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Universal health care nothing like 'socialism'  
First published: Saturday, August 18, 2007

The Times Union needs to do a better job calling out right-wing Republicans who continually raise the old "socialism" saw every time there's a new proposal for universal medical and mental health care. When President Harry Truman campaigned in 1948 on a government health insurance plank, this same group called it "socialism."

  
Yes, the same crowd that also called Social Security, unemployment insurance and the 40-hour workweek "socialistic."

Isn't it time the corporate-conservative, reactionary right did some new scripting?

The fact is genuine socialized medicine would be the nationalization of the hospitals, and putting every medical doctor, nurse and social worker on the government payroll. No one, absolutely no one, is proposing this.

A creditable universal health care plan would extend Medicare coverage, now for seniors older than 65, to all. I can count on my fingers the number of elderly people who think Medicare is a bad program.

The next time conservatives parrot "socialism," remind them they seem to have no problem at all with all kinds of big government handouts and giveaways to the corporations and business monopolies: tax breaks, tax abatements, low-interest development loans, enterprise zones, seven direct cash subsidies. This is so out of hand that sometimes the average citizen has trouble telling the difference between government and the corporations to whom they pander.

PERRY CHET KING Albany

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The next time conservatives parrot "socialism," remind them they seem to have no problem at all with all kinds of big government handouts and giveaways to the corporations and business monopolies: tax breaks, tax abatements, low-interest development loans, enterprise zones, seven direct cash subsidies. This is so out of hand that sometimes the average citizen has trouble telling the difference between government and the corporations to whom they pander

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I can count on my fingers the number of elderly people who think Medicare is a bad program

Quoted from JoAnn

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My mom has Senior Blue which is a spin off of Medicare. And although she has had no complaints to the present, there are only a handful of doctors that will accept her insurance and her perscriptions must be approved.

My mother in law has Senior Blue but she does have more medical condiitons than my mom. She has had stints placed in both of her arteries and the doctor prescribed Plavix for her. This perscription costs approx $300/mo. Senior Blue will not cover this drug, so she will not take them.

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August 1, 2007

Senator Clinton Calls for Passage of Bill to Enable More Children to Benefit from the Children's Health Insurance Program

Urges Support for Clinton Amendment to Extend Family and Medical Leave for Families of Wounded Soldiers

(Editorial note: I thought we were getting away from these sort of amendments once we cleaned out the "sewage" that had been in DC)

Washington, DC - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today spoke on the floor of the Senate, urging passage of legislation to cover more children under the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). She also called on her colleagues to support bipartisan legislation, cosponsored by Senators Dole, Mikulski, Graham, Kennedy and Brown, that she has introduced as an amendment to the SCHIP bill that would extend the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) for up to six months for spouses and parents of soldiers who have been injured in combat. The amendment would enact a key recommendation of the Commission on Care for America’s Returning Wounded Warriors.

The following is a transcript of Senator Clinton's remarks on the Senate floor:

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Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague from Washington for her usual, very thorough, and persuasive statement on the floor about the need for flexibility in this important program and the recognition that healthcare, like everything else, costs differently depending upon where you are in the country. And I thank the Senator from Washington for reinforcing that important point.

But the larger point is this: today in this Congress, we are on the verge of providing the greatest expansion of health coverage for our children since the creation of the Children's Health Insurance Program a decade ago. I believe--and I don't imagine anyone in this chamber would argue--with the belief that every child deserves a healthy start in life. Certainly, we try to provide that healthy start for our own children and we give a lot of lip service to the idea that we should provide it for all children, yet far too many children in our nation -- more than nine million -- do not have healthcare.

I was very proud to help create the State Children's Health Insurance Program during the Clinton Administration, working on this legislation during my time as First Lady. And after the bill passed, I worked to get the word out and try to help more children and their parents understand what this new program could mean for them and encourage them to sign up in the first few years. In the Senate, I have continued that effort, fighting to ensure healthcare for children has the priority in our budget that it deserves.

So today, thanks to the work of so many, CHIP provides health insurance for six million children. Now, in New York alone, almost 400,000 children benefit from this program every month.

With the legislation that Chairman Baucus and Senators Grassley, Rockefeller and Hatch helped to craft, an additional 50,000 children in my state of New York will have access to health insurance coverage. This legislation will also help enroll many of the 300,000 children in New York who live in families that are already eligible because their families make less than $52,000 a year--250 percent of the poverty level for a family of four. In total across our country, 3.2 million children who are uninsured will gain coverage. That will reduce the number of uninsured children by one third over the next five years.

Now, Mr. President, if we can afford tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and tax cuts for oil companies that are making record profits, I certainly think we can find it in our hearts and budget to help cover millions of children who deserve a healthy start.

I want to be clear, if the president vetoes this bill, he will be vetoing healthcare for more than three million children. And once again the President will have put ideology, not children, first.

