Rep. John Conyers and Members of Congress Host Medicare for All Press Conference to Announce 111 Cosponsors on HR 676
On Tuesday, May 23, 2017, Congressman Joseph Crowley, Chairman of the Democratic Caucus, signed on as a cosponsor to HR 676, national single payer legislation, improved Medicare for All, becoming the 111th cosponsor.
On Wednesday, May 24th, just before the CBO announced that 23 million Americans would lose their health insurance under the Republican health care bill passed by the House, Congressman John Conyers, the conscience of the Congress, and seven other cosponsors of HR 676 and representatives of physicians and nurses gathered together to announce the amazing growth of both public and Congressional support for HR 676.
Congressman Conyers has been introducing HR 676 into the Congress since 2003 when he worked with Physicians for a National Health Program to produce legislation that that would implement the Physicians Proposal for a National Health Plan. The plan would remove the profit and administrative waste of the health insurers saving $500 billion to be invested in expanding care to those not covered and improving care for everyone. HR 676 removes the deductibles and co-pays allowing patients to quickly access needed care by ending the economic barriers that now keep even the insured away from care.
The press conference was broadcast live on Facebook. Here is a transcript of what was said:
Congressman John Conyers of Michigan:
Yesterday, Congressmen, 111th cosponsor, Chairman of the Caucus Joe Crowley. The first time we have a substantial majority of the Democratic Caucus on this bill. Isn’t that great! He’s a supporter of mine.
Health care has also set a record high as town halls are filled with people asking more about it or demanding Medicare for All. So why now? Well, obviously we’ve been getting a lot of concern and support because of the horrific bill that the Republicans rammed through the Congress a couple of weeks ago by 2 votes and no Democratic votes and energized people all over the country.
But it’s also because the status quo is not enough. Right now more than 10% of the adults in America have no insurance and there are millions more who have insurance but still don’t have care because they simply can’t afford the out of pocket costs.
Obviously we are all united in opposition to Trumpcare, that’s easy. But people know what we are against, but we want to promote more what we are for. As a Democrat, I believe that health care is a right not a privilege. I believe in universal health care for every American not just a plan or a contract but the ability to see a doctor and to get treatment whenever they need it.
We will never get universal care building on the foundation of private for-profit insurance. The only way we will get there is the way every other advanced country on the planet has, through a universal system like expanded Medicare for All.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most inhumane.” And he was right. For years people have said, including people who support single payer,that it’s not time yet, that Medicare for All will have to wait.
Well, Dr. Martin Luther King said that “Wait” has almost always meant “never.”
We’re here to say that we’re done waiting. It’s time now, Medicare for All.
And now from Tennessee I bring you the Honorable Steve Cohen.
21:48 Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee:
It’s an honor for me to follow John Conyers at this podium. Today is my birthday. I have two fathers, one that’s deceased, my biological father who was a doctor and provided health care, and my congressional father is John Conyers. I chose the judiciary committee and we’ve been together on the judiciary for 11 years.
John Conyers has always been for 676 wanting to give everybody health care. John Conyers is a civil right hero, a civil rights leader, and health care is a civil rights issue. It’s essential. It is ridiculous that we finagle around with bills trying to come up with something that can get enough votes to pass. We’re talking about people’s lives and people’s health. That shouldn’t be a finagling operation, it should be something that we do because we understand that we’re here for a short period of time and we need to give people every opportunity to enjoy life and to enjoy it for as long as possible. We do that through medical care and medical research. So this is the right bill.
We should provide health care that doesn’t involve having to have profit for insurance companies or 20 or 40 or 50 billion dollar salaries for insurance executives and advertising costs to try and get people to buy insurance of one company over another. We should have health care for all. I’m for it and I appreciate John Conyers being the leader if for one day.
And I want to introduce now my classmate, an individual who believes in this as earnestly as John and I do, Peter Welch.
20:07 Congressman Peter Welch:
We’ve had an elusive goal in this country ever since Harry Truman was president and that is to have a health care system where every single American had access to the health care he or she needed.
