Urgent Amendments Pending: Single Payer Lives
The Pen
Health Care
After an anti-heroic 6 month campaign by Congress to avoid confronting the real problem in any meaningful way, that insurance company overhead and outlandish, undeserved profits are bleeding our health care system to death, the headline read, "Get ready to pay more for your health coverage."
But elsewhere the headline also read, "Public option backers fight on." Because there ARE valiant members of Congress who are still fighting for good public policy, Anthony Weiner with an amendment to substitute HR 676 for the core of HR 3200, the Kucinich amendment to allow states to implement their own single payer plans, and the Sanders (S 703) amendment on the Senate side. Any or all of these amendments can and WILL pass if only we speak up in sufficientnumbers. Please make your voice heard today.
Single Payer Amendments Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1013.php
Now let us be clear, any so-called "public option" short of true single payer is just an exercise in seeing how much they can cripple any actual remedy. Single payer is the ONLY strong public option. But in the meantime the latest word from the White House is that President Obama "prefers" a public option, but is not going to demand it. So what is this all about, "change we would prefer," or something like that? Would the American people have elected a candidate with the slogan, "Change we would prefer?" We think not.
So who is going to demand it? Who IS going to stand up and fight for REAL change? . . . And the answer is the same as it has always been, we the people. Because unless we the people make our voices heard, and unless we keep speaking out regardless of how many defeatist sirens in the corporate media try to persuade us to lay down our tongues without a fight, none of our champions can prevail alone.
And it looks like at least some semblance of a robust public option may come out of the House, and only because of the pressure we have applied with our voices already, mind you. But of course corporate forces will try to get that compromised away yet further in the Senate. So our message to our House members is this, "We will hold you accountable if the FINAL bill does not contain a STRONG public option."
Single Payer Amendments Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1013.php
It is not enough for them to just cast a vote in their own chamber and say, "Well, gosh we tried." No, we expect our House members to actually fight for us, to stick to their guns and not just roll over
at the finish line. Because of one thing you can be sure, the American people at large will hold them accountable in the end.
If the Baucus bill looks like it was written by the Republicans, it's because, surprise, surprise . . . it was. The Democrats have the votes to pass ANYTHING they really want. But they have bent over
backwards so far to try to appease the obstructionist Republicans whose votes they will never get, not to mention their own corporate handlers, that we now have a Republican bill that the Republicans
themselves can disown. So when the American people finally wake up to how much the Baucus bill is a corporate slanted con job, they will vent their wrath on the Democrats and the Republicans take their seats back. Pretty slick, huh?
But they can't get away with any of this stuff unless we are silent, unless they think they can get away with fooling us. So speak out and keep speaking out, so they know the people are paying attention this time and will NOT be fooled. We may have to fight this state by state for many years. We have been fighting this fight so many years already. We're not going to stop now.
And here is the one click Facebook page for this action.
Single Payer Amendments Action:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1013
And the Twitter reply to send, to send this message to all your members of Congress that way, is
@cxs #p1013
Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.
If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.peaceteam.net/in.htm