GMHCC Blog
Welcome to our new blog! GMHCC is a non-profit organization, grassroots organization. We seek to unite Greater Minnesota citizens and their organizations to create positive social change on health care and other issues. In particular, we advocate for affordable prescription drugs, a sustainable Medicare system, and health insurance coverage for all citizens. We also offer related information and resources, including a prescription drug program.
We'll be posting on healthcare, legislative, and many other issues. Check back soon!
posted by GMHCC @ 9:58 PM
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Welcome to our GMHCC blog. Feel free to use it to communicate your views and suggestions on health care issues.
We are gathering a collection of health care case histores. As part of our efforts, we would like to have you send (by e-mail if possible) copies of flyers or announcements related to health care dilemmas. By that I refer to civic groups, churches and/or private service organizations fundraising attempts to help someone defray extraordinary medical expenses resulting from insufficent or non-existent health insurance coverage.
Our theme for this effort is "No More Bake Sale Health Care!"
SICKO is AVAILABLE!
We now have copies of SICKO (the movie) and will be making it available throughout the region to groups large and small. Call today to reserve a showing time and location for your group!
888-694-5055 toll-free
Where can I get a copy???
Sen. John Marty is putting the finishing touches on SF 2324/HF2522, the Minnesota Health Act (MHA). I really really like this bill. It's an improvement over SF 460 (which is basically the model Minnesota single-payer forces have relied on since 1991) because it adds some useful provisions that SF 460 didn't have, and is better organized than SF 460. I even like it better than HR 676, the national single-payer bill.
As those of you who have been on this listserve since at least last spring know, the original version of the MHA created a debate within the single-payer movement when it was introduced in May. Essentially, the Greater Mn Health Care Coalition and I took the position that the MHA allowed insurance companies to continue to operate and was therefore not a single-payer bill. MUHCC's lobbyist at the time argued that it was a single-payer and that listserve members should support it. That debate has been completely resolved now, thanks to the hard work of John Marty and a lot of other people on both sides of the issue.
By July John had made it clear he wanted to eliminate those provisions that would have allowed insurance companies to emerge, and by September he had circulated a new version of the bill that was definitely a single-payer bill. Then, some time in November, two members of the MUHCC board -- Drs. Jim Hart and Lisa Nilles -- asked me if I would join them in a few meetings to see if we could suggest amendments that would resolve a few minor issues that remained and make the bill easier to read. I agreed.
At the first meeting, Lisa came up with the bright idea of reorganizing the MHA so that it followed the outline of HR 676. Jim and I agreed immediately. HR 676's structure is clean and quite logical. Jim and Lisa and I spent two long meetings together (I think the total time we spent together was 8 or 9 hours), Lisa spent another dozen or so hours cutting and pasting and writing a new draft, and we all spent more hours reading it.
When we had completed our new draft, we sent it over to John Marty's office. John invited the three of us to a meeting in mid-December to go over our draft with him. We scheduled three hours, but our meeting actually went on for five hours. We'd have gotten out sooner if John hadn't been so scrupulous about understanding every little detail in the new draft and thinking through dozens of issues raised by our new draft plus some issues we hadn't thought of. For five straight hours -- no breaks, no fresh infusions of coffee -- we went over every single word in our proposed draft, compared it to virtually every single word in the September draft, and we even reviewed chunks of SF 460 and HR 676 to help us solve some issues.
When John's committee assistant Laura Blubaugh sent Jim, Lisa and me a new draft in January, we sent back two dozen comments, almost all of them style suggestions. John and Laura met to discuss these and mailed back thoughtful comments on all of them.
I know other people had comments along the way too, so I don't want to suggest that Jim, Lisa and I were the only ones to provide helpful feedback. What I do want to stress is that MUHCC and GMHCC worked hard over the last six months to write a bill we could all agree on, and John Marty went overboard to ensure that any misunderstandings created by his original bill were resolved and that the final bill was well written. Like any movement, we will continue to have day-to-day debates about tactics and minor issues, but from my perspective we are united and we have a great bill to work for. I would not have scripted the tension that we had to deal with last spring. But because all the parties focused on issues and not personalities, we got a result none of us planned for -- a very good single-payer bill, probably the best in the country.
Kip
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