We’ve made two big steps, one was Medicare and Medicaid in 1964 and the other was the Affordable Care Act in 2010. We now take the next step by having a Medicare system that applies to everybody. Medicare works. Everybody over 65 is part of it. Everybody over 65 is covered. Everybody over 65 has helped to pay. It works for everybody over 65—why not let it work for everybody?
That’s what this is about. Medicare for All. All of us are covered. All of us helped pay for it. We share the responsibility to build a health care system that will be there when we need it and when the people we love need it.
I’m proud to be a cosponsor with my friend John Conyers and all of my friends here. Thank you.
18:56 Congressman Ro Khanna
Thank you. I’m Ro Khanna, a freshman member from California. It’s an honor. John Conyers is a hero of mine so it’s really an honor to be on this bill with him. Thank you for your leadership.
I represent Silicon Valley and I want to make a point not just on the morality of Medicare for All but the economics of Medicare for All. If you talk to people in the Valley at start ups and entrepreneurs they will tell you that one of the big disadvantages is the cost of health care which taking up almost 15 to 17% of GDP.
It’s why they often can’t compete and it’s often health care is one of the causes of them going offshore and putting jobs offshore. It’s not the wages it’s the cost of health care benefits. Every economist that has looked at this knows that if you have Medicare for All and you cut out all the insurance costs, you cut out all the advertising costs, you make the system more efficient. It would create more jobs. It would be good for business. The only people who are opposed to this are those who have a vested interest in the current economic system.
And so I think it is not enough for our party just to point out why Trumpcare is terrible. People want a positive vision and solution, and John Conyers’ bill is that solution and I’m so really proud to support it.
Thank you.
17:17 Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman.
Good morning, my name is Bonnie Watson Coleman and I represent the 12th District in the great state of New Jersey. In my state alone the devastating repeal of the ACA the House Republicans sent over to the senate would increase the number of uninsured New Jersians by 124% in just two years that is by 2019.
This is simple. Medicare for all. It is not only an alternative, it is the right answer to the question that we have before us.
We are living in a country where the 25 best paid hedge fund managers earn as a collective 11 billion dollars a year. At the same time we live in a country where over 20 million Americans did not have health care as I stand here. America is the wealthiest nation and we are the wealthiest we have ever been.
I refuse to believe that in this great nation we cannot provide health care for all.
So let’s do the numbers. Medicare spends less than 2% on administration as opposed to 18% for private insurers.
Health care costs also eat away at American business competitiveness. We’ve heard this.
Prior to the recession General Motors said that health care created an additional $1,500 on the sticker for a new car. Starbucks reported that it paid more for health care than it did for coffee beans.
The Affordable Care Act has slowed the overall pace of the increase in the cost of health care but we need to take a look at the way that we cover millions of our military veterans and our seniors and we know that works and that is Medicare for All. And so while we grapple with the decisions that are being made down here in Washington, there are those of us who stand with our esteemed colleague, Mr. John Conyers, and say Medicare for All, it’s a simple solution, that’s what makes America great. And I’m delighted to be a cosponsor of this legislation.
14:45 Congressman Jamie Raskin
Winston Churchill said that you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing once they have tried everything else. And I think we’re getting to the point where it is time for America to embrace single payer health care. We’re spending more than 17% of our GDP on health care compared to what they are paying in France or the UK or the Netherlands which is about 10 or 11% of their GDP.
30 cents on the dollar of our health care money goes to insurance bureaucracy. That’s a waste of money, that’s money that should be going to taking care of people. And that’s what single payer is. You cut out all of the insurance bureaucracy and all of the fighting over benefits and co-pays and deductibles and you just cover everybody for health care.
I’ve lived in France for a year a little more than a decade ago with my family. And we got there, we had only been there a few weeks and our youngest daughter came down with a screeching ear ache. So we called our French friends and said What do you do? And they said you call SOS which is part of the national health service and 20 minutes later a knock on the door, a doctor arrives and diagnoses Tabbatha with not an ear infection but a strep throat, and wrote us a prescription in the same illegible script you get here in the United States. And we went down to the pharmacy which was two doors away and within an hour we had taken care of it.
In America it would be come two Thursdays from now in the middle of the day and miss work sitting in a room with 30 other screaming children.
