Here is the text of the resolution:

(from Amanda Fritz’s blog, Portland City Commissioner)

RESOLUTION No. Urge Congress to enact the United States National Health Care Act sponsored by Representative John Conyers. (Resolution)
WHEREAS, all people deserve equal access to quality health care; and

WHEREAS, there is a growing crisis in health care in the United States of America, manifested in rising health care costs, increased premiums, out-of-pocket spending, and decreased international business competitiveness; and

WHEREAS, approximately one third of Oregonians lacked health insurance at some time in 2007-2008; and

WHEREAS, those insured now often experience burdensome medical debt; and

WHEREAS, half of all personal bankruptcies are due to illnesses or medical bills; and

WHEREAS, the rising costs of insuring city employees can best be met not by limiting their benefits or terminating their employment, but by expanding their health care benefits under a national, publicly-funded health care program; and

WHEREAS, the complex bureaucracy arising from our fragmented, for-profit, multi-payer system of health care financing consumes approximately 30 percent of the United States health care spending while Medicare has a 3 percent overhead; and

WHEREAS, United States Representative John Conyers introduced H.R. 676, the United States National Health Care Act, in the United States House of Representatives for the 111th Congress; and

WHEREAS, this Act would provide a universal, comprehensive, single-payer system of high quality national health care;
NOW, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the Council of the City of Portland:

1. Respectfully urges the United States Congress to enact the United States National Health Care Act sponsored by Representative John Conyers.

2. Directs the City Attorney to transmit copies of this resolution to the President of the United States and to members of the Oregon congressional delegation accompanied by letters urging them to work to adopt and implement the United States National Health Care Act (Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act) as defined in H.R. 676 to provide for comprehensive health care coverage for all United States residents.

3. Affirms that the Council of the City of Portland will use the City’s website, public meetings, news releases, and other forms of communication to encourage Portland residents to participate actively in the democratic process by informing their elected officials of their wishes and expectations regarding H.R. 676 and other matters of public concern.

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I guess it’s because the corporations aren’t people, just profit-seeking entities. But what about public relations as an engine of profit, as I learned in my (misguided) business school days?

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Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Maine, a subsidiary of WellPoint, the nation’s largest insurer, wanted the state to approve an average rate hike of 18.5 percent on its policyholders. Maine rejected the increase and now the insurer is fighting for the hike in court.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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Bah! So far from the single-payer that’s really needed, yet so seemingly impossible for Senate Democrats to even go to the public option. The writing was on the wall back in May when Baucus wouldn’t even let single-payer advocates into his caucus meeting on health care. He knew that might create a real debate rather than this hodgepodge of a mess there is now that the health companies can salivate over.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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Six Oregon physicians left Portland Sept. 8 in a custom-painted Winnebago on a cross-country roadshow aimed at building support for a government-sponsored health plan that would cover all Americans in a single giant risk pool.

read full story

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The protests move on to Chicago n the 6th and the across the U.S. on the 15th.

full news story by David Swanson

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Here is the question from the poll:

“Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans?”

65% percent of respondents said yes.

here is a full analysis of the poll by Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford.

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An article from some doctors who have worked on both sides of the border. They have no difficulty discussing problems with Canadian healthcare, such as some procedures that are less readily available than in the U.S. and some of the delays in some specialized services. But, overall, the lower systemic costs, the minimization of bureaucracy through streamlined billing, and the accessibility of all Canadians regardless of ability to pay are named as positives of the Canadian system. This is a good read for some thoughtful analysis of Doctors…

Overall, they indicated that although the Canadian model is not perfect, it is a good system in which patients generally receive timely and competent care and physicians have fewer practice hassles compared with their American counterparts.

“I think universal coverage works,” said Hesam Farivar-Mohseni, MD, of Ontario’s Brampton Civic Hospital, a Canadian citizen who spent nearly 11 years in the United States. Following a two-year fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he spent time working in New York and at West Virginia University Hospitals in Morgantown.