Earlier this year, I was proud to introduce legislation with Congressman John Dingell to reauthorize and expand CHIP, and I'm very pleased that a number of the ideas in our bill are included in this legislation, such as cutting the red tape and bolstering incentives to get eligible children into the program.

The legislation also improves access to private coverage and expands access to benefits like mental health and dental coverage. This is so important.

And I really applaud the Finance Committee under Chairman Baucus' leadership. Mental health and dental coverage are too often left out when we talk about healthcare.

Well, not far from where I'm standing, in the state of Maryland, last year, a young boy, Deamonte Driver, had a toothache. And his mother sought help for him to be able to get dental care. She called dentists, but they weren't taking any more children on Medicaid or on CHIP, and then she got help from a legal aid group that helped poor families. They called around, and I think they called 27 or 28 dentists who said, look, our quota for poor kids is filled.

Well, Deamonte Driver's toothache turned into an abscess. And the abscess burst, infecting his bloodstream, and he ended up in the hospital where doctors valiantly tried to save his life from the brain infection that resulted from the abscessed tooth that had not been treated. This young man died.

And when one thinks about the loss of a child over something that started as a toothache, it is heartbreaking, but it is not by any means an isolated case. And at the end of Deamonte's life, the state of Maryland and the United States government ended up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for emergency care, for intensive care, for life support to no avail, for want of $80-100 to find a dentist who would care for Deamonte.

So, I really commend the authors of this bipartisan bill for their work and for bringing forward a practical, fiscally responsible compromise that will allow us to reauthorize this important program and expand coverage. And I'm eager to see that it is signed into law.

I am disappointed, however, that the bill we are considering this week fails to include the Legal Immigrant Children's Health Improvement Act, which I introduced with Senator Snowe. Senator Snowe and I have been working on this for a number of years. This bipartisan bill would give states the flexibility to provide the same Medicaid and CHIP coverage to low income, legal immigrant children and pregnant women as is provided to U.S. Citizens. I will underscore that, we are talking about legal immigrant children and legal pregnant women.

I really believe that we should provide this flexibility to states because the current restrictions prevent thousands of legal immigrant children and pregnant women from receiving preventive health services and treatment for minor illnesses before they become serious. Families who are unable to access care for their children have little choice but to turn to emergency rooms. And this hurts children and pregnant women, plain and simple. And I urge my colleagues to support my amendment to lift the ban on Medicaid and CHIP coverage for low income, legal immigrant children and pregnant women.

I also am disappointed that some of my colleagues have expressed concern about states like New York, New Jersey and others that have chosen to cover children above 300 percent of the poverty level. The legislation we are considering on the floor would allow New York to continue doing this and receive the CHIP matching rate. We should not punish children and their families who live in high cost areas and who need healthcare coverage. And I encourage my colleagues to vote against any effort to undermine the extension of healthcare in high cost states where it costs more--as we heard from Senator Cantwell and her statement on the floor--to provide the same coverage and treatment one would get elsewhere in our country.

So, I'm proud that we are debating a bill to expand healthcare to 3.2 million children. But the fact is, there should be no debating the moral crisis of nine million children without healthcare; no debating the moral urgency of strengthening our healthcare system for children and all Americans. Ultimately, Mr. President, the answer will be in a cost-effective, quality-driven, uniquely-American program that provides healthcare to every single man, woman, and child in our country. But until we get to that point, it is imperative that the Congress pass this bill before we go out for recess and send it to the president with the hope that he will sign it into law.

I would also like to mention another issue we urgently need to address. Last week, the bipartisan Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors -- chaired by former Senator Bob Dole and former Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala -- issued its final report on the need to reform the medical care that our troops and veterans receive.

The commission found, in an excellent report—it's not one of these commission reports that just take up a lot of space on the shelf; it’s very pointed with six specific recommendations—and it found that one of the most important ways to improve care for injured servicemembers is to improve support for their families. That's why I introduced a bipartisan bill, the Military Family and Medical Leave Act with Senators Dole, Mikulski, Graham, Kennedy and Brown, to implement a key recommendation of the commission. And we have offered this as an amendment to the CHIP legislation.

The Family and Medical Leave Act was the first bill signed into law under the Clinton Administration. It came about because of a lot of hard work led by Senator Dodd here in the Senate and others, and it has proven to be enormously successful, helping more than 60 million men and women who try to balance the demands of work and family. I believe it is time to strengthen the Act for military families who find themselves in a very difficult situation. They should be given up to six months of leave to care for a loved one who has sustained a combat-related injury.

