Tag Archives: Medicare for All

4/13 News Roundup – Sanders To Progressives: “Ignore Consultants, Follow Your Gut’; Single Payer Continues To Surge & More

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

Bernie Sanders urges liberal candidates to ignore consultants, follow their guts

Speaking to a room packed with progressives running for state and local office, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., advised the first-time candidates to ignore the political establishment and trust their guts.

Crediting the movement catalyzed by his 2016 Democratic presidential campaign, Sanders said the policies of Medicare for all, free college tuition, a $15 dollar minimum wage, criminal justice reform, and legalizing marijuana are now “mainstream” among Democrats.

“What was once considered radical is now mainstream,” Sanders said Thursday to cheers at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington.

Sanders bashed the political establishment and the press repeatedly throughout his speech. The media, Sanders said, plays a “destructive” game by telling the “American people that politics is too complicated, you can’t get involved, you don’t know how to run for office.”

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The former presidential contender encouraged the candidates, who are in Washington for four days of training, to embrace a progressive agenda even if they’re running in red or purple states.

“Let me give you a warning here: Watch out for consultants,” he said to laughs. “Often their advice is conservative and wrong. Trust your own guts, trust your own instincts.”

The training, put on by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Sanders’ Our Revolution, includes four days of helping candidates craft their public persona, how to pitch reporters, building field operations, do-it-yourself opposition research, and budgeting.

More news/video/tweets/etc. in the comments.

3/28 News Roundup – Pipeline Protestors ‘Not Guilty’ After Claiming ‘Legal Necessity”; Support For Medicare-For-All Surges & More

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

Anti-pipeline campaigners found not guilty by judge because ‘protest against climate change crisis’ was legal ‘necessity’

More than a dozen protesters who clambered into holes dug for a high pressure gas pipeline said they had been found not responsible by a judge after hearing them argue their actions to try and stop climate change were a legal “necessity”.

Karenna Gore, the daughter of former Vice President Al Gore, was among more than 198 people who were arrested because of their 2015 actions protesting the pipeline in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Thirteen people were to go on trial this week, though prosecutors downgraded their original criminal charges to one of civil infraction.

On Tuesday, Judge Mary Ann Driscoll of West Roxbury District Court, found all 13 defendants not responsible, the equivalent of not guilty in a criminal case. She did so after each of the defendants addressed the judge and explained why they were driven to try and halt the pipeline’s construction.

Speaking outside the court afterwards, Ms Gore, 44, Director of the Centre for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, said the court’s decision was historic. “What happened today was really important,” she said.

“The people….were found not responsible by reason of necessity. The irony is that we are making ourselves responsible. We’re part of the the movement that is standing up and saying we won’t let this go by on our watch. We won’t act like nothing’s wrong.”

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The environmentalist and academic Bill McKibben, who was to appear as a defence witness for the defendants, said on Twitter: “Good golly! A few minutes ago a Boston judge acquitted 13 pipeline protesters on the grounds that the climate crisis made it necessary for them to commit civil disobedience. This may be a first in America.”

More news/video/tweets/etc. in the comments.

Indian government announces free health-insurance to cover 500 million people.

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

  India announced Thursday a program to give half a billion citizens free health insurance, a potentially transformative upgrade of the country’s dilapidated public health-care services and a key element of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s last budget before national elections next year. […] Under the plan, the government will cover health-care costs of up to $7,800 for 100 million poor families and spend some $188 million to create “health and wellness” centers, Jaitley announced to loud table-thumping in India’s lower house. Spending on nutrition for tuberculosis patients, cleanliness drives and education will also result in significant improvements in public … Continue reading →

1/24 News Roundup – Sanders Speaks To A Million+ About Medicare-For-All, NYC Sues Big Pharma For Fueling Opioid Epidemic & More

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

Bernie Sanders talks universal Medicare, and 1.1 million people click to watch him

With more than one million people watching at home, and hundreds watching from the studio audience, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) leaned across his desk with a crucial health-care question.

“What’s the quality of the Norwegian system?” Sanders asked Meetali Kakadi, an Oslo-based health researcher. “Is it good?”

