Medicare for All

By: Benjamin Day and Gillian Mason - Healthcare-NOW
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  • Benjamin Day and Gillian Mason of Healthcare-NOW break down everything you need to know about the social movement to make healthcare a right in the United States. Medicare for All!
    ©2023 Healthcare-NOW Education Fund, Inc.
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Hygiene & Healthy Living Political Science Politics & Government
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Episodes
  • MAHA: Getting to Know RFK Jr.

    MAHA: Getting to Know RFK Jr.
    Feb 11 2025
    Well, the voters have spoken, and despite all of our recommendations to the contrary, they seem to have voted for Trump. Yeah, we’re pretty sad/scared/pissed off/trying to cope by dissociating and stress eating as well. Regardless, once again, it’s Trump’s America and we’re just living (or dying) in it. We know from experience that a Trump presidency is bad for our health, but now he has a surprising new ally in making our lives shorter and more dangerous: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhwR1W_x-TA Show Notes RFK is a former presidential candidate and critic of Trump, an expert falconer, an eater of roadkill, a source of shame for the entire Kennedy family, and a “superspreader” of false information about vaccines. And now he’s about to bring his mission to Make America Healthy Again to the masses as the Secretary of Health and Human Services for the entire USA. In this episode, we’re going to try to figure out what the hell that means. RFK Jr has some wild ideas about medicine and public health, making some strange connections between cause and effect in our health. Let’s play a game! We’ll give you some health outcomes, and you guess what RFK has said is the cause of the problem (or “problem” in several cases). (Sources: BBC, HuffPo, Daily Beast) Problem: Autism, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and ADHDCause: Vaccines! This assertion is primarily based on the fact that SOME earlier vaccines included a preservative thimerosal, a compound that contains mercury, even though it’s been debunked AND hasn’t been included in children’s vaccines since 2001. Problem: Arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid diseaseCause: Fluoride in drinking water! Problem: Fatness, depression, and cancerCause: Ultra Processed Foods Solution: Raw milk! Problem: AIDSCause: Not HIV! (See his book about Anthony Faucci) Problem: Increasing concentrations of bioavailable aluminum in the environmentCause: Chemtrails This one’s a trick question because in a 2016, a survey of scientists showed that most of them didn’t even believe that aluminum levels were increasing, let alone that chemtrails exist. Problem: Gay and Trans KidsCause: Pesticides (atrazine) in tap water. Amazing logic here: “[atrazine can] chemically castrate and forcibly feminize [frogs]... If it’s doing that to frogs, there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well.” Problem: COVID 19Cause: Chinese bioweapon. His logic (from a campaign video leaked to the NY Post): “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential and the impact of that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons.” A heaping helping of anti-Asian racism with a side of antisemitism! Problem: RFK Jr’s own problems with memory loss and cognitionCause: He said in a 2012 divorce deposition, “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” Also, tuna fish. He hasn’t ever provided medical records to document this, but doctors say it might have happened? Despite the fact that he’s about to be nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. isn’t a doctor or a medical researcher. The brain worm explains a lot about RFK Jr’s thinking, but neural parasites aside, how did this guy get to be a “public health expert” to begin with? He started as a well-respected environmental lawyer. In 1984, he began volunteering with The Hudson River Fisherman's Association, later renamed “Riverkeeper,” which inspired the global “Waterkeeper” movement. He sued big polluters, helped formulate a model for sustainable development,
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    46 mins
  • Medicaid Privatization Smackdown in Connecticut!

