of the American people, according to numerous polls, want a plan to provide national health insurance. Recent polls show 59% in favor (see this and this). The majority of physicians favor such a plan, and so do America's mayors.
Despite these numbers, media coverage of 'Tea Party' protesters at town hall meetings has eclipsed the fact that most Americans support national health care.
In a 2004 CBC poll, citizens of Canada identified Tommy Douglas as the "greatest Canadian of all time." Tommy Douglas, a Baptist minister-turned-politician, led the effort to enact Single-Payer health care in Canada.
If Barack Obama led America as Tommy Douglas led Canada, he would leave a legacy of real change. By making health care a right for all, Mr. Obama would go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents, with the stature of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
(The foregoing was drafted by the Media Committee of the Green Party of the United States and released on September 14, 2009. The article was first published at OpEdNews.com on September 16, 2009.)
There are no Green members of the US Congress, although dozens of Greens have run for the US House and Senate in the past and more will run in 2010. Read what a Green member of Congress might have said Wednesday evening, if the media gave the Green Party the same air time as they give Democrats and Republicans....
* * *
President Obama was correct when he said, quoting the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, that health care was fundamentally a moral issue and a matter of "social justice and the character of our country." President Obama understands that we're in a national crisis -- that's why he wants to lead on health care reform.
But the President stopped short of asserting that health care should be made a right for all Americans. He said he has "no interest in putting insurance companies out of business." He did not admit the fact that the insurance industry's very existence depends on the power to restrict coverage, deny claims to those with coverage, cancel coverage for people when they need medical care most, and reject people who are high-risk because of low income, age, and prior medical condition. (President Obama related several accounts of such outrages in his speech.) The insurance business plays a middle-man role, exacting huge fees for its profits, administrative costs, overhead, and high CEO salaries, while providing no medical services.
As long as for-profit insurance continues to exist, access to health care remains secondary to corporate middle-man profits. Replacing private insurance and HMO coverage with a plan to make Medicare universal is the only solution.
Since Medicare doesn't function to make a profit, its administrative costs are about three percent. For-profit insurance takes about a 30 percent bite out of health care spending and imposes unwieldy administrative costs and paperwork on doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers. That's why health care eats up over 15 percent of domestic spending in the US, compared to about 9 percent in Canada, which has a Single-Payer system.
What do we get for all this extra spending, under the for-profit insurance status quo? Nearly 47 million Americans have no coverage at all. Even people with coverage are at risk. Most personal bankruptcies are caused by medical costs, and 7 out of 10 Americans bankrupted by medical costs have insurance. Infant mortality rates are higher in the US than in Canada and the UK, and life expectancies are lower, according to the World Health Organization.
America already has death panels -- they're called HMOs and insurance companies. (See this and this.)
This is a terrible waste of human lives, and a waste of money, too. President Obama knows that the Medicare For All / Single-Payer plan is the best solution. He has said so in the past, admitting that if one wanted to provide health care to all Americans, the only solution was Single-Payer (see this and this). But now that he is President, he won't challenge the power and profits of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
The President proposes a solution that would heavily regulate HMOs and insurance firms yet compensate them with huge payoffs. He would improve access to health insurance and reduce the number of uninsured, but at a cost of $1 trillion over ten years, according to preliminary estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. This $1 trillion includes subsidies to businesses to cover their employees. Since Obamacare would exempt 95% of small businesses from the employer insurance mandate, small business employees (many of whom are low-income) will have to be covered elsewhere -- an added expense. President Obama is simply wrong when he says he would not increase the federal deficit to pay for health care expansion.
Obamacare would also impose 'mandates.' The President made this clear when he said "under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance -- just as most states require you to carry auto insurance." The mandate plan would subsidize people who can't afford to purchase health insurance under this new law.
The Massachusetts mandate plan, passed three years ago, has not provided universal health care. The state's individual-mandate health reform law, which President Obama seeks to replicate on a national scale, has failed to cover at least 352,000 uninsured residents.
And Obamacare will protect drug company profits by maintaining the Bush ban on bulk purchasing of prescription drugs.
In his speech, President Obama urged inclusion of the public option. But he noted that the public option would not ever cover more than 5% of the American people. That's not a sufficient public option. We cannot drive down insurance premiums with a program that only covers 10 million people (a number likely to include millions of Americans who are either high-risk or suffer existing health problems). In the end, the President said that the public option is negotiable -- it might be no more than a bargaining chip in talks with Republicans and blue-dog Democrats.
In the end, Obamacare means a giant taxpayer-funded life-support system for private for-profit corporations, while Americans spend more money for less access. Is this necessary?
Insurance, pharmaceutical, and other big-business lobbies pumped millions of dollars into both Democratic and Republican campaigns in the last election to buy influence ($46,002,881 in insurance industry contributions in 2008). Now they're seeing their investment pay off -- just as Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions reaped campaign contribution rewards when the White House and Congress bailed out Wall Street earlier this year.
Media commentators are asking if President Obama can succeed in his bold effort to win bipartisan support. But for those of us excluded from the national debate, including the Green Party and other advocates of universal health care, bipartisanship too often means that Democrats and Republicans alike are serving the demands of corporate lobbyists instead of the public interest.