Currently, these spouses, parents, and children can receive only 12 weeks of leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. All too often, this is just not enough time, as injured servicemembers grapple with traumatic brain injuries, severe physical wounds and other problems upon returning from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

In fact, 33 percent of active duty, 22 percent of reservists, and 37 percent of retired servicemembers reported to the commission that a family member or close friend had to leave their homes for extended periods of time to help them in the hospital. About 20 percent said family or friends gave up jobs to be with them to act as their caregiver.

This is a step that we can take immediately that will make a real difference. Many of us have been to hospitals here in our own country—Walter Reed, Brook Army Medical Center-- and other places in the world, like Landstuhl in Germany, where we've seen our wounded warriors. There is no doubt that having the support, assistance and comfort of a family member during that process when a young man or woman who has served our country is brought from the battlefield to the hospital, makes a big difference in recovery and rehabilitation. I think all of us agree that not only do our men and women in uniform make tremendous sacrifices on our behalf, so do their families. And as a nation, we have a duty to provide them with the support that they deserve to have.

So, Mr. President, expanding access to healthcare for children and providing better support for our military families comes down to basic values that we as Americans hold dear. I think we all agree every child deserves a healthy start and every man or woman who wears the uniform of our country deserves more than words of support. The promise of America is rooted in these values, and I am very proud to support the bipartisan legislation expanding healthcare for children. And I urge my colleagues to join me and the Senators from both sides of the aisle who are supporting our military families who are caring for those who have been injured in service to our country.

And, Mr. President, finally, we hope that on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue there will be a change of heart, that the president will decide to sign this legislation and relieve the burdens of ill health and inadequate access to healthcare that haunt the lives of so many American families. Mr. President, please support this effort in every way possible by signing the legislation that will be sent to you. I yield the floor.

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Health care returns as force in presidential politics
BY NANCY BENAC The Associated Press

   WASHINGTON — It’s been 14 years since first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health care reform plan sank like a stone, swallowed by fears of a big-government power grab. In the years since, wary presidential candidates at first avoided the issue altogether, then gingerly dipped one toe, then another, back into the pool.
   This year, no self-respecting presidential candidate wants to be without a health care overhaul plan, and talk about “universal coverage” is back.
   There is a stark difference between the medicine being prescribed by Democrats and Republicans.
   Democratic candidates argue it is the government’s job to make sure everyone has health insurance they cannot lose. Republicans are pushing more limited incentives and subsidies to help people obtain affordable coverage.
   Both sides are trying to steer clear of anything resembling the 1993 plan. Clinton — this time the candidate rather than the spouse — comes out with her own plan Monday, adamant that “we’re going to get it done this time.”
   Democrats in general and the New York senator in particular approach the debate this time with better bedside manners than in the last major go-around.
   Even defenders of Clinton’s 1993 effort to change the system say the process scared the patient — namely, middle-income people who may want a better way, but have insurance and do not want to step into the unknown with health care.
   Those fears were embodied by a middle-class couple named Harry and Louise, characters in an advertising campaign sponsored by the health insurance industry. The ads, targeting mainly opinionmakers in Washington and New York, showed the couple fretting over having to get their insurance through a new “billion-dollar bureaucracy” that would include mandatory health insurance purchasing alliances.
   This time, the candidates are all “being very careful to say that, look, if you have health insurance today, you can keep it,” said Kenneth Thorpe, a professor of health policy at Emory University. He has helped the top four Democrats crunch the numbers of their plans and was involved in Clinton’s 1993 effort.
   “The Harry and Louise ad was one of those things where people were concerned that people have to move from what they have to a plan they didn’t really know.” Thorpe said. “The lesson is, the less disruptive you make it, it makes it very difficult for Harry and Louise to come out and criticize it.”
   Already, the GOP candidates are branding Democratic proposals a step on the road to socialized medicine while they offer incremental steps such as tax breaks to expand coverage and make it more affordable.
   “Let me tell ya, if we don’t do it, the Democrats will,” warns Republican Mitt Romney. “And if the Democrats do it, it’ll be socialized medicine. It will be governmentmanaged care. It’ll be what’s known as Hillary-care or Barack Obamacare or whatever you want to call it.”
   Polls indicate health coverage ranks high with voters as a concern and that people are willing to pay higher taxes to ensure those without coverage get it.
   Two-thirds in a Pew poll this year supported government-financed health insurance for all. But that is absent the sticky details of how it would work or how much it would cost.
   Robert Blendon, who directs the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy, said the current climate favors Democratic activism on health care but that could change quickly if the insured believe there is a threat to what they have.
   “The Democrats have tried to tone it down,” Blendon said, and for the most part are trying to avoid alienating insurers, physicians and hospitals. John Edwards, whose plan is the boldest among the top tier of candidates because it mandates universal coverage, has not been shy about taking on the industry.
   “But I think you will find Clinton reaching out to these groups with plans that many find quite acceptable,” Blendon said.
   Clinton has said she wants to “figure out how we provide universal health care without putting billions more into the system.” Her goal has been universal coverage in eight years.
   And what might Harry and Louise think of all this?
   The health insurance association that sponsored the ads has since merged into a new trade group called America’s Health Insurance Plans. Chief executive Karen Ignagni strikes a conciliatory tone, saying there is greater consensus this time to move toward universal coverage — and a better understanding of the political realities in getting there.
   “We’re in a different place than we were,” she said. “I think that both sides are going to have to be very, very careful.”
   Democrats, she said, look at the Clinton-era debacle and know they have to be careful to avoid overreaching. Republicans, likewise, know they should not underreach, she said.
   “The sweet spot in the middle is trying to create a workable program that individuals who currently have coverage believe is the right direction and will not cause them to lose coverage.”

