How do the Federal Healthcare Bills impact the HCHR campaign?

At the heart of the Healthcare Is a Human Right campaign is our belief that healthcare is a fundamental human right. We believe that our government must make the moral commitment to recognize this basic right and enact a system which provides care for all. None of the federal bills being considered make this moral commitment.

When we started this campaign, we quickly agreed that a federal universal and properly funded Medicare-for-all system (i.e., "single payer") makes the most sense, but that it is currently impossible because of the influence and control of those profiting off the healthcare industry. We realized the struggle has to be first won on a state level, which is exactly how Canada's national healthcare system started, in province of Saskatchewan. The attempts at federal healthcare reform over the past year have proven this to be correct.

Federal Reform Hijacked by Insurance Companies
"The reform process in Washington has been hijacked by the private health insurance industry," says Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, Harvard professor of medicine and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, who points out that the Senate Baucas Bill was drafted by a former vice-president of Well-Point Insurance, the largest private insurance company in the country. She says: "What’s come out of the House, what’s likely to come out of the Senate, is a completely inadequate bill that takes about $500 billion in taxpayer money and hands it over to the private health insurance industry."
See her interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

States' Right to Innovate Amendments
Senator Sanders and other progressives in Congress have been fighting to help facilitate state-based reform through a "State's Right To Innovate" amendment to the federal healthcare bills. These amendments would provide federal assistance on some technical issues which arise in the transition from the current mess of how we pay for healthcare to a system that makes sense, such as automatically granting waivers so a state who wish to pool together healthcare tax dollars from Medicare and Medicaid into a state's own universal plan. If this would pass, it would be a gift because it would make our job of getting out of that mess easier. But we can and we must move forward no matter what and simply request the federal waivers and other assistance we need. The biggest obstacle to moving towards healthcare for all in Vermont is not the techincal barriers, but the political will. And that is exactly what we are changing through grassroots organizing.

[For more on the issue of technical challenges with waivers and possible ERISA lawsuits see Vermont Health Care For All's "Can we do single-payer on a state level?" ]