“Patients in Canada are not being denied anything,” he said. “People in the U.S. think that patients here [in Canada] are waiting outside the hospital, they have no access to the hospital, and they’re dying because this is government-sponsored health care. That’s not true at all. If there’s a serious disease the family doctor calls a specialist and the person is seen right away. If a patient has a kidney stone or something similar, they may wait for eight hours, but that’s true in the States, too. Such patients don’t get seen in the emergency room there right away, either.

read the rest of the article…

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He says Canadian single-payer “works really well if you don’t get too sick.” In fact, it’s the opposite – it works really well if you do get too sick, because you jump to the front of the queue for care… And yes, there is a queue -if it is less serious, you wait some, if it is more serious or life-threatening, you don’t.

The reason this story is unfair goes far beyond the apples and oranges comparison a U.S. ‘public option’ and the Canadian single-payer system. The real problem with the story is the implication that we Canadians are all waiting around for life-saving surgery, or we are heading to the U.S. to get some real care. They cherry pick a few stories that seem to prove their point, but these are people who end up absorbing huge medical bills if they go to the U.S., and thus is only for those with cash to pay for U.S. medical care. These ’sufferers’ in Canada would be suffering much more if they were uninsured or under-insured and in the U.S.

Looking specifically at one of Fox’s cherry-picked subjects, Foreign Affair to Remember comments on how Fox News just keeps bringing out Lin Gilbert from Vancouver. She is poor and had to wait for treatment for her chronic back pain:

So Fox seems to trot out this poor lady, Lin Gilbert, whenever they need a worst-case scenario to spook the population away from any sort of health care change. OK, if you want to talk horror stories, maybe Fox should interview Monique Zimmerman-Stein, who has been nearly blind for the last two years from Stickler syndrome. She recently decided to forego her own treatment to save funds to treat her two daughters, who also suffer from the condition.

And where in Canada does she live? Florida. Watch how the insurance companies treat her and tell me how proud you are of our system.

News Corpse has this to say about Ms. Gilbert back in July:

Lin Gilbert suffered from debilitating back pain that she says was untreated in an untimely manner in her native Vancouver… eventually she got the surgery she needed and is pain free today. It cost her nothing. She has no debt related to her medical treatment. An American with the same problem would still be suffering or would have racked up an unmanageable debt that would haunt them and their family for the rest of their life.

I can’t speak to what delayed the treatments in Canada for these women, but surveys show that they are the exceptions. Most Canadians are satisfied with their healthcare program, with an overwhelming 82% saying that they prefer their system to a private system like that of their neighbors to the south. Furthermore, a Gallup poll showed that Canadians are far more satisfied with their system than we Americans are with ours.

While there is no denying that there are waits in Canada, would Lin Gilbert have even been able to get care if she lived in the U.S.? Fox doesn’t say.

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Detroit Free Press, Sept 28th

This Canadian is tired of US media (ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX) transmitting health care falsehoods to the public. I would expect this type of malarkey from the representative of a US for-profit health care insurance company.

Furthermore the media has been no mention of the numerous Americans who are presently living abroad in countries with a private health care system in medical exile.

This Canadian would rather pay a little extra tax than the exorbitant premiums to a for-profit health insurance company. As Americans you have every freedom to fill the coffers of those aforementioned companies.

Now you all can say you know a Canadian, who along with well over 80% of the population is proud of our state of the art health care system. However I respectfully request that the media quit brow beating the remaining first world nations who all offer a single payer health care system.

Ian Montrose

Belle River, Ontario, Canada

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On a recent trip to Canada, I spent some time reading The Globe and Mail. In an article on Page A17 of the Sept. 14 issue, economist Eugene Lang and health policy adviser Philip DeMont compare the Canadian (medicare) and U.S. health care systems.

They observe that “the hysterical tone of the anti-medicare rhetoric among Republicans would make one think Canada is North Korea.” Lang and DeMont go on to discuss the “inconvenient truth” that “Canada’s approach to providing citizens with universal health insurance is superior to the U.S. model of private insurance.”

They proceed to compare the two systems using four indicators of health care efficiency: life expectancy, infant mortality, cost differences, and percentage of citizens covered. On each of these measures, Canadians enjoy clear advantages over their U.S. neighbors.

read the rest of the letter

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