Then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, holding a copy of the Clinton health-care plan, kicks off a threestate sales campaign during a visit to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in this Oct. 28, 1993, file photo

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Polls indicate health coverage ranks high with voters as a concern and that people are willing to pay higher taxes to ensure those without coverage get it.

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Main Entry: 1in·sur·ance  
Pronunciation: \in-ˈshu̇r-ən(t)s also ˈin-ˌ\
Function: noun
Date: 1651
1 a: the business of insuring persons or property b: coverage by contract whereby one party undertakes to indemnify or guarantee another against loss by a specified contingency or peril c: the sum for which something is insured
2: a means of guaranteeing protection or safety

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Main Entry: 1care  
Pronunciation: \ˈker\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English caru; akin to Old High German kara lament, Old Irish gairm call, cry, Latin garrire to chatter
Date: before 12th century
1: suffering of mind : grief
2 a: a disquieted state of mixed uncertainty, apprehension, and responsibility b: a cause for such anxiety
3 a: painstaking or watchful attention b: maintenance
4: regard coming from desire or esteem5: charge, supervision
6: a person or thing that is an object of attention, anxiety, or solicitude

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Polls indicate health coverage ranks high with voters as a concern and that people are willing to pay higher taxes to ensure those without coverage get it.

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Tax gambling to pay for health care

I wonder if another source of revenue, along with taxing cigarettes, could help pay for health care.
What if we tried a federal “Powerball” lottery, and each state held “Powerball” lotteries, and all taxes on OTB, lotteries, slot machines went into a general health care fund?
Then, for “a dollar and a dream,” the dream might be health care for all.
PEG LAPO
Delanson

Quoted from Admin

http://www.dailygazette.com

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Doctors Group Applauds Bush Veto

Thursday, October 18, 2007 7:47 PM

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons issued the following statement from Kathryn Serkes, director of policy and public affairs, in response to the House of Representative’s failure today to override President Bush’s veto of a bill to reauthorize and expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP):


“We support the President’s veto of this massive, messy bill that would have spent almost as much money on doctors and seniors as it would have on children’s medical care.




“This bill is an example of the worst of political sausage-making. In the old joke, we’re warned that we really don’t want to know what’s chopped up and thrown in the pot to get the end product.


“This bill is like an extremely expensive sausage filled with mystery meats that have nothing to do with delivering medical care to poor children who have no other means to get it. And no one has bothered to analyze the contents.




“Some physician and other groups are cynically using the cry ‘for the kids’ to advance their own agendas and self-interests when in reality, about HALF – or more than $10 billion a year -- is diverted to doctors and seniors.


“The numbers tell the story: according to the AMA’s action alerts, over ten years about $117 billion was allocated to doctors and seniors, with $129 billion for children’s programs. It includes almost $70 billion for physician Medicare payments, a pet project of the American Medical Association; about $50 billion for Medicare beneficiaries; and cuts physician-owned hospitals off at the knees, a blow to patients of all ages but a big win for the American Hospital Association.


“Also, it does such a bad job of targeting assistance to truly needy children that it isn’t even on the radar screen. About 60 percent of children currently eligible already have private insurance, and more than 75 percent eligible under this expansion already have private insurance.


“Since so many families well above the poverty level are included in this bill, a much simpler and effective strategy to get them affordable insurance would be to allow them to purchase insurance policies outside their own states. This would open up the markets for families held hostage by states with massive mandates and regulatory costs that drive up insurance premiums, such as New Jersey.


“Rather than sue the federal government to force the SCHIP reauthorizations, governors and attorneys general would do well to consider the model legislation passed this summer by the state legislator members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) called ‘Health Care Choice Act for States.’ This simple act would increase the buying power of millions of SCHIP-eligible families without burdening the taxpayers or paying off the doctors.”

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“Rather than sue the federal government to force the SCHIP reauthorizations, governors and attorneys general would do well to consider the model legislation passed this summer by the state legislator members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) called ‘Health Care Choice Act for States.’ This simple act would increase the buying power of millions of SCHIP-eligible families without burdening the taxpayers or paying off the doctors.”