Health Care Alert

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We Need Real Universal Health Care Coverage

By John Conyers

Created Apr 23 2007 - 11:54pm

The health care crisis we face today affects everyone, overwhelming America's workers and businesses. Many low-wage earners do not receive health benefits and cannot afford insurance. Higher salaried workers know that the cost of their health insurance may lead to the next round of layoffs.

More than 46 million Americans lack basic health care coverage. Millions more face high deductibles and staggering costs leaving essential care out of reach.

We can no longer seek gradual reforms or provide insurance companies with financial incentives to solve the problem. The time has come for a single payer national health care system that provides complete care to all Americans.

Since the 2006 elections, we have heard plenty of new voices calling for universal health care. Unfortunately, many of these claim to be universal health care, but are merely bandaids to the problem.

One proposal has the federal government giving billions of dollars to insurance companies to cover the uninsured. Other proposals only cover children or shift the entire burden of healthcare to employees in the form of health savings accounts.

Unfortunately, patchwork fixes like these will not work. The only way to provide a lasting solution to our health care crisis is through single payer universal health care. We must not let the movement toward universal health care be co-opted by proposals that serve to enrich those seeking to extend the status quo at the expense of true reform.

To address this need, I have introduced H.R. 676, the United States National Health Insurance Act. My bill would create a single payer universal health care system by strengthening and extending the Medicare program to cover all Americans.

Please help me enact this important legislation by signing this statement of support [0]. We must have real reform through a single payer universal health care program if we are to solve our nation's health care crisis.

Oxfam calls for end to Palestinian blockade

Ian Black, Middle East editor
Friday April 13, 2007
Guardian Unlimited


Aid to the Palestinian Authority was suspended in April 2006 after Hamas's victory. Photograph: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are suffering "devastating" humanitarian consequences as incomes plummet, debts mount and essential services face meltdown, Oxfam says in a report that calls for an immediate end to the international financial blockade of the Hamas-led government.

With poverty up by 30% in 2006 and previously unknown levels of factional violence on the streets, the Palestinian territories - occupied by Israel in the 1967 war - risk becoming "a failed state" if the punitive measures are not lifted, the charity warns.

Palestinians were already struggling to make ends meet when key donors, including the US, the EU and Canada, suspended direct aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in April 2006. The move came in response to the victory of the Islamist movement Hamas in parliamentary elections. Israel halted the transfers of tax and customs revenue it owed to the PA shortly afterwards.

Hamas refuses to recognise Israel, to renounce violence or to accept existing peace agreements, but it has hinted recently at a more pragmatic approach and largely observed a ceasefire. Last month, in a deal brokered by Saudi Arabia, it agreed to form a national unity government under President Mahmoud Abbas, triggering new moves to ease the boycott.

The PA is now operating on a quarter of the $160m (£81m) a month it needs to finance its activities. The impact has been so severe because an estimated one million people depend on incomes paid to 160,000 government employees. Oxfam reports that 46% of Palestinians now do not have enough food to meet their needs; that the number of people in deep poverty (defined as those living on less than 50 cents a day) nearly doubled in 2006 to over one million; and that incomes of PA workers had fallen to 40% of their normal levels. A November 2006 poll of government workers showed an increase in poverty from 35% to 71%.

Salam Fayyad, the highly regarded Palestinian finance minister, said in Brussels on Wednesday that the boycott had "devastated" the Palestinian economy.

Norway has agreed to resume financial assistance to the PA , while Russia, France, and other EU governments are considering renewing transfers in order to improve the lives of Palestinians, beyond a "temporary international mechanism" designed to provide direct support to Palestinians without going through the PA.

The US and Israel have showed no sign of changing their positions despite repeated calls to accept that the blockade has proved counter-productive.

Oxfam argues that it is legitimate for donors to attach conditions to how their money is spent, but not to advance a political agenda. Aid could be suspended if money was used corruptly or to fund terrorism. "International aid should be provided impartially on the basis of need, not as a political tool to change the policies of a government," said Oxfam's international executive director, Jeremy Hobbs.

"Oxfam opposes violence against civilians and supports Israel's right to exist alongside a viable and independent Palestinian state. But suspending aid - and withholding tax revenue in violation of international agreements - is not an ethical or effective way to achieve these outcomes. And in this case, it hasn't worked. Instead, parents have been driven into debt, children taken out of classrooms and whole families deprived of access to medicine and healthcare."

