We believe that women should have control of their own healthcare.
— The President of the United States, Barack Obama (via feminismisprettycool)
“One key reason that Rwandans are so much healthier today is the spread of health insurance. In 1999, Rwanda’s health facilities sat unused, as the vast majority of people couldn’t afford them. In response, the Health Ministry began a pilot project of health insurance in three districts. In 2004, the program began to spread across the nation. Now health insurance — called Mutuelle de Santé — is nearly universal. Andrew Makaka, who manages the health financing unit at the Ministry of Health, said that only 4 percent of Rwandans are uninsured.
Mutuelle is a community system — premiums go into a local risk pool and are administered by communities. Until last year, Mutuelle’s premiums were about two dollars a year. This system turned out to be untenable — even two dollars a year was too much for a lot of people. (If you are a rural farmer with an income of some $150 a year, you have to spend every penny on food.)
Last year Mutuelle adopted a sliding scale. For the wealthiest, premiums essentially quadrupled, to about $8 a year. Each visit to a clinic has a co-pay of about 33 cents. If you need to go to the hospital, you pay a tenth of your hospital bill.”
(Source: The New York Times)
“Arizona’s Jan Brewer, the scowling force behind SB1070, or the “show me your papers, Mexicans” law. Bored with working to be a dick to immigrants (or people whose darker than white skin makes them appear to be in this country illegally), Brewer has set her sights on a new disenfranchised group to bully: same-sex domestic partners…
She attempted to revoke same-sex partner benefits in 2009, but that move was blocked when a court ruled that rescinding benefits from domestic partners would cause state employees financial hardship and emotional trauma. Bickering over the ruling continued until September of last year, when the 9th Circuit Court ruled that the state of Arizona didn’t have a right to take health care away from gay couples. Now, Brewer wants the Supreme Court to get involved, three years after she first signed a law eliminating same sex partner benefits and after a handful of increasingly high court rulings siding against the state of Arizona. Taking health care away from gay couples is just that important to her.” - Erin Gloria Ryan
— http://jezebel.com/5924508/americas-most-evil-governor-asks-supreme-court-to-take-health-care-away-from-gays
Obama’s great achievement is not any one element of the health care reform law — not even the now-upheld individual mandate compelling individuals to have health insurance or pay a fine. The important thing is the law’s underlying assumption that every American, rich or poor, should have access to adequate health care.
In the rest of the industrialized world, this simple idea is taken for granted.
—
Eugene Robinson, in his column, The Bigger Picture: The Physical and Moral Health of the Nation
Yes. This is the bottom-line point, and it should be the starting point for any future discussions on this issue.
(via bohemiansouth)
We don’t blink an eye of the money that we have been spending on perpetual warfare. We literally don’t even, we don’t just sit here and go, ‘Whoa, trillions & trillions of dollars for warfare.’ But when we’re talking about healthcare, which is our people and their well-being, we’re shocked that it should cost us some money.
— Mark Ruffalo (via bobbyparsa)
heart4rescue:
kileyrae:
think-progress:
President Obama stopped shaking hands for a moment today so that he could embrace a sobbing woman whose uninsured sister recently died of colon cancer.
And the Republican response.
If you don’t click the link, let me just summarize for you. A Republican is asked, “What would you do to provide health care to the 30 million Americans who don’t have it if you repeal Obamacare?” He replies, “That is not the issue.”
I then screamed in frustration and facepalmed.
