Campaign Finance Reform is the key to getting Health Care Reform

Democracy Now! had two somewhat related stories that will interest Coffee Party members. One is about the effort to get the undue influence of money out of our political system and the other is about Vermont’s effort to get a single payer Canadian style health care system.

Today marks the anniversary of the Citizens Untied ruling by the Supreme Court that allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. Common Cause has been working on campaign finance reform for a long time. Today they have called on the Department of Justice to investigate potential conflicts of interest by Judge Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia because they failed to recuse themselves in the case.

In this interview with Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin he discusses Vermont’s effort to move towards a single payer health insurance system like Medicare. A majority of doctors and nurses support a single payer system because it is universal, more efficient and cheaper.

Many single payer advocates believe that the US will eventually move to a single payer system because it is the best to cut costs and cover every American cradle to grave. And they believe that it will take a state implementing first and demonstrating how well it works because the health industry floods our politicians with massive amounts of money to prevent single payer from being supported by either party.

Here Shumlin describes why Vermont is the state that is best positioned to move to a single payer system.

Listen, here’s why we can do this in Vermont, why we have a better shot than perhaps anywhere else in America. Today is the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that allows corporations to spend unlimited cash to influence our elections. What is different about Vermont is that our legislators are not in the pockets of special interests; they’re in the pockets of their constituents. Now, there’s a very simple reason for that. I was president of the Senate. My last campaign cost $2,500. My counterpart in New York’s campaign, the president of the Senate just across the lake, probably cost multiple millions of dollars. My point is, we have a citizen legislature in the state. We are not beholden to the special interests. We fight for our constituents in their best interest. And frankly, our insurance companies are smart enough to know that. So, I think that—you know, we all know that what’s destroying democracy is the extraordinary influence of corporate money. The folks that are making money off the system then elect the politicians that make the decisions about their economic future. So we have a real opportunity here, and I think our insurance companies are smart enough to see that we’re going to make progress, and they want to be the company that has the single payer.

Medicare was named after the Canadian health care system which was championed by actor Kiefer Sutherland’s Grandfather Tommy Davidson. This article describes the Greatest Canadian’s effort.

As premier of Saskatchewan, Tommy Douglas pioneered a number of progressive policies there, including the expansion of public utilities, unionization and public auto insurance. But his biggest achievement was the creation of universal health insurance, called Medicare. It passed in Saskatchewan in 1962, guaranteeing hospital care for all residents. The rest of Canada soon followed, province by province. After his death, Douglas earned the title of "The Greatest Canadian" in a poll by the CBC.

One day our nation will get a Medicare-for-all system, but the undue influence of money remains as the greatest obstacle. In our upcoming meetings we will be inviting a representative from Common Cause to discuss what we can do to support campaign finance reform and a representative from Ohio’s Single Payer Action Network (SPAN) to discuss the ongoing efforts to bring single-payer health care for all to Ohio. Stay tuned and engaged!