Bush's Budget Projects $333 Billion Tax Increase

Editor's note: I am moving to post at the primary blog(also see new articles below).
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March 26, 2007

Joint Tax Committee Releases Description of Tax Provisions in President's Budget, Projects $333 Billion Tax Increase from Proposed Standard Deduction for Health Insurance

The Joint Committee on Taxation today released Description of Revenue Provisions Contained in the President's Fiscal Year 2008 Budget Proposal (JCS-2-07):

This document, prepared by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, provides a description and analysis of the revenue provisions modifying the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 (the “Code”) that are contained in the President’s fiscal year 2008 budget proposal, as submitted to the Congress on February 5, 2007. The document generally follows the order of the proposals as included in the Department of the Treasury’s explanation of the President’s budget proposal. For each provision, there is a description of present law and the proposal (including effective date), a reference to relevant prior budget proposals or recent legislative action, and an analysis of policy issues related to the proposal.

On page 301, the Joint Committee projects that the President's proposed standard deduction for health insurance, coupled with repeal of the exclusion for employer-paid health insurance, self-employed health insurance deduction, and itemized medical deductions, would result in a $333 billion tax increase over 10 years.

March 26, 2007 in Congressional News | Permalink

Palestinian Medical and Health Institutions Call for Imposing Measures against the Israel Medical Association

February 2007

Occupied Palestinian Territory

Whereas the Israel Medical Association’s (IMA) medical ethics record on torture has been well documented, and the institution has never denounced or seriously confronted the Israeli government on its shameless use of torture;

Whereas the IMA has shown blatant disregard for the ethical issue of medical neutrality, with the IMA unconditionally defending the violations of medical neutrality by the Israeli army in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT);

Whereas the IMA is charged with being the executive arm of the Israeli establishment working to support political imperatives rather than serving universal medical ethics;

Whereas the IMA violates it own Physicians’ Code of Ethics, which stipulates that the goal of the IMA is to: “… maintain a suitable professional and ethical level in the medical profession”;

Whereas the IMA has either contributed directly to maintaining, defending, or justifying oppression and wars, or has stood silently in the face of civilian deaths in the OPT and Lebanon; the killing, harassment and wounding of Palestinian and Lebanese health professionals on duty; and the destruction of the Palestinian and Lebanese health systems -- in the OPT as a result of destruction of the infrastructure, the apartheid Wall, and in Lebanon as a result of the massive destruction of infrastructure, roads, bridges and petrol outlets-- all systematic violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention;

Given that all forms of international intervention have failed to force Israel to comply with international law or to end its repression of Palestinians and the unjust war in Lebanon;

Given that direct appeals to the IMA have been unavailing, including those from both local and international health and human rights organisations over many years, and despite a mass of incriminating documentation;

Given that the World Medical Association, responsible for monitoring medical ethics worldwide, and which has as its current Chair of Council the IMA president, has repeatedly declined to take action as it is mandated to do;

Given that people of conscience in the international community of medical and health professionals and workers shoulder the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in their struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through various forms of boycott and sanctions;

In the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression,


We, the undersigned, Palestinian Medical and Health institutions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, call on world medical and health institutions to:

1. Immediately end cooperation with, and refrain from participation in, any form of collaboration or joint activities with the IMA.
2. Advocate for the condemnation of the IMA.
3. Support Palestinian medical and health institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as a condition for such support.


The undersigned:

1. The Medical Association -Jerusalem (Palestinian Physician’s Union).
2. Maqassed Hospital - Jerusalem
3. Red Crescent Society –Gaza
4. The Gaza Community Mental Health Program
5. Arab Women’s Union Hospital – Nablus
6. Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees – West Bank and Gaza (Palestinian Medical Relief Society)
7. Health Work Committees
8. Union of Health Work Committees - Gaza
9. Union of Health Care Committees
10. The National Society for Rehabilitation – Gaza
11. Near East Council of Churches Committee for Refugees - Gaza
12. Union of Agricultural Work Committees
13. Treatment and Rehabilitation Center for the Victims of Torture (TRC)
14. Patients Friends Society -Jenin
15. Union of Palestinian Handicapped
16. Palestinian Family Planning and Protection Association
17. Health Policy Forum
18. Project Loving Care-Jerusalem
19. Palestinian National Institute for NGO’s

Posted on Mar 26, 07 | 12:51 am

IRAQ: Children suffer bad water diseases

26 Mar 2007 07:33:56 GMT
Source: IRIN

More BAGHDAD, 26 March 2007 (IRIN) - BAGHDAD, 26 March 2007 (IRIN) - Mohammed Hussein Shureida, 40, sets aside a huge portion of his monthly income to buy water from private tankers and protect his family from waterborne diseases that can result from drinking Iraq's tap water.

