Former Oregon Gov Kitzhaber rallies health reform effort (Trippi involved)

[HuckleB]

http://www.oregonlive.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news/114403299089660.xml?oregonian?lcplfp&coll=7

"Former Gov. John Kitzhaber officially launched his grass-roots reform movement Sunday with a forum that attracted about 200 people determined to change the way the country thinks about health care.

The goal of the kickoff meeting, at Cleveland High School in Southeast Portland, was to brainstorm ways to get the word out to more people, enough to spark a national debate.

To help with that, Kitzhaber has recruited political adviser Joe Trippi, who successfully used the Internet to rally bottom-up support for former presidential candidate Howard Dean.

..."

also...

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=41082

[napi21]

1. I love the idea that they are talking about the health care problem,

but to hear Trippi is involved makes me nervous. Yes he did a great job with the internet for Dean, but he failed miserably in advising him of the pitfalls he would face with the opposition.

Mass. is also putting this issue on the block with mandatory health care.

Lets see where this all goes.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. I'm soooooo excited about this!

I caught a little blurb about it 3 months ago, and I've been waiting to hear more.

Oregon is sooo on the cutting edge of progressiveness. (said in my best latte drinkin librul elitist attitude voice) :)

[xray s]

3. and why exactly should we be scraping Medicare?

We should be scraping inefficient corporate owned insurance, not Medicare.

[sandnsea]

4. Well that'll never work

This state thrives on CA retirees, they're never going to agree to scrap Medicare. Low income people are never going to agree to scrap Medicaid for less coverage. I don't know what he's thinking, this is just dumb. And Joe Trippi??? Good god. I think he's lost as many elections as Bob Schrum.

I had such hopes for this when I first heard Kitzhaber was working on a better plan for the state. *sigh* Give me the Massachusetts plan, any day.

[HuckleB]

5. Interesting replies.

Too much knee-jerk dismissal of both this plan and Kitzhaber's first step plan for my stomach. The current system is broke, and you're not going to fix it in one fell swoop. This is going to take years of hard work, with many steps, many discussions, many proposals, and many rewritings of those proposals before and after they go into action.

This is about starting to make a change. To simply dismiss the first attempts to move to create change is to say, "let's just sit with the statuse quo." That doesn't work for me. And it doesn't sound like DU should sound, IMO.