YOU CAN'T MAKE ME

March 31, 2023

Mar 31, 2023

Good Morning Healthcare Advocates

Thank you for reading and taking action and educating others on the need for healthcare reform. Thank you also for recommending topics to research (use the comment button below). Topics in work are rural healthcare, the hospice situation, and prison healthcare.

This is Trans Visibility day. Here is a site where you can find ways to celebrate and take actions in support of trans-related causes. Many of them are just good things to do - scroll to the bottom of that link. (Thank you - Chop Wood, Carry Water - Jessica Cravens), I recommend her site highly as a daily collection of actions to save democracy.

You Can’t Make Me

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was designed as an interim step towards universal healthcare. It used basic design principles to address the major problems, in small steps. Everyone should be covered so more of us are healthy and costs are manageable for all of us. Preventive care should be readily available to everyone so that health can be restored quickly and efficiently. Remember if you let the condition go too long sometimes there is no recovery (See T. R. Reid’s book).

To make sure everyone was covered the ACA used a carrot/stick approach. If you chose not to have insurance, then you paid a tax. That was called the individual mandate.

The individual mandate was struck down in 2018/2019. The major case against it was in the courtroom of Judge Reed O’Conner in Texas. YOU CAN’T MAKE ME HAVE INSURANCE.

Today there are about 27 million with no insurance and about 40 million underinsured (high deductible policies that are used for catastrophic illness).

Reed O’ Conner’s courtroom is a busy place. Last year a case was brought to his courtroom by companies that were self insured and they had religious or moral objections to providing things like contraception or preventative AIDS medications in their health insurance. Judge Reed O’Conner ruled in their favor because YOU CAN’T MAKE ME PAY FOR WHAT I DON’T LIKE.

Yesterday In that busy courtroom, Reed O’Conner ruled that since the organization appointed by the government to recommend free disease screenings as part of the ACA was not appointed by Congress, the portion of the ACA that has free disease screenings is unconstitutional. YOU CAN’T MAKE ME PROVIDE SCREENINGS TO OTHERS.

You know, I was an employee of a company engaged by the government to advise them how to assure the government’s mission in space. I’m pretty sure that none of us were appointed by Congress.

Ok, you get the picture, preventive medications are an effective low cost way to prevent serious illness and keep people productive.

Early screenings for diseases are the way we detect serious illnesses like cancer from being incurable. I know how important that is since people I know had cancer detected too late.

Encouraging those screenings by making them free means we can save more people at lower cost.

But it is pretty clear that there are a large number of people in our country not interested in low cost effective methods of saving lives because, YOU CAN’T MAKE ME.

I will likely never convince any of them until they experience the tragedy and financial hardship of a death of a loved one that could have been prevented. I am sorry that they choose selfishness as opposed to ensuring that all of us stay as healthy as possible because that is really the cost effective, humane solution and makes us a productive democracy.

However, if Universal Single Payer Healthcare were the law of the land, we would all have insurance paid for by federal tax (instead of premiums) and be able to provide the medication, the screenings, and the access to care that so many are missing. It doesn’t take away from anyone, it provides more to everyone at lower cost (according to the CBO).

Representative Jayapal will be reintroducing her universal healthcare bill in May and it is high time we joined the rest of the industrialized world and cared for all of us.

TAKE ACTION

Resistbot

Text SIGN PUNANO to 50409 to tell your representative and senators and the president that it is high time we had universal healthcare like the rest of the industrialized world.

I am writing to you because I am tired of selfish Americans whittling away the ACA for their own mean purposes and harming others. Allowing people to be uninsured (27 million) or underinsured (40 million) or denying coverage or medications because you don’t like someone or their medical condition is just hateful.

Representative Jayapal will be reintroducing her Single Payer Universal Healthcare bill in mid May. It will cover all of us cradle to grave, prescriptions, hospitals, doctors, all of us. Even the CBO has determined that Universal Healthcare is in the financial interest of the US because it costs less. I know you are worried about the debt ceiling. How about using universal health care to lower expenses!! It takes away from no one, provides more care to everyone and at lower cost

This is a basic part of our country’s infrastructure and I want you to sign on to it and make it a reality for all of us.