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At a rally in front of the insurance giant Aetna, demonstrators demanded a public option to be part of the national health care legislation. The rally was one of 150 rallies throughout the United States that took place on September 22.
Big health insurance companies like Aetna are spending $641,000 a day to oppose reform because they profit by keeping the system as it is...by denying claims, raising premiums, imposing co-pays and deductibles at will, making health care decisions instead of our doctors, and denying care because of pre-existing conditions.
Ron Williams, the Aetna CEO, made 24.3 million dollars last year and Aetna generated $31.6 billion dollars in revenue from 19 million customers. Enough!! It is time to put PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS! At the conclusion of the rally an Aetna representative was presented with a list of demands that included:
* Insuring doctors rights to determine the health care of patients. * Aetna stop denying coverage based on pre-existing medical conditions * Stop giving incentives to employees for denying care and rejecting claims and * Stop using consumers money to block health care reform -- Tom Connolly
“We can pass a labor supported agenda in Congress, but first we must get health care with a public option. We will get this if you mobilize your members to go to the town hall meetings and show support and write our representatives urging them to pass health care reform,” said Mark Gaffney, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, speaking to 75 union leaders at the Causeway Bay Hotel in Lansing, Michigan on Tuesday, August 25. “Then we can get Employee Free Choice and bank regulation so the banks and other financial institutions and the Wall Street crowd are stopped from the speculation that got us into this mess.”
The meeting was an AFL-CIO Community Services Seminar to discuss how to out reach to laid off workers about the various services and training programs available to them. Among the new features are an outreach to laid off workers by establishing unemployed clubs that include job fairs, food banks, resume writing, networking, opportunities for training, and helping out in organizing drives. The attendees included union brothers and sisters from AFSCME, United Steelworkers, UAW, Utility Workers, Operating Engineers, CWA and UFCW from various communities in the lower peninsula of the state of Michigan.
-- Jim Ryan, Detroit
By Sam Webb
It seems clear that the prospects for a bipartisan health care bill are diminishing with each passing day. And as far as I'm concerned that is a good thing. Nothing good, nothing resembling "reform" could come from bipartisanship in this Congress. The Republicans have no appetite for real health care reform. The health care system isn't broken in their view. So why fix it? A few cosmetic changes maybe, but nothing more.
According to media reports, the Democrats have begun devising a strategy to pass a bill without Republican support. I appauld them. While I can understand President Obama's desire to pass a bipartisan bill, there is nothing necessarily virtuous about bipartisanship, it should not be turned into a principle of political governance. Conversely, political partisanship is not necessarily a dirty word either. The appropriate method of governing cannot be resolved abstractly.
Process in politics is important, but it shouldn't trump the democratic will. Millions elected Barack Obama and a new Congress in the expectation that they would bring real change to their lives. But the health care debate is making crystal clear that the Republicans and to a degree some Democrats are in no mood to assist the the legislative agenda of the Obama administration, - an agenda that the majority of Americans elected him to carry out.
The mission of the extreme right in the Republican Party (and the extreme right dominates the GOP), in fact, is to sabotge health care reform and Obama's Presidency by any means necessary. It will embrace bipartisanship only in words and only to the degree that it stalls the reform agenda of the President. Once negotiations become substantive, right wing extremists turn nasty and let loose their attack dogs, including their gun toting ones, on the President and other advocates of real change.
I know the American people would like to have less rancor and partisanship in politics, but it is hard to imagine that changing anytime soon. For one thing, the extreme right turned mean spirited and divisive politics into its trademark three decades ago and there is little reason to think that will change going forward. In fact, the noise from the right wing is becoming more strident and shrill, more dangerous, and more irresponsible since President Obama was elected.
For another thing, eras of deepgoing democratic reform - the 1930s and 1960s come to mind - are a product of clashing partisan interests and political coalitions. Feelings are intense, democratic life is charged, divisions along class and social lines emerge in clearer form, and social inertia gives way to social action. Like it or not, political leaders and ordinary people take sides.
Franklin Roosevelt and John L. Lewis took sides in the New Deal era; so did President Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights era. And in both eras, millions - most of whom were new to political activism - threw themselves into the struggle for progressive social change. It wasn't always pretty, but it was nearly always necessary. Had political leaders not taken sides and had not people taken to the streets, progressive change would have died stillborn.
With the wreckage of 30 years of right wing rule everywhere, an economic crisis of immense proportions hanging over the country, an extreme right, badly weakened, but still a part of the political equation, and powerful corporate interests and their supporters in both parties who either want to prevent or contain people's reforms, can we move this vast country in the direction of economic justice, equality and peace without intense, sustained, and partisan struggle with an increasingly anti-corporate thrust? History and common sense say 'no.'
A reformer from an even earlier era famously said, "Power concedes nothing without a struggle."
Reading the headlines over the last few days about the critical and historic health care reform battle unfolding in the country, I was reminded of a few of the articles we ran in mid-June and earlier on how the battle lines were going to be drawn.
Flavio Casoy wrote a few prescient articles describing how the Republicans saw the health reform battle as a way to "take down" the Obama presidency.
Casoy, then a medical student and activist for single-payer and health care reform, wrote in
As Congress shapes health care bill, opportunities and dangers for progressives
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/16001/
that the GOP "have chosen health care as the issue to defeat the president and turn the electoral winds in their favor in 2010. Their comeback would make it much more difficult for us to advance a truly worker-friendly legislative agenda.
"Their choice to fight the president’s popularity on health care imbues the issue with a dual nature. On one hand, we are fighting to expand access to quality and affordable care for everyone in America; on the other hand, we are fighting to defend the gains of last November. Success or defeat of the president on health care will determine our success or defeat on many other issues. "
Casoy, like many of the People's World writers, saw the forest for the trees. People's World writers can see the big picture of what is at stake, where are the battle lines, who are potential allies, who is the main oppostion, because our writers are active in the struggles and take a partisan stance. Partisan to what is best for the vast majority of people -- those who have to work in some capacity to live -- partisan to the working class and diversity of the American people.
That why Pete Seeger once said, "You learn something everytime you read the People's World."
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