In ads that say Vice President Cheney would have passed away from heart problems if not for the fact that he has access to quality, publicly funded health care coverage, the California Nurses Association (CNA) is calling for 'Cheney Care' for every American.
'All Americans have the right to the quality of care that our Vice-President, President and Congress already have,' said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of CNA/NNOC and a vice-president of the AFL-CIO.
Vice President Cheney's recent medical procedures for heart problems were covered by publicly-funded health insurance. According to some studies, tens of millions of Americans who pay for private insurance likely would not have had similar care. Private insurers would have denied their claims for payments if they shared Vice President Cheney's medical history and prognosis.
According to one news account, many of these Americans would simply have not been treated and might even be dead.
DeMoro also criticized the universal health care plans offered by the leading candidates for president. “All the leading Democratic proposals fall well short of 'CheneyCare,' keeping insurance companies at the apex of power and allowing them to deny care that can save lives,' she pointed out. 'The Republican proposals are even worse.”
The CNA campaign is calling for a single-payer national health care model that exclude private insurance companies. It further urges voters to sign a petition for 'Cheney Care' for all and to demand this of the presidential candidates.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich supports a single-payer system based on expanding Medicare to cover everyone.
In the Democratic presidential debates last Saturday, the issue of health care was raised as a point of difference between front runners Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.
Clinton, who favors a mandated program that would give Americans a choice between federal insurance provided to members of Congress or private insurance, accused Obama of being inconsistent in his health care program, saying he supported single-payer health care at one point but now favors something else.
Sen. Obama replied, 'If I were designing a system from scratch. I would set up a single payer system.' Obama cited current systemic inefficiencies and massive costs (twice per capita of any other industrialized country) that a single-payer system would eliminate.
Obama added that because about half of the people who currently have coverage have employer-based private insurance, 'it would be impractical' to shift to a single-payer system. Obama calls for expanding the federal insurance program that members of Congress get to cover uninsured Americans.
The apparent difference between Obama and Clinton on this matter is that Obama does not favor requiring people to buy insurance. He said, 'As I go around to town hall meetings, I don't meet people who are trying to avoid getting health care. The problem is they can't afford it.'
Republican candidates, when they do discuss the health care issue, argue for privatizing public programs that expand health care coverage, for turning public health resources over to private companies, and for leaving working families at the mercy of huge insurance and medical corporations who have so far failed to deliver affordable universal care.
