by Mike Hall, Aug 19, 2009
e Hall, Aug 19, 2009
While TV news reports continue to focus on the loud, angry and sometimes just plain bizarre antics of health care reform opponents, union members are mobilizing to counter the big lies, at town hall meetings and forums around the country.
Just yesterday, some 100 union members brought their voices to a Clovis, N.M., town hall meeting with Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D) as did another 100 at Democratic Rep. Vic Snyder’s Little Rock, Ark., meeting. More than two dozen union members met AFSCME’s Highway to Health Care tour bus when it pulled into Shreveport, La., yesterday.
Over the weekend, hundreds of people in Rutland, Vt., carrying red placards and wearing T-shirts stating “Healthcare Is a Human Right, took part in a health care town hall, shifting the debate 180 degrees from a similar event less than two months ago. The members of the Vermont Workers’ Center/Jobs with Justice made sure lawmakers at the town hall heard their voices this time, a sharp contrast with the 200-person “Tea Party” event pushed by extremist radio shows weeks before.
In a column on Huffington Post, Stewart Acuff, special assistant to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, writes that the radical right is attempting to shut down health care reform and change by intimidation and force and the power of the Big Lies. He says union members and their allies are fighting for “a healthcare system that ensures quality healthcare for all and checks the insane greed of the insurance industry.”
When I say “fight,” I don’t mean the thuggishness being used by the right. I mean peaceful, nonviolent mobilization that counters the Big Lies of the right, gives cover to weak Democrats and demonstrates convincingly that our ideas and policies are in the interests of a stronger, healthier, freer and fairer America.
Last night, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) showed he doesn’t need much help to shut down the loud and bizarre disrupters spouting the biggest lies about health care reform. When one women in a Dartmouth, Mass., town hall meeting—waving a photo of President Obama with a Hitler moustache—claimed the health care reform proposals that Obama supports are “Nazi policy,” Frank replied, to cheers from many in the crowd:
On what planet do you spend most of your time? Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.
Meanwhile, several recent polls show support for a public health insurance plan option remains high.
Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners, says:
Poll after poll shows that large majorities of Americans support reform that offers a choice of a public health insurance plan or private insurance. In fact, Americans strongly support having that choice rather than access to only private insurance. Choice is a key value.
In a late July and early August survey, Quinnipiac found 62 percent of respondents backed a public option that would allow working families to choose between a private plan or a public plan. In a late July poll, 66 percent told New York Times/CBS pollsters they supported a public plan and 56 percent told a Time poll the same thing.
Yesterday, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reiterated its research that shows a public plan would help lower health care costs in the long run while providing coverage to millions of the uninsured.
In the policy memo, Why a Public Insurance Plan Is Essential for Health Reform, EPI researcher Alexander Hertel-Fernandez writes that a public plan option would inject some badly needed competition into the system and “force private insurers to compete on efficiency and quality,” rather than the way they currently compete for business: Enrolling the lowest-cost workers and businesses.
Find out more about a public plan option from EPI here, here and here.
The co-called health care “co-op” alterative is severely flawed and unworkable, says Rick Bender, president of the Washington State Labor Council (WSLC).
Creating a patchwork of state or regional cooperatives where none exist just seems like an extremely costly and very bad idea. What you end up with, if you could even create it, would be a series of fragmented risk pools and duplicative administrative structures around the country
As Sweeney said on Monday, “The only way to force real competition on the insurance companies is a strong public plan option.”
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