Fifty million Americans are without health insurance, and 25 million are "underinsured." The U.S. auto giants are collapsing in part due to extraordinary health care expenses, while they are competing with companies in countries that provide universal health care. Barack Obama said in 2007 that "affordable, universal health care for every single American must not be a question of whether, it must be a question of how. ... Every four years, health care plans are offered up in campaigns with great fanfare and promise. But once those campaigns end, the plans collapse under the weight of Washington politics." Obama knows well the issue -- while his mother lay dying of cancer, she still had to battle the insurance industry. Yet Daschle proposes not much more than tinkering -- improving Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Health Administration, all examples of "single-payer health care" -- in which the government is the single payer for the health care -- while preserving the inefficient, multipayer, for-profit insurance model.

On February 14th at 6:30pm at the Friends Meeting House Lexington KY there will be a pot luck dinner and a program "Why we walk".

A weekly 30 minute review of news and opinion, recorded from a shortwave radio. With times and freqs for listening at home. 2 files- broadcast and slow-modem streaming. Free to rebroadcast. China, Netherlands, Cuba, and Russia.

Democrats appear more united than anytime in recent memory with no obvious DLC-MoveOn fights over wars or deficits and there's an authentic crisis that trumps pious platitudes about free trade and `family values.'

Education and health care are the new gold. Without massive investments in education and health care, our coutnry will be under-
developed and under-achieving.

January 14, 2009
By Stephanie Kraft


There's no law to keep newspapers from grabbing whatever comes across an editor's desk and cramming it into a column with the discreet disclaimer "Viewpoint."

The Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Healthcare – National Single Payer Coalition Steering Committee is gearing up for the second national call-in day to Congress on Thursday, January 15, 2009. Locally, newly elected Cong. Paul Tonko has indicated that he intends to co-sponsor HR 676, the federal single payer bill. Cong. Gillibrand has not yet made a commitment. In NY, groups are calling on Cong. Rangel (D-Harlem), chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, to hold hearings on the fiscal impact on universal health care. A new study shows that single payer would create more than 2 million new jobs - more than our economy lost last year. As the state level, the universal health care study by the Urban Institute has been delayed yet again. It is now expected out in April, a year late.

"The modern state as a constitutional state and participative democracy has a universal social security function and overall responsibility for development of the economy according to basic rights."

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