"I nearly lost my six-year old son last summer as he developed acute diarrhoea from the bad water we were drinking," said Shureida, a taxi driver from the Baghdad slums of Sadr city. "Medicines were not easy to get, causing my son to suffer a lot until he recovered and since then we decided not to drink tap water," added the father-of-three.

Four years after the US-led invasion of Iraq that ousted deceased former president Saddam Hussein, the majority of Iraqis find it difficult to get safe water, despite the fact that the country is blessed with two abundant natural water sources, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Like much of Iraq's infrastructure, its national water networks have been left to fall into disrepair over the past two decades as a result of Iraq's long economic stagnation under United Nations-imposed sanctions during Saddam's era.

Since 2003, Iraq's water problems worsened as the country's main water treatment and pumping stations were stripped of vital equipment by looters immediately after the collapse of the former regime.

Acts of sabotage damaged infrastructure even further. Municipal water became dirty and contaminated – exposing children to dangerous waterborne diseases.

"Now our main sources for potable water are the private tankers that roam in our district. Although it is expensive to buy water from them, it's better than getting water with diseases and then having to struggle to get medical treatment," said Shureida. "It costs me something like 150,000 Iraqi dinars [about US $120] per month just to secure good water for drinking."

Marking World Water Day on 22 March, the UN Children's Agency (UNICEF) in Iraq warned that the chronic shortage of safe drinking water could push up incidences of diarrhoea, a leading killer of children in the country.

Children vulnerable to diarrhoea

"Iraq's young children are particularly vulnerable to diarrhoea, which can easily kill or lead to severe malnutrition and stunted growth," said Roger Wright, UNICEF Representative for Iraq, in a statement issued on World Water Day.

UNICEF launched a water tanker service in April 2003 to help the worst-affected families in Baghdad. Tanker trucks full of safe drinking water were sent daily to the most deprived areas of the capital, Baghdad, and Basra in the south of the country.

Last year, UNICEF tankers reached about 120,000 people per day in Baghdad, delivering 400 million litres of safe water to 10 residential areas, five schools and six main hospitals – as well as to a growing number of displaced families in the capital.

But lack of funds has forced UNICEF this month to halt its water service.

"Latest reports suggest we are already seeing an increase in diarrhoea cases, even before the usual onset of the 'diarrhoea season' in June. It is particularly worrying that water tankering services have had to be halted in Baghdad this month due to lack of funds," Wright said.

Vinod Alkari, UNICEF Iraq's Chief of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, said that the use of water tankers is "usually only a short-term solution in the aftermath of emergencies. But Iraq is still facing a growing humanitarian crisis. If people are cut off from this critical service, it will push them to the edge of desperation and risk the health of their children."

The Iraqi government has said that it can take care of the problem without the help of UNICEF.

"Great efforts are being exerted despite all the challenges as about US $650 million is allocated for water projects this year," said Ayad al-Safi, the undersecretary of Iraq's Ministry of Municipalities and Public works.

"UNICEF was helping us by providing essential water treatment chemicals like chlorine, but we can manage that as we are establishing 25 water treatment units all over Iraq, treating from 4,000 to 10,000 cubic metres of water every day," al-Safi added.

However, the government's efforts to repair water networks have been hampered by continuing violence in restive areas, ongoing electricity outages, attacks on infrastructure and engineering works and under-investment in the water sector.

While precise figures for the number of people, especially children, affected by waterborne diseases in Iraq are not available, doctors are expressing serious concern over the issue.

Dr Rafid Shaker Nazal of the hospital in Baghdad's Sadr City, where about 3.5 million people live, said that his hospital is treating 50 to 70 people per month for waterborne diseases.

"Gastro-enteritis, brucellosis, hepatitis and typhoid fever are common among the children of this area due to bad drinking water. What makes it more difficult is that medicines are not available and health centres do not have enough qualified personnel," he said.