Maybe I'm seeing things too optimistic, but stepping back from the details of the healthcare reform movement, and looking at the big national trends, there is reason to hope that the movement in California for guaranteed healthcare will lead the nation along a path to progress.

Obviously in many ways the situation is different...labor unions are stronger in California than they are nationally, (and led the way in defeating the insurance industry-backed fake healthcare reform bill offered last year by Arnold Schwarzenneger and former Speaker Fabian Nunez), and the healthcare grassroots might be more developed as well.

But the underlying economics are the same...workers, families, employers and the state budget alike are all being crushed by out-of-control costs for insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-pays, all for a service that places us last in the industrialized world, and to subsidize a health insurance industry that plays no role in the delivery of patient care.

So let's just take a look at the evidence that suggests California is leading the nation:

This year's extended primary just might be great for healthcare reform as the Clinton campaign's failure may have killed off the terrible idea of insurance mandates.  She ran on it, and lost---just like Arnold did in California last year.

If so, great news all around.  Working people, already struggling, will not face the prospects of having their wages garnished to pay off Blue Cross' inflated premiums, overhead, and denials.  Healthcare reformers can focus their work towards enacting genuine solutions, rather than fighting off this insurance marketing scheme masquerading as health care policy.  And all of us can debate the real issues at hand here, like the new report finding the number of underinsured is spiking as our healthcare system continues its death-by-insurer spiral.

We'll take a look at this and updates from single-payer movement below!

Until we get rid of the health insurance corporations, we can at least fight back, shame them, and force them to do the right thing.

We did with the tragic story of Nataline Sarkisyan.

And now, Kim Kutcher enters the stage.

She's in full-on patient revolt mode, working with fellow nurses to get the back surgery she needs to avoid a lifetime of disability.  We'll take a look at what's happening and why.  It's an important template that someday might help your friends or family--and ask you to lend a hand, or at least a couple of dialing fingers.

...cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association's Breakroom Blog...

So this is what it's come to.  This isn't a plot point from the set of a disaster film.  This is the front line of our healthcare crisis: Oregon is holding a lottery for health coverage.  The 3,000 or so winners gets to sign up for health insurance with the Oregon Health Plan.  We'll take our chances, below...

...cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association's Breakroom Blog...
How do people feel about this?

In 1995, Taiwan had 40% of its population without health coverage, a huge rich-poor gap in life expectancy, and a ton of social and economic problems as a result.  

So they did the rational thing:  they introduced a national, non-profit, single-payer health care system.

Is this any way to run a healthcare system?  Today we learn that patients across the country are entering the "DNA underground," purposely avoiding or hiding DNA tests because they know their insurer will kick them off the rolls, or jack their rates up, in they don't.  These very same insurers, we also learn today, have taken to combing facebook profiles in a bid to kick sick people off their rolls.

In a single-payer system, everyone is in and nobody's out.  In today's healthcare system, the healthy are in, and the rest of us are out.  How is that a good thing?

...cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association's Breakroom Blog, as we organize for guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model.

This could be the start of something huge.

The sociopaths who run our nation's health insurance corporations might--just might--begin to face justice for the countless Americans that have suffered at their hands.  Health Net, one of the largest insurers in the nation, is facing multiple civil and criminal charges for retroactive recissions, their habit of kicking people off the insurance rolls as soon as they get sick.

This practice is not a coincidence--it's at the heart of their business plan, in fact of the whole model of for-profit health insurance.  Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo was brave in standing up to the practice,and justified.  We need other activist prosecutors to follow his lead, and help turn the public disgust with insurance corporations into national momentum for replacing them with universal, non-profit guaranteed coverage...also known as single-payer healthcare.

...cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association's Breakroom Blog...

I was speaking to a reporter recently about single-payer healthcare, when she said something striking: "I hear from people all the time complaining about the pharmaceutical companies.  But where's the movement against the insurance companies?  I hear almost nothing."

Well, I think it's out there and it's growing---in individual states and around the country.  There are a couple of great examples just from today.  Check `em out...or find them cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association's Breakroom Blog, where we organize to bring about guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model...