Only YOU Can Save Health Care Reform-ACT NOW!

Only YOU Can Save Health Care Reform- so please ACT NOW!
A note from Rabbi Michael Lerner & FROM TIKKUN MAGAZINE'S OUTREACH AND EDUCATION ARM: THE NETWORK OF SPIRITUAL PROGRESSIVES
These next few weeks when Congresspeople and Senators are in their home districts is the critical moment.

The Right knows that. They've organized their zealots to disrupt Congressional public meetings to give the false impression that there is a populist revolt against extending health care to the poor and against challenging the private insurance companies and pharmaeuticals.

The liberals have disempowered themselves by trying to come up with health care plans that extend coverage but meanwhile protect the insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and hospital/medical profiteers. The only way they can do that is to raise the costs on the Middle Class, either through taxes or through reduction of services or through hidden price increases. Not realizing that whatever they propose is going to be labeled "socialized medicine," they've already weakened their "public option" dramatically, and worse is yet to come in the Fall.

The only rational alternative is Single Payer, as promoted by Bernie Sanders in the Senate and John Conyers in the House HR 676. But this will not have a chance against the tens of millions of dollars being spent by the insurance companies and pharmaceuticals and health-care profiteers-- unless your Congresspeople hear from you and everyone you know, insisting that they too support some version of "health care for all" (Single Payer).

You can write to your Congressperson's and Senator's home district office. You can find that address for your Congress person by going to https://writerep.house.gov/htbin/wrep_findrep and for your U.S. Senators
try: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

The best thing to do is to write a personal letter-not an email, because a personal letter takes you longer and hence shows your elected Congressional and Senatorial reps that you are really willing to take the time and so they must take you more seriously. Also, find out if there is going to be a public meeting, and insist on speaking. Go with at least 2 other friends who will support YOU to insist that your elected rep support Single Payer. If you can't do either of these, then at least telephone call these representatives or, if you can't do any of the other approaches, then email him or her.

If you don't feel competent to discuss these issues, go to www.tikkun.org and read our editorial and Aaron Roland's article on health care. Or read them in the July/August issue of the magazine. [My editorial about Why The Left Lost Single Payer refers only to the fact that we had not yet gotten it into the national debate, and how we need to reframe it in order to do so. Now that Cong. Pelosi has promised an actual VOTE on single payer, it's back in the game, but what it would need to win is detailed in that editorial.]
Next, go to Physicians for a National Health Plan at http://www.pnhp.org/ and read through that website, plus go to www/guaranteedhelathcare.org/legislation/hr-676-conyers/united-states-national-health-insurance-act/. Contact these organizations to get more information and to help you work with their members in this project to counter the misinformation being spread by the health profiteers and insurance companies.

Now can you see why it would have made sense for you to have taken the initiative to create or sustain a Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) chapter in your area? If that existed now, you'd go together as a chapter to talk about these issues with your elected representatives. You'd be part of an efficient force, and you wouldn't have to face the dichotomy that ethical concern forces on you today: either to act on your own, or just let the Right have its way nationally. So there's a lesson to learn here: please join the Network of Spiritual Progressives now, before passing "Go," before doing anything else. You can do that right now at www.spiritualprogressives.org. Without that support, we have no way of carrying on this kind of public education work!!!

Next, please send this note to every single person on your email lists, and ask if any of them might be willing to go with you to your Congressperson or their own, or to send a letter of their own. Please urge them too to become familiar enough with the issues that they won't be intimidated when your Congressperson pretends that the "public option" is going to do enough. You need only read the details of Obama's deal with the pharmaceuticals (they agree to support his plan plus reducing costs of drugs for Medicare by $80 billion over the course of ten years-in exchange for Obama not backing calls for a plan that would allow Medicare and "the public option" to seek other possible sources of drugs that might drive the cost of drugs down much further and provide much greater savings to the ordinary consumer of prescription drugs (like me, for example, who, post cancer-surgery, now have run out of my limited medicare coverage of drugs and have to pay out-of-pocket (because the limits of drug care coverage has been exhausted for this year-so I'm going to have to pay over $1,000 a month for these prescription drugs). Even if you are on vacation, you could take the time to write the letter that needs to be received by both your US Senators plus your Congressperson (even if you are "sure" that they won't listen-because if enough people write, they will listen).