So health care is something we can work out. We can make this happen. We’ve got to liberate the small businesses from the burden of health insurance. It is crippling for small businesses to have to deal with this. It should not be their responsibility. It should be a national responsibility that we take care of everybody’s health care. It’s something that we all do for each other. It’s what it means to be an American that we are committed to each other.
And what I’m excited about this debate over the atrocious Trumpcare proposal is that more and more Americans are seeing that we need to take national responsibility for making sure everybody gets health care because if somebody else’s kid gets sick it means that my kid is going to get sick.
And we can’t afford tens of millions of people not having health care, not having the ability to be in a regular relationship with a doctor so this is the logical way to go. America is ready for it. I want to salute Congressman Conyers for his many decades of leadership on single payer. This is going to be the pathway through. Let’s make it happen.
11:51 Congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin:
Hi, I’m Mark Pocan from Wisconsin and let me first say a big congratulations to Representative Conyers. This is the largest number that we’ve ever had on this bill, 111 cosponsors. The reason there are 111 cosponsors is that Americans, the two programs that I think people find most valuable, they’ve paid in to all their life and they really count on they know it’s there when they really need it, are Social Security and Medicare. Why not take that Medicare model and make it work for absolutely everyone.
You know the debate we so often have here in Congress is that we passed the Affordable Care Act so that 20 million people now have access to health care than didn’t before, we know there are improvements that have to happen, but the other side of the aisle wants to take health care away from 24 million people and make it devastating and completely in the wrong direction.
What happens in the Town Halls across my district from Dodgeville to Darlington from Monroe to Madison, all in Wisconsin, every single town hall when we get talking about health care inevitably we get to what about Medicare for All. And when we get to that it gets the largest response of any in that Town Hall.
In fact, I recently did a Town Hall in Kenosha, Wisconsin in Paul Ryan’s district. If the Republicans aren’t going to do Town Halls, we’re going to do Town Halls. And again, in his district, the largest response of the Town Hall was when we get to the subject of Medicare for All.
So let’s face it, the people are there, the people are leading. It’s time for us to catch up and follow and become leaders ourselves. I want to thank Representative Conyers for launching these efforts and to get to 111 cosponsors really is a big thing. It’s time to get this done, and I’m looking forward to being an active part of that.
9:54 Congressman Keith Ellison from Minnesota
All I want to say is we can fight fiercely to protect the Affordable Care Act and also look a little farther in terms of establishing Medicare for All. We cannot limit ourselves to what’s in front of us at the moment. We can fight fiercely but also dream of a day when everybody can go to a doctor simply because they are an American. That is the moment we need to be in. And that is the fight we need to be waging right now.
So we are using the momentum that we are gaining in fighting and protecting the Affordable Care Act to gather people around this idea of Medicare for All. Mark’s right, people all over this country, you say Medicare for All, people are enthusiastic about it, people are leading, and I just want to say thank you to you, Congressman Conyers, for toiling in this vineyard for years, so all I want to say is thank you from the Progressive Caucus, who is always pushing the boundaries of the possible, a little bit more, that’s our John, Thank you.
8:46 Congressman John Conyers introduces Jeanne Ross, RN of the National Nurses United:
My name is Jeanne Ross. I am a registered nurse from Minnesota and co-president of the National Nurses United, the largest nurses’ union in the United States. I’m proud to stand here representing more than 150,000 registered nurses across the country in strong support of HR 676, the Improved Medicare for All Act.
We have a broken health care system in this country. And registered nurses see the tragic effects of this broken system every day at the hospital bedside. The system has failed tens of millions of people including the millions who actually have health insurance but that can’t afford to use it because of exorbitant co-pays, deductibles and premiums.
It’s a system driven by profit not by protecting peoples’ health. Too many patients are not able to receive the care they need to survive and to thrive. Too many are forced to delay care until they experience a life threatening emergency. The United States of America, the richest country in the world and yet we have the worst health outcomes in the industrialized world. This is unacceptable. People should not die because our politicians are not willing to stand up to the health insurance industry.
