As much as I'd like to believe that a President Obama will move our country onto a new path, there's this lingering fear in me that our next leader will be challenged unlike any other in our recent history and some of those challenges might be more formidable than any mere mortal can handle.

We need to resolve right now that, assuming Barack Obama becomes our Commander In Chief and he doesn't morph into the Anti-Christ as the wackos predict, that we will not succumb to fear should things go terribly wrong.

There is an intramural battle within center-left-liberal-progressive circles with regard to health care reform.

This diary is in follow-up to my diary last week and Ezra Klein's public response (see also comments to his essay.

THURSDAY NIGHT IS HEALTH CARE CHANGE NIGHT, a weekly Daily Kos Health Care Series

HOT OFF THE PRESS: Senator Jeff Bingaman's office (D-NM) just called ten minutes ago to inform me that the Senator HAS included all provisions of the moratorium on Medicaid Rules in the supplemental funding bill on Iraq. The president may still shut down public hospitals, emergency rooms, teaching hospitals and school based health clinics as planned, but he'll have to pause the war to do it!

Let's see if he vetoes! More to come under the rainbow (i.e., fold).

By Donna Smith, American SiCKO, Communications Specialist for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee
CHICAGO—We used to get annoyed when the admission desk at the hospital would hold us up from getting care with the co-pay collection effort, but now the world of medical finance and consumerism is about to take a giant leap forward.  Co-pay collections of the early 21st century will seem mild and meek, and we patients will more formally and openly be viewed as earnings units and revenue streams... unless we act forcefully and quickly to alter the coming reality.
 
    Shocked as we might pretend to be, we have been a party to the transition as we have stood by and watched as so many of our fellow citizens went without access to care at all – 47 million fellow citizens uninsured.  Fifty million more under-insured. And the rest of us annoyed with the process but silently and slightly smug about our own insured status – else we would have been marching in the streets, screaming for change and fighting for one another and the human right that is our healthcare.

Simple truth health insurance costs so much because we use so much of it. A system in which A delivers services to B that are paid by C will always result in more services delivered by and demanded B.

I recently moved across country to take a new job. My new home is in a  rural part of California. Moving can always be stressful and across country even more so.

One of the tasks in moving is to find new healthcare professionals. When you live in one location for a long time as I did, you tend to take your doctor for granted. You know their peculiarities and more importantly, they know yours.

Today, May 14th, is the 119th anniversary of the passing away of Mary Seacole, the Mother of Social Justice nursing.

RNs now celebrate Mary Seacole Day as part of National Nurses Week—and as the day we honor the social justice aspect of the work of nurses.   Mary Seacole remains an important inspiration for the national nurses movement being built by CNA/NNOC (California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee), which focuses on improving patient care and safety in hospitals and on bringing this country the guaranteed, single-payer health care that our patients deserve.  

...cross-posted at the Guaranteed Healthcare blog.

Canadian blogger Phil Paine has a rather grim, thought-provoking post over at his site, Philpaine.com.  The title, What is progress? what is progressive?, barely touches on the substance.  Phil, who has lived in the United States in the past, has been concerned for years about the corruption of thought and language promoted successfully by the so-called conservative movement.  It is Phil's fear that even a resounding Democratic victory in November will do little to deal with the huge problems faced by the United States.

First, the problems facing the United States Are so huge that when they come home to roost in the very near future.  The conservative noise machine will do what it has done in the past -- blame the Democratic administration for the problems that they themselves have created.  It's been done before -- think Jimmy Carter:

As the GOP suffers its third straight major territorial loss, and Obama locks up the nomination with the promise of big coat tails in Republican districts, it is time for us to consider the future, and ask ourselves: What will we do with power, how to use it, how not to squander it, and how we can keep corruption from sapping our moral authority?

I hope that this discussion can be incorporated into the architecture of a plan that I call (with no small hubris) A 12 Step Plan to Save America.

There has been a long running debate among progressives about what arena is the best to push health care reform. Should the solution come from states or from the federal government? Some in Washington, D.C. have said that states should simply wait for the Wise Elders of the Beltway to act - but a new poll suggests that's not the way the public feels.