    Medicaid Privatization Smackdown in Connecticut!
    Nov 13 2024
    We spend a lot of time griping about the insidious power of corporate health insurance in our healthcare system here. But you would expect that taxpayer funded public programs for our most vulnerable friends and neighbors are free from profiteering right? Sadly, no. Medicaid - the public program that serves the lowest income Americans, plus some people with disabilities, and a lot of the country’s long-term care - has been extensively privatized in most states. Hoping to trim budgets, most states have outsourced Medicaid recipients to “Medicaid Managed Care Organizations,” which are actually private insurance companies. And with private insurance comes the barriers to care we know all too well, like prior authorizations, denial of claims, and narrow networks. These are all part of the private insurance/public programs business model: the more care they avoid paying for, the more money from those capitated payments they get to keep. But today we have a rare ray of sunshine: a state showing there’s another way to provide care, not just coverage, to some of their most vulnerable residents. In 2012 Connecticut kicked the private insurance-run Managed Care Organizations out of their Medicaid program. They took on Big Insurance and won. Our guest today will walk us through how it went down. Sheldon Toubman has been a litigation attorney for Disability Rights Connecticut since 2021, and a leader of the efforts to remove Managed Care Organizations from the state’s Medicaid program. Before that, he was a staff attorney with New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA), where he spent 30 years representing and working on behalf of Medicaid enrollees. He engages in a variety of strategies on behalf of people with disabilities, from litigation to legislative advocacy and public education through media, webinars and other means. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM7dRzHkVu0&t=1804s Show Notes Sheldon tells us that before 2012, Connecticut’s Medicaid program was bifurcarted: eligible kids, pregnant people, and families were in a capitated Managed Care Organization (MCO) model and people with disabilities were in a fee-for-service program. (Medicaid is funded with federal dollars, but unlike Medicare, states design the programs and make all the decisions about plans.) With a fee-for-service model, the state takes on the risk. With the MCO model, the MCO receives a per-person/per-month fee (a "capitated payment") from the state, and they have to provide the care; if the patient requires less care, the MCO keeps the money, but if the patient requires more care, the MCO has to pay for the amount above the per-person/per-month fee. MCOs had a financial incentive to deny care so they could recoup more money. Beginning in the late 1990s, Medicaid advocates began a campaign of lawsuits and lobbying to remove Managed Care from their Medicaid program. Hartford, Connecticut is known as the insurace capital of the US, so this was a tough fight. Insurance companies fought this campaign because public programs are a major profit center for insurers, often more profitable than private employer-sponsored insurance. The insurance industry claimed they provided excellent care for less money, and coordinated care in a way that's not possible with the fee-for-service model. The insurance industry also ran ads about all the jobs they provide, and legislators were afraid to tangle with them. When the state asked for data about how the MCOs spent public dollars, they refused to provide it. So advocates only had anecdotal information, and it was hard to refute the claims the MCOs made about how well they served patients. One of the anecdotal complaints they heard the most was the lack of access to providers. Advocates convinced the state to check the insurance company provider network lists, so the state instituted a Secret Shopper survey to analyze them. They found that patients could get an appointment with supposed in-netw...
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    56 mins
  • Boo and Vote Local!

    Boo and Vote Local!
    Oct 21 2024
    In case you’ve been asleep or under a rock for the past six months, we need to let you know two things: First, Kendrick won his beef with Drake, and second, there is a presidential election coming up. Like any presidential election year, everyone’s so focused on the big showdown at the top of the ticket, but that means that a lot of the local and state races, congressional races, and referenda that will make up most of your ballot are getting ignored. Just because Anderson Cooper isn’t covering your city’s mayoral contest or your state’s Railroad Commissioner race doesn’t mean those elections aren’t critically important in determining the immediate future of your community and getting important issues like healthcare on the table! So for this episode, we’re going to leave the speculation about Donald and Kamala to Anderson and take our own 360 view of why we all need to get in on the down-ballot action and how we bring healthcare justice to the forefront of our election conversations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY6SAa8LU9c Show Notes We have two guests who know their way around a Get Out the Vote Drive! Jasmine Ruddy is the Assistant Director of Campaigns for National Nurses United. She helps lead NNU's political campaigns from Medicare for All to electoral work and more! Her background is in the climate justice movement and campus/student organizing in her home state of North Carolina Jonathan Cohn is the Policy Director at Progressive Massachusetts, which does multi-issue advocacy work. Jonathan wears many hats in the political space in Massachusetts and has been active in many progressive issue and electoral campaigns over the past little over a decade. Jasmine describes the local campaign that got her hooked: as a campus organizer for climate justice she helped win ballot measures to pass a regional transit tax. It was a concrete and tangible way to make an impact on the climate justice movement. Jonathan cut his political teeth on the Obama 2012 campaign, and got the local politics bug when Boston Mayor Tom Menino retired. Twelve candidates came forward for the first open mayoral race in 20 years. He was especially interested in public school policies and funding. He volunteered for mayoral candidate and City Council Member Felix Arroyo Jr. Ben confesses that while he loves democracy, he hates elections (#relatable). But he does find more hopefulness at the local level. He also got started in a mayoral election in Boston, but the most exciting campaign he worked on was for state house. He lived in one of the most progressive districts in the state but their state representative was a powerful, well-funded right-leaning Democrat. Ben's candidate, Nika Elugardo, a true progressive beat him despite all those advantages. Picture it: New Jersey, 1990s, tween Gillian lives in a suburb (North Plainfield) seeking to change its name to distance itself from the majority Black and Brown city of Plainfield. During a town-wide debate on the ballot measure, young Gillian spoke against renaming the city. She was quoted on the front page of the local paper: "North Plainfield shouldn't change its name. Stonybrook is just a dirty brook that divides our town, just like this issue is doing right now." The anti-name change side won and our star was born. We discuss the additional influence a voter can have when working on a local election. When races can be won or lost by a few dozen votes, the candidates care a lot more about each individual. They may knock on your door or call you seeking support, which is a great opportunity to insert the issues you care about into the election. Once your candidate gets elected, they'll remember the folks who helped them get there and you'll have more influence when lobbying them on the issues you care about. (You may even end up with a job.) Jonathan's personal philosophy is "Boo and Vote." He never liked Obama's catchphrase "don't boo; v...
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    50 mins

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