And Americans across the country are waking up to this reality. We know this system does not provide the care, is not designed to heal patients, it’s designed to make corporations rich. The state of health care in America can’t be taken lightly. We need a solution.
Registered nurses have a professional obligation. We advocate for the health and welfare of our patients. We take this obligation very seriously and we know from caring for patients in hospitals and clinics every day, the only solution to this health care crisis is a single payer health care system. This is why we are proud to work with Representative John Conyers and endorse HR 676, the Improved Medicare for All Act. A single payer health care system will ensure every single resident of the United States has equal access to quality, therapeutic health care.
With Medicare for All the country will save billions of dollars in health care costs also insuring every single person has access to quality health care. This is a no brainer. It must happen.
National Nurses United is grateful to the 111, I hear we got one more, members of Congress who have cosponsored this bill so far. This is significant. For the first time in history, single payer Medicare for All is the majority position in the House Democratic Caucus.
Now it’s time for every single member of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, to cosponsor this bill and we have a special message to Democrats who have not yet cosponsored this bill. It is not enough to fight for the status quo, because the status quo is not working for tens of millions of people in this country.
Yes, we ask you to defend the gains of the Affordable Care Act and stop the atrocious Republican AHCA which threatens 24 million Americans with loss of their insurance. But we can and must propose an alternative beyond the status quo which frankly hasn’t worked for millions of Americans. The time has come for truly universal health care through a single payer system and here’s our pledge.
Registered Nurses do not give up on our patients and we will not relent until we win Medicare for All. Thank you.
4:31 Congressman Conyers: Last but not least from the University of Chicago, Mr. Verhoef.
4:19 Phil Verhoef, MD, PhD, Physicians for a National Health Program.
So I’m an ICU physician at the University of Chicago and as an ICU physician I depend on research and evidence to help inform me about how to practice medicine, how to take care of critically ill kids and adults in the ICU.
But I look at our current health care system, and when I look at the evidence and when I look at the research, I’m pretty sure that our health care system is also critically ill. Why do I say that? Well, look, based on research published last week we ranked 80th out of 195 countries and that is by far the worst of the developed countries in this world.
But more importantly we have 30 million uninsured patients in this country. What that means based on research and evidence is that we will have no less than 20,000 deaths this year because of that lack of insurance. That is unacceptable.
On top of that costs are out of control.
We spend the most per person out of pocket on health care. We spend the most per person per GDP. We spend the most on every possible measure that you can think of.
And so we are failing on every front… this is a critically ill health system. So I say, as a critical care physician, What’s the solution?
Well, one solution has been proposed in Trumpcare and I can tell you that I’m pretty sure, even without CBO’s report which we expect later today, that this is actually going to make our critically ill system even worse.
It’s a little bit like giving grandma a heart attack when she is already in the ICU for pneumonia. And so ultimately why would that happen? So look, if 24 million people lose health insurance, that’s another 20,000 deaths that we can lay at the feet of the architects of this awful bill.
Second, this bill (Trumpcare) achieves financial responsibility by providing a humongous tax cut to actually destabilize Medicare at same time that it guts Medicaid. So what that really means is that we are balancing the books on the backs of senior citizens, children, people with disabilities and the poor.
And this just doesn’t make any sense to me.
But we have a solution, we have a therapy for this critically ill patient, our health care system, and that is HR 676, improved and expanded Medicare for All
Again I turn to research and evidence based on studies from other countries around the world that use similar systems, it saves lives, it saves money, it improves health outcomes.
The thing that burns me up is that we have a solution on the books and there is not political will to move forward with it except for Congressman Conyers and the 111 cosponsors that have been supportive.
As an ICU physician, I know what the solution to our critically ill system is and that’s HR 676 Improved and Expanded Medicare for All and I hope to see political will to stop the deaths of people for lack of health insurance.
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https://www.facebook.com/CongressmanConyers/?hc_ref=PAGES_TIMELINE
The full press conference is on Congressman Conyers’ facebook page. I have transcribed it so that those who cannot hear because of the background noise will be able to read the very important content. I welcome corrections of any errors made. Kay Tillow at nursenpo@aol.com. www.kyhealthcare.org http://unionsforsinglepayer.org
