April is Martin Luther King, JR. National Healthcare Month – and not a moment too soon!

We have three to four weeks to finish preparations for hundreds of local community healthcare hearings, forums, and action, and I am urging you to prepare to join in the activities that will get us to a national single payer healthcare system as soon as possible.

H.R. 676, the single payer bill: a wonderful piece of legislation – some say it is almost too good to be true. It will provide a comprehensive quality healthcare system for all from the womb to the end of life – a system that will serve every person in this country without co-pays and deductibles, and without the constant denials and delays that we face in the current healthcare system. It will cover everything – doctors, nurses, hospitals, dental, optical, hearing, prescription drugs and long term care.

BUT REMEMBER, Until we change this system to a single payer system, we will be continuing to pay the insurance companies one-third of every dollar they receive for their excessive expenditures, their multi-million dollar CEO salaries, their advertising and lobbying costs and their incredibly wasteful bureaucracy.

In other words, the equation works like this. We are covering about six million or more children now with SCHIPS. We could cover nine million for the same amount of money if there were no insurance companies taking a third off the top. Without the insurance companies in the middle of our system, we can cover 1/3rd more people with the same money we are now spending. Without the insurance companies as a barrier, we could cover everybody, all of the people who are not covered and provide much better benefits for all of the rest of us.

It is no secret that we spend the largest amount of money per capita in the world for healthcare – healthcare that we don’t get. But, our healthcare coverage is not even good, and in some instances, it is a lot worse. We have 50 million people waiting months and years and sometimes until they die for healthcare coverage. We have at least 50 million more who are insecurely covered, anxiously trying to avoid the day when they will find their coverage to be inadequate or that their coverage is dropped, or when their co-pays are too high to continue – or that their job has gone overseas.

It is not the fault of the dedicated nurses and doctors. It is the fault of a flawed system that requires huge profits to be taken away from healthcare and stashed in the pockets of the greedy. It is the fault of a political system whose problems I don’t need to enumerate. If you are a single payer supporter, you know all of these facts.

WE HAVE WORK TO DO!

APRIL! All of our Members of Congress are going to be home for the first two weeks in April. It is not vacation time for them. It is “working in their home district time.” Sooooo…it is a perfect time for you to organize healthcare TRUTH HEARINGS. Invite people in your community to come together to talk about this issue, and insist that your Congress Member endorse H.R. 676. See examples of TRUTH HEARINGS at http://www.healthcare-now.org/action/how_to.htm.

In April, you can also carry petitions all over your community and send them to us to present to the Congressional Teach Out on April 24th being planned by Congressman John Conyers. You could even take a laptop to all of your meetings and get people to sign onto the petition right on line. http://www.healthcare-now.org/petition.php.

In April, you could hold a prayer vigil or a demonstration or a speak out at your Congress member’s office or carry our banner that says “HEALTHCARE, not WARFARE!”

Please go to our website, www.healthcare-now. right now, and read about how you can get involved in all of the above activities and more. This is a critical moment.

NOW is the brief window of opportunity when we can help our Members of Congress and the major Congressional Committees, Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce, know that they need to hold hearings on the healthcare crisis and the viability of the single payer national healthcare bill, H.R. 676. And now is the time to get our Senators to present a complimentary bill to the Senate. It is the time to get our governors and our state legislators to endorse a national single payer program. They know that their states are desperately trying to deal with the healthcare burden. We must help them see that they can change that with a national single payer system.

Next year they will be raising money and campaigning for reelection. They will be posturing for votes and involved in presidential politics. So we cannot wait. Now is the time for Congress to act on the most important domestic priority to all of us who made our wishes clear in the fall election.

ONE MORE THING: Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Gore, Romney, Guiliani, McCain, etc. none of these candidates will support a single payer system unless we help them understand it and make it crystal clear that this is what we want from them. They must give up their dependence on the millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical drug industry and the insurance companies –they are our representatives our government and they are only in office because of the people, the voters, not because of the campaign contributions.

This is a great time to be alive! Let us play a historic role in making our country better for all of our people.

If you want to know how we can do it, look at the inspirational video on our website – John Conyers talking for seven minutes about the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. King and how we can win single payer! http://www.healthcare-now.org/action/film.htm.

Remember Dr. King and his Riverside Church sermon calling for an end to the Vietnam war and for healthcare for all one April day in 1967 -- and his martyrdom for his courage one year later in April of 1968. The example of those movements can be an inspiration to us. We are 30,000 strong. That translates into about 300,000 or 3,000,000 ready to work for what we must have – a national single payer healthcare system for all.

Call us if we can help. 1-800-453-1305 or write to info@healthcare-now.org.

Peace and Healthcare. We need it now.