Health Care Protesters Are Sitting In At Insurance Offices. Join Them!

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via Crooks & Liars:



Health Care Protesters Are Sitting In At Insurance Offices. Join Them!
By Susie Madrak Wednesday Sep 30, 2009 6:30pm


You want to know what you can do? Here are some ideas from an interview yesterday on Democracy Now!:

Watch: http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/health-care-protesters-are-sitting-in

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Kevin, let’s start with you. What exactly are you launching today, this campaign of civil disobedience?

KEVIN ZEESE: Well, it’s three groups that are launching it. ProsperityAgenda.us, which is trying to democratize the economy in the way that Michael Moore is starting to get a debate going about, we see healthcare as critical to people getting control over their lives. And a single-payer system is the only way to do it. Healthcare-NOW!, which is the leading grassroots advocacy group for single payer that is joining us. And the Center for the Working Poor in Los Angeles works on issues of low-wage workers.

And the basic thrust of this is, is to highlight the denial of healthcare by the insurance industry. Doctors and patients reach an agreement on what they want, what kind of healthcare is appropriate, and too often healthcare insurance companies say, “No, we’re not going to pay for that.” In fact, there was a report put out by one of the really excellent organizations in this effort, California Nurses Association, that showed that 20 percent of the time when people have agreed on healthcare, the insurance companies say no. Twenty percent of the time. One company was 40 percent of the time. So this is a serious problem. In fact, Michael Moore, when he did Sicko, had 25,000 people write him and say that they were being denied healthcare. So the goal is to say, “Get these people healthcare.”

We’re going to go—and if people who are denied healthcare want to have the community support them, they should contact us at mobilizeforhealthcare.org, and we will bring people together to go to the insurance company and say to the insurance company, “Provide this person with healthcare.” These are life and death decisions, and their profits should not be coming before patients.

But the overlying message of this is that the healthcare—health insurance industry should not be seen as a solution to our healthcare crisis. They are the cancer of the healthcare crisis. We need a single-payer system. And the band-aid, putting over the cancer, that President Obama and the Democrats are pursuing in Washington is not going to make the situation better. In fact, it’s going to make it worse, because they’re going to empower these insurance companies with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual new revenue by having working people, who can’t even afford to put food on the table in too many kinds, forced to buy private insurance that’s overpriced and a pretty lousy product. It’s amazing that we’re seeing the government forcing people to buy insurance, when the insurance industry is the cause of so much of the problems that we’re facing here.

So, people who want to get involved in this, we’re looking for people to sign up to protest, mobilizeforhealthcare.org, and come there and sign up, whether you’re a patient, whether you’re—want to get involved in this. We’ve had hundreds of people sign up already, and we want hundreds and hundreds more, because this is going to be a national campaign

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The complete piece is at: http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/health-care-protesters-are-sitting-in