In her view, it was: “Far better than Canada.”

Sanders’s “town hall on Medicare for All,” an event he’d organized after becoming convinced that it would never be produced by the mainstream media, never got more combative than that. Over 100 minutes, Sanders and nine guests — three at a time, taking turns — discussed the need to bring about single-payer health care, its benefits to business, and its implementation around the world. (Kakadi’s Canada joke was aimed at Danyaal Raza, there to defend his country’s system.)

“It’s a discussion you’re not likely to see on the mainstream news,” Sanders said at the outset. “This event will not be interrupted be commercials for the drug companies.”

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On Tuesday night, it was Sanders asking the questions, and getting answers he liked. In the room — the Congressional Auditorium, where in 2010 President Obama revved up House Democrats ahead of their Affordable Care Act vote — Sanders’s audience alternated between rapt attention and grateful applause as experts explained how higher tax rates could replace America’s health-care system with universal Medicare. A mention of Tommy Douglas, the father of Canada’s health-care system who remains somewhat obscure in the United States, inspired loud applause.

“No billboards, no high salaries,” said the former Medicare and Medicaid administrator Donald Berwick. “The complexity of the system just isn’t there. What we’ve got here is insane!”

“Is that a clinical term?” asked Sanders, jokingly.

More news/video/tweets/etc. in the comments, including:

*Live-streamed event with Bill McKibben and Bernie Sanders
*Disaster Capitalism in Action as Puerto Rico Governor Announces Plan to Privatize Power Utility
*With a Shutdown Surrender, Democrats Left Millions of People Behind
*Why Democrats Need to Stand With Working Americans vs. Big Banks
*Montana Just Showed Every Other State How to Protect the Open Internet
*Pipeline news, Water Protector updates & More

Bernie to visit University of Toronto on Oct. 29 – tickets sell out in the blink of an eye!

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

In support of Bernie, who takes regular beatings from so-called liberal Democrats, but keeps right at it, and to cheer myself up a bit, I’m posting a little story today about a visit he has planned to head up north. US Senator and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders will speak about health care on October 29 at Convocation Hall in an event titled “What the U.S. Can Learn From Canadian Health Care.” Tickets for the event became available at 10am this morning and ‘sold out’ (they were free) in seconds. The comments under one story about the event were almost entirely … Continue reading →

9/27 News Roundup – Why Bernie’s CNN Debate Was A Good Idea, Maria As Trump’s Katrina & More

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

Happy Wednesday all!

Starting off with the Bernie being right and the establishment being wrong (as usual), and then will put everything else in the comments.

Bernie Sanders’ Health Care Debate Was a Good Idea for a Very Simple Reason

When CNN announced last week that it would hold a debate on health care between Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham and progressive Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar, the reaction in some Democratic circles was anxiety. “I’m not sure single payer vs Graham-Cassidy is the debate we want right now,” mused former Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor. With the Affordable Care Act once more on the ropes, the argument seemed to go, Sanders was choosing to advance his personal politics ahead of the priorities of the moment.

Those fears were unfounded. A Monday night cable news special was never going to be the make-or-break moment for health care reform, but more importantly, Sanders’ skeptics, and his Republican debating opponents, misunderstood his entire approach to health care reform—no one in the Senate has as much riding on Obamacare’s survival as he does.

Both Cassidy and Graham, who learned shortly before the broadcast that they were at least one vote shy of passage, hoped to frame the conversation as a choice between their bill and the Medicare-for-all proposal Sanders unveiled last week. For the Republicans, it was a contrast of the free-market vs. crippling Canadian bureaucracy. If America only knew Bernie Sanders is a socialist.

But Sanders needed all of 10 seconds to make clear that his purpose at the debate was different. “These gentlemen have on five occasions tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act, throw tens and tens of millions of Americans off of the health insurance they currently have, and make it impossible or very difficult for people with pre-existing conditions to get the health care that they can afford,” he said.

