To call your congressman and senators to ask the simple question, “Which side are you on?”
Let me back up a second. HCAN is Health Care for Americans Now!, a huge effort to make sure we get quality affordable universal health care coverage now, not decades from now. They are pushing, MoveOn-style, in all 50 states to put pressure on every single member of Congress to reform our broken health care system and guarantee quality coverage to every American.
The big shiny banner above is a link to HCAN’s powerful click-to-call tool. All you have to do is click on the link, fill out the form, and the click-to-call system will call your phone and connect you directly with your representative free of charge. All you have to do is click the link, type your phone number, and ask “Which side are you on?”
With insurance premiums rising 1,000% in the last five years, and Americans spending $2 trillion a year ($217 million per hour!!!!) on health care, something has got to give. And with insurance companies spending $50 billion a year on advertising, Big Insurance is going to try its damnedest to make sure we continue to play under “industry company rules”:
So call your representative now. We want to know where our representatives stand. Americans nearly unanimously agree that the next president should increase access to quality, affordable health care and decrease the number of uninsured. Will our representatives in Congress listen? Will they pledge to guarantee universal, affordable health care coverage, or will they side with insurance companies?
Find out by making the call. If you have a website and you want the embed code for a nice, shiny banner of your own, follow this link.
The new Health Care for Americans Now (HCAN) has a name remarkably similar to the longer established pro-single payer organization Healthcare-NOW making it is easy to confuse the two.
While both groups recognize that our current health system is in terminal downward spiral and both groups recognize the negative role that health insurance companies play in that spiral, HCAN offers only a partial solution that essentially leaves the health insurance industry intact while reining them in by means of a yet to be defined set of consumer rules. Those rules are supposed to insure “quality and affordability”, terms, which could mean a lot of different things for different individuals.
Healthcare-NOW, as well as PNHP, the California Nurses Association and most organized physician groups recognize that carefully worked out policy, such as HR 676, and not just regulatory rules must provide the underpinning of health care reform. They also recognize that reform must be single payer,
b/c real health care reform does not have the financial capability to incorporate the health insurance industry profits within its framework.
HR 676 has 92 sponsors in the House and support from a myriad of professional, occupational and social justice orgs. Currently 59% of physicians and 65% of Americans want a government run, tax-financed system. Why replace this effort with a Move-On style reform drive to extract a pledge from our congresspersons to make rules that insurance companies will simply circumvent.
As an aside, the Move-On polling form of its members on health care reform contains several conceptual errors rendering it, in my view and in the view of ricklm, a less than valid tool.