Fake CA Health Reform is DEAD
HUGE: Fake CA Health Reform is DEAD
[
size=12]More than SCHIP, the important action in the movement for guaranteed healthcare is happening in California, where the insurance industry almost pulled off the big scam, getting Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Speaker Fabian Nunez to cooperate on a plan forcing the sale of more expensive, unworkable insurance products?and blocking the guaranteed, single-payer reform this country needs.

...cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association?s Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

The quick background for those of you who missed it...insurance corporations have set the terms of the debate this year in California, with Schwarzenegger proposing that all individuals be forced to purchase private insurance products, and Nunez and certain corporate Dems countering that all employers be forced to purchase them on behalf of their workforce. Both plans would give more customers, revenue, and medical influence to the very insurance corporations who have ruined our healthcare system...while doing nothing to actually solve our healthcare crisis.

Everything has changed as a broad coalition of mainstream Dems has realized that Arnold?s plan is unaffordable for the average patient. Of course it is! Private insurers waste one-third of care dollars on overhead and profits. You simply cannot do that and provide people with the care they need. Of course, any plan built on private insurance corporations is unworkable.

But what really kills the deal is the fact that Speaker Nunez? wife has just gone on the payroll of the hospital industry, having been hired by a lobbying group funded by the California Hospital Association. It is quite possible that he will be legally required to recuse himself on all healthcare bills...including the one he is trying to push through with Schwarzenegger. Even if not, the symbolism of doubling his family income through HMO money leaves him with no credibility on the issue.

Or as Zenei Cortez, RN, put it: "Californians can no longer trust that he will represent the public interest and not the financial interest of a large industry that has put his wife on their payroll."

To join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a "Medicare for All" or SinglePayer financing), visit GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association.[/size]