Yesterday I wrote about a way to cut health care costs by attacking the some of the costs that get built into the system of educating doctors, running the practice and dealing with malpractice. This is my idea for single-payer care, and I don't claim it's terribly original. It borrows much from the Canadian system.

But the real point here is that I'm trying to sell this to people. So this is not just an idea for a plan, but a manifesto of sorts. Think of it as a position paper that I would love to see the candidates adopt. Not only a position paper but a sales pitch that I think will work better than others have in the past. Because it avoids putting things directly in government hands, and might appeal to those that think (wrongly I know) that government can't do anything right unless it involves guns.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

Thanks to America's health care system, today was a very stressful day for me. My story is so typical as to be boring - which is a really sad commentary.

This morning, while thumbing through some routine paperwork, my wife discovered that I have no health insurance. Without going into the details, we missed a bi-annual deadline for payment - a deadline that the company buried in fine print, and one that the company didn't even bother to tell us was approaching, or even missed after the fact. They just ended my coverage, with not so much as a letter or a phone call.

Democrats and the GOP have been going back over proposals for health insurance reform. All of them focus on insurance and access to it. That's important, no question.

But I'm going to take a different tack here. I'm going to lay out some little-discussed reasons why health care is more expensive in the US than in almost any other country. I'm talking about the built-in costs. That is, all the stuff that keeps the system running -- and doesn't need to cost as much as it does.

Basically, there are three components: the cost of being a doctor, the cost of interacting with insurance companies and the cost of having the oversight for the medical profession in the court system.

I'm headed into surgery on Tuesday. I currently have insurance. But it's worth thinking about the effects of a John McCain Presidency. It would harm chronically ill people like me, and cause all sorts of economic messes. I'll admit it--Hillary Clinton is better than John McCain.  

On Mother’s Day, what better than to talk about a mother’s love for her children. And here is a mother with tender thoughts about her 2-year-old daughter, and about her own mother, and how it translates into a run for Congress against steep odds.

MORE under the fold, cross-posted on www.miami-dade-dems.blogspot.com with photos and a YouTube video of her speech.

Sometime last fall, after the escalation in Iraq and while the Democratic field of contenders was already plump and getting plumper, I had downright giddy conversations with friends about our chances in 2008. Man, o man. After what we'd seen and suffered for seven years, having had our long-ago predictions -- Dubya is the Anti-Christ, we said in 2000, well before the votes weren't counted -- proven true over and over again, 2008 was going to be the year of years for our beloved Democratic Party. Regardless of who the Republicans nominated, they could dress him up like Uncle Sam on odd days and Jesus Christ on even ones, and the Democratic nominee would win, hands down. The blowout in November might not reach Reagan-Mondale proportions, but it was going to leave bodies strewn, nevertheless. Wrongs were going to be righted. O, heady days.

You have to wonder about the average person in in the average town with the average job earning average income. What do they think of McCain's, Obama's or Clinton's health care proposal? Do they have time to think about health care?

Between the job, the kids, the spouse, the house, bills and the cost of gasoline; who has time to think about health care? It only comes up when you or someone in the house is sick. You think about it when your employer changes insurers. You worry about it when you try to take your benefits on COBRA. It's a disaster when you find your individual health insurance policy is retroactively canceled because you actually expected to use it.

Life experience tells us what we don't like about the U.S. health care system. We don't like the expense, medical mistakes, the lack of dignity, the rush and hush and lack of trust we have with our current system. It should come as no surprise that politicians are offering no real solutuions to this mess. They are too busy trying to get elected to do anything really helpful.

I was just reading eve's diary about a woman she called in West Virginia.  The woman has an illness that will be terminal and is immobile and her husband helps as best he can but loses hours everyday commuting to his job.  Wonderful caring eve did her best to help from long distance by finding and providing this family with phone numbers of people who may be able to help.

Reading the diary and some of the comments is heartbreaking as everyone, regardless of their station in life or political persuasion, deserves better.  I couldn't help but compare their circumstances with those of my parents in Canada and it's shameful that American families can't expect the same treatment.  More of their story after the jump.