Whether Obamacare passes or Republicans, town-hall hecklers, and radio ranters succeed in blocking health care reform, the result will be a victory for insurance companies and other powerful corporations and a defeat for the American people.
The Green Party says: We can either protect insurance and drug companies and their profits, or we can save American lives and dollars by enacting Medicare For All / Single-Payer national health care. We demand Single-Payer.
What would we get if Single-Payer legislation were passed?
• Single-Payer covers every American regardless of employment, income, ability to pay, age, or prior medical condition. Everyone is guaranteed quality health care, including prescriptions: Everybody in, nobody out. Under Single-Payer, no American will face financial ruin because of illness or injury.
• Single-Payer is less bureaucratic than private insurance. Health care decisions are made solely by patient and physician. Single-Payer allows us to choose our physician, health care provider, and health care facility, without needing an approval from a government or insurance company bureaucrat.
• Single-Payer will cut health care costs by as much as a third and reduce what we pay for coverage. Health care will be funded at the federal level and administered at the state level. Working Americans will pay far less than what we now pay for private health coverage, because Single-Payer eliminates the profit-making insurance and HMO middle-men. By pooling risk among all of us, everyone would pay the same percent of their income -- replacing the current system, in which sick and poor Americans pay proportionally more.
• Single-payer will reduce paperwork for physicians and hospitals, one reason why thousands of MDs, other health care professionals, and medical students have endorsed single-payer. Physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers will compete to serve the public in a Single-Payer system, raising the quality of health care.
• Health care rationing? With private insurance, medical treatment is rationed according to your ability to pay for coverage. With Single-Payer, insurance company profits are abolished and health care is rationed according to need, with medical emergencies and serious illnesses receiving top priority.
• People of color (with or without coverage) and poor Americans have suffered the worst treatment under the status quo, and thus have the most to gain from Single-Payer. (See Cynthia McKinney's article "How Did We Get From There to Here? (100,000 Unnecessary Black Deaths Per Year)." )
• Single-Payer will boost our ailing economy and provide relief for businesses large and small, because it cancels the high expense and administrative burden of employer-based health benefits. Single-Payer will relieve cities, towns, and school boards from the cost of providing health insurance to employees, allowing responsible officials to reduce their budgets and lower local property taxes.
• Single-Payer gives government and citizens a common stake in preventive, holistic medicine and sound food policies to keep costs down while promoting greater public health. Greens support reorienting health care from expensive technology and pharmaceutical-based disease management to an integrative promotion of healthy lifestyles and alternative therapies, including therapies that have been used effectively for thousands of years as well as new ones that come from our increasing understanding of mind-body interactions. And we need to look at the incentives the US government currently provides. As Dr. Andrew Weil said in a recent interview with Larry King, "You can't have the government telling us to eat more fruits and vegetables and at the same time, through its subsidy program, ensuring that fruits and vegetables are the most expensive things in grocery stores and all the unhealthy stuff is the cheapest." (Larry King Live, CNN, September 10, 2009)
• Single-Payer is not socialized medicine. It is social insurance for health care. Under Single-Payer, private physicians and hospitals remain private. After treating a patient, instead of sending a bill to one of several hundred insurers, HMOs, or agencies (each with its own different and complex requirements), they send the bill to a single agency (hence 'Single-Payer') and then get paid. Calling Single-Payer socialism is like calling the defense industry socialism because Lockheed-Martin gets 96% of its revenue from government contracts.
For all these reasons, the Green Party supports Single-Payer/Medicare For All. It has always been in our national platform -- and Green candidates and elected public officials are firmly behind the demand for passage of HR 676, Rep. John Conyers' bill to expand Medicare to cover everyone. Greens take no corporate contributions and we don't take orders from any insurance, drug, or other corporate lobby.
We demand that Democrats make good on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pledge to bring HR 676 to the House floor for a debate and full vote up or down after Congress's August recess. Such a vote will require new studies by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congressional Budget Office on the cost of Single-Payer. Earlier GAO, CBO, and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) studies revealed that moving to a Medicare For All system would not increase federal spending but would save about $400 billion annually, or $4 trillion over ten years -- enough to cover nearly 47 million Americans uninsured and eliminate co-pays and deductibles for everyone.
We demand a televised national debate between advocates and opponents of Single-Payer, so Americans can hear the truth about universal health care.
We demand that the White House and Congress -- and the media -- acknowledge that a majority of the American people, according to numerous polls, want a plan to provide national health insurance. Recent polls show 59% in favor (see this and this). The majority of physicians favor such a plan, and so do America's mayors.
Despite these numbers, media coverage of 'Tea Party' protesters at town hall meetings has eclipsed the fact that most Americans support national health care.
In a 2004 CBC poll, citizens of Canada identified Tommy Douglas as the "greatest Canadian of all time." Tommy Douglas, a Baptist minister-turned-politician, led the effort to enact Single-Payer health care in Canada.
If Barack Obama led America as Tommy Douglas led Canada, he would leave a legacy of real change. By making health care a right for all, Mr. Obama would go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents, with the stature of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
(The foregoing was drafted by the Media Committee of the Green Party of the United States and released on September 14, 2009. The article was first published at OpEdNews.com on September 16, 2009.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