OK, this is where we get Love Embodied or Compassion Armed or Generosity Empowered-this is the real moment folks, and it all depends on each of us to act now! Spiritual progressives can't be real if they are not willing to struggle for caring-for-all. Of course, if we fail to win at this point, we will continue the struggle in the Fall, and in the future. Just check out our Spiritual Covenant with America and you'll see our larger programmatic vision-because the only way we will ever win the changes that make for a society based on generosity and compassion is when we are willing to fight for fundamental changes. And please read my editorial in the Sept/Oct 2009 issue of Tikkun which you'll be getting in a few weeks if you subscribe or are a payed-up member of the Network of Spiritual Progressives-to get a fuller description of why being "moderate," "pragmatic" and "realistic" has actually undermined Obama's popularity and failed as a strategy.
Don't let anyone convince you to moderate your message away from a Single Payer National Health Plan, because sticking with "Single Payer" may be the only way to get moderates who like to find the "middle" to stick with even a reasonably serious "public option" which they won't stick with if that is the left end of the debate, because they they'll simply try to be realistic by moving further and further from what is needed and toward accommodating to the needs of the insurance companies and health care profiteers. So, advocate for Single Payer to get even a vaguely reasonable "public option." And in general, you'll get more of what you want in social change if you fight for your whole most utopian or idealistic vision--and let others then make the compromises, knowing that they have to take you into account.
The best legislation we've gotten in the past forty years came from Richard Nixon's White House--not because he believed in the things he eventually supported, like the creation of various environmental restrictions and safeguards, but because his positions were trying to head off an even more militant mass movement of progressives that was demanding much more. It is the absence of that movement that cripples the liberals in Congress and Obama in the White House--and our task is to recreate it, but to do so with a different kind of discourse, not a discourse of "rights" but a discourse of love. And in the final analysis, the entire health care debate comes down to this: are you willing to take seriously the Biblical command that we must "love the stranger" and care for the poor and the powerless!
Love and blessings,
Michael

Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun Chair, The Network of Spiritual Progressives
RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org 510 644 1200


Single-Payer National Health Insurance


Single-payer national health insurance is a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health financing, but delivery of care remains largely private.
Currently, the U.S. health care system is outrageously expensive, yet inadequate. Despite spending more than twice as much as the rest of the industrialized nations ($7,129 per capita), the United States performs poorly in comparison on major health indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and immunization rates. Moreover, the other advanced nations provide comprehensive coverage to their entire populations, while the U.S. leaves 45.7 million completely uninsured and millions more inadequately covered.

The reason we spend more and get less than the rest of the world is because we have a patchwork system of for-profit payers. Private insurers necessarily waste health dollars on things that have nothing to do with care: overhead, underwriting, billing, sales and marketing departments as well as huge profits and exorbitant executive pay. Doctors and hospitals must maintain costly administrative staffs to deal with the bureaucracy. Combined, this needless administration consumes one-third (31 percent) of Americans' health dollars.
Single-payer financing is the only way to recapture this wasted money. The potential savings on paperwork, more than $350 billion per year, are enough to provide comprehensive coverage to everyone without paying any more than we already do.
Under a single-payer system, all Americans would be covered for all medically necessary services, including: doctor, hospital, preventive, long-term care, mental health, reproductive health care, dental, vision, prescription drug and medical supply costs. Patients would regain free choice of doctor and hospital, and doctors would regain autonomy over patient care.
Physicians would be paid fee-for-service according to a negotiated formulary or receive salary from a hospital or nonprofit HMO / group practice. Hospitals would receive a global budget for operating expenses. Health facilities and expensive equipment purchases would be managed by regional health planning boards.
A single-payer system would be financed by eliminating private insurers and recapturing their administrative waste. Modest new taxes would replace premiums and out-of-pocket payments currently paid by individuals and business. Costs would be controlled through negotiated fees, global budgeting and bulk purchasing.
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Visit a WA Chapter of NSP or Tikkun and The Network of Spiritual Progressives to learn more.