Health Care Street Heat Targets Senator Schumer, Demanding Medicare for All

[IndianaGreen]

Published on Saturday, December 12, 2009 by Huffington Post

Health Care Street Heat Targets Senator Schumer, Demanding Medicare for All

by Joseph Huff-Hannon

New York, NY. December 10, 2009 -- On Thursday morning, a group of friends and colleagues, mostly middle-aged, sat and chatted over coffee at a midtown deli near Grand Central Station. Then Laurie Wen, an organizer with the Mobilization for Healthcare for All, showed up with a box of granola bars and a bag full of T-shirts, and everybody cheerfully rolled up their sleeves to write the number of an attorney on their forearms

Two hours later most of them were in jail, and the "fourth wave" of a nationwide campaign to use civil disobedience to push for a single-payer plan had delivered its demands to the doorstep of Senator Chuck Schumer's midtown Manhattan office.

It's a particularly poignant day for Rich Marini, one of the advance team of people sitting here today -- and not in a good way.

"Ironically, today is the day that my company stopped providing health care to its employees," says Marini of Staten Island, a programmer at an IT firm called Tango Inc. "Henceforth all employees will have to pay in out of pocket about $8,000 a year. We were all told we have the "opportunity to re-enroll."

On the second floor of the deli, Laurie reminds everybody that in at least 20 other cities across the country, people are sitting in at the offices of health insurance companies and politicians. Senator Chuck Schumer has raised the ire of these activists in New York because of his role in recent negotiations in the Senate to lower the age of eligibility of Medicate from 65 to 55. The catch: this is viewed by many as a way to abandon the public option, or any anemic version thereof that remains in legislation currently being considered by the Senate. This bit of horse-trading is seen by activists here as a paltry trade-off, and one that reflects the senator's friendliness to the insurance industry over the desires of his constituents. According to OpenSecrets.org, Schumer is the biggest recipient in Congress of donations from the HMO/Health Services category, raking in $99,650 in campaign contributions this year. At press time a message left with Senator Schumer's New York press office was not returned.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/12-4

[PBS Poll-435]

1. That was a waste of 30 seconds

:thumbsdown:

[Lord Helmet]

2. Schumer is also proposing a "level playing field" which will stymie real competition.

LINK

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What’s troubling here however is Pear’s assertion that “one way they propose to do that is by requiring the public plan to resemble private insurance as much as possible.” Remember that leveling the playing field is one thing, striping the public plan of its inherent advantages (its ability to use its size to negotiate better prices and its lower administrative costs) is another. After all, if the public option is just a clone of a private plan, then it’s pretty useless.

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