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Sanders, of course, was happy to defend the principle of a single-payer system, but he never let that get in the way of the task on hand, nor did he reject the incrementalism the Senate sometimes lives and breathes by. Of course Medicare-for-all won’t be passing anytime soon, he said. But in the meantime, there were bipartisan fixes to made to Obamacare, and opportunity to act on prescription drug prices—an area of agreement, Sanders noted, between he and President Trump.

David Doel of ‘The Rational National’ has more to say on the subject:

Also in this post:

*Meet Bernie Sanders’s new namesake: A spider from Cuba
*Bernie Sanders Leans Into Planned Parenthood at the CNN Health Care Debate
*Trump Tax “Hoax” Would Blow $5 Trillion Hole In Budget Over Next Decade: Analysis
*Fenceline Communities on Gulf Coast Face Mass Displacement & Toxic Pollution One Month After Harvey
*Water Protector/Pipeline updates
*Democratic Candidate for Governor Says He’d Shut Down Enbridge Line 5
& Much more

9/26 News Roundup – Puerto Rico In Crisis, Target Announces A $15 Min Wage & More

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

Happy Tuesday friends, thanks for visiting TPW! If you are not currently a member and would like to be, please email the tpwhelpdesk@gmail.com and I’ll get you set up (or you can try your luck with the automated system…).

Starting off with some good news:

‘Our Momentum Is Unstoppable’: Workers Celebrate as Target Announces $15 Minimum Wage

In what is being described as a huge victory for the tens of thousands of workers across the country who have for years organized, rallied, and gone on strike for higher wages, Target on Monday announced that it plans to raise the company-wide minimum hourly wage to $11 by next month and $15 by 2020.

“Five years ago, when 200 New York City fast-food workers first walked off the job for $15 an hour and union rights, nobody gave us a shot. Since then, we’ve spread this movement to every corner of the country and beyond fast-food. We did what they said we couldn’t: we won. We won in the states, in the cities, with the big politicians and with the big corporations,” Steven Suffridge, a Minneapolis McDonald’s Worker and Fight for $15 organizer, wrote in an email reacting to the news. “And today, we won $15 an hour for all Target employees.”

In celebration, Fight for $15 and other groups began circulating a graphic that echoes Suffridge’s message: “When we fight, we win!”

Immediately upon seeing the news of the Target wage boost—which will affect over 320,000 workers throughout the U.S—activists and lawmakers immediately began raising the question: if Target can pay its workers a decent wage, why can’t Walmart, McDonald’s, and other profitable low-wage corporate giants?

“C’mon McDonalds, Walmart, and everybody else,” wrote Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who recently celebrated Minneapolis lawmakers for overwhelmingly voting to raise the city minimum wage to $15 by 2024. “Pay your workers right!”

The rest of the days news/videos/etc will be in the comments, including:

*Voting machine concerns have states eyeing return to paper ballots
*Tony Blair Says Bernie Doesn’t Have the Answers (Public Opinion Says Otherwise)
*Bernie Sanders’ Graham-Cassidy Debate Quotes Will Inspire You To Fight For Health Care
*National park ban saved 2m plastic bottles – and still Trump reversed it
*Candidate Updates (Stephen Jaffe, Joe Cunningham, Jack Love, Abdul El-Sayed, Cathy Myers & more)
*Corbyn is a changed man – and he’s forging a path to power
& much more.

Shalynne’s Story – Why We Need Medicare For All

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

From Amy For The People (NV-04):

I have been advocating non-stop for healthcare across Nevada, as well as across the nation. I’ve been telling the story of my daughter, Shalynne. Two years ago, Shalynne went to the emergency room with nearly all the signs, symptoms, and risk factors of a blood clot. Because she was unable to provide proof of health insurance, she was denied the appropriate care, which ultimately led to her dying in my arms of a pulmonary embolism.

Her death at the hands of our Nation’s barbaric, profit-driven healthcare system, tragically, is an all too familiar story. The fight, not only against repealing the ACA, but for expanded and improved Medicare for All has become my calling. I didn’t choose this fight, it chose me.

I’m tired of witnessing self-proclaimed progressive congressman regurgitating the same old corporatist rhetoric, circumventing the real reason our healthcare system is failing Americans: profit.

-Amy Vilela

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