Organized Labor

Michael Moore Joins with Labor in Support of SB 840 

Academy Award winning filmmaker Michael Moore joined union members in Sacramento on June 12 for a rally in support of the single-payer healthcare reform bill, SB 840, authored by southern California State Sen. Sheila Kuehl. About 1,500 California Nurses Association members, healthcare workers, and California School Employees Association members rallied at the state capitol after Moore spoke at a legislative briefing sponsored by Sen. Kuehl for some of the 42 co-authors of SB 840.

The bill establishes a system similar to an expanded and improved Medicare for all, and is referred to as a single-payer plan because there is one pool of publicly administered funds to pay for care delivered by the current, mostly private hospitals, clinics, physicians and other providers. The Kuehl bill would eliminate insurance companies from the health care system. The bill was endorsed by the California Labor Federation last year. It passed the legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Schwarzenegger, then re-introduced this year. It again passed the state Senate earlier this month.

After the rally on the Capitol steps and a march through downtown Sacramento, the nurses union hosted the west coast premiere of Moore’s new documentary, “SiCKO,” which provides a blistering indictment of the healthcare industry. Kuehl said that the film chronicles the problems that SB 840 would help correct. CNA Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro said she had attended a private screening in New York and that that “SiCKO” is “not just an indictment of an indefensible healthcare industry in the U.S. It’s a rejoinder for those who think we can fix the soulless monster by tinkering with an unconscionable system that puts us further in thrall to those who created the crisis.”

Moore said that, “We are the only industrialized country that doesn’t say health care is a right.” He pointed out that nine million children lack health insurance coverage and that, “We lose 18,000 Americans every year because they don’t have a health insurance card.” Moore said he had spent a lot of time in California making “SiCKO”—following the plight of patients who had been denied care, including one who ended up homeless in Los Angeles. He called for an end to the practice of insurance companies and HMOs dumping patients off at County hospitals and for the regulation of pharmaceutical companies like public utilities.

The insurance companies are a criminal racket,” he said. “I sincerely hope that California will take the lead as you have always done and get the insurance companies out of health care. It’s critical that you succeed here in California.” Moore pointed out that many doctors have become demoralized “because they’ve been given the shaft by the insurance companies.” He noted that one reason for the high cost of health care is that 30 percent of costs go to administrative overhead like paperwork, marketing, executive salaries, and profit. He answered critics who decry a “government-run” system, pointing out that the overhead costs for administering Medicare are only 3 percent and in Canada, with its single payer system, only 1.7 percent.

“Americans have fallen for this myth that ‘government is bad’ —but we are the government,” Moore said. “Ask your grandparents if their Social Security check comes every month. It comes on time, on the same day every month, through the government-run postal system. We are told to fear ‘socialized medicine,’ but isn’t that what our police departments are, socialized? Do we require the fire department to make a profit? In a hospital, that question should never be asked.”

Kuehl’s briefing also featured testimony from Andy Bales of the Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles testified about how hospitals dump patients on Skid Row, and Dr. Linda Penno, who spoke about her work as a medical reviewer for the health insurer Humana. Dawnelle Keys spoke about how her 18-month-old daughter died after being denied treatment that wasn’t covered by her health insurance. Moore called for the legislature to pass a bill to make it a criminal act to deny care.

Moore called for Gov. Schwarzenegger to sign SB 840, pointing out that, “The governor was able to come here to America in great physical health because he came from a country where health care was provided. I would hope he’d want the same for all Californians.” In Austria, like Canada, France and the United Kingdom, patients do not have to pay medical fees out-of-pocket because healthcare is a government service.

Sen. Kuehl thanked Moore for his contribution to the fight for universal health care, saying, “You make films that show us the truth—about Flint, Michigan, about guns. I think single payer is inevitable because people will learn the truth and your film will play an important role in that.”

Speakers at the rally and legislative briefing also pointed out that there are 6.6 million uninsured in California; that three-fourths of the uninsured non-elderly Californians are in working families; over 80 percent of uninsured employees have no access to employment-based insurance because they did not work for an employer who offered benefits or were not eligible for benefits from their employer. California ranks 46th in the nation in the percentage of uninsured, 41st in the percentage of children who are fully immunized, and 41st in the per capita number of cases of infectious disease according to a survey complied by the United Health Foundation in 2006 edition. Further, from 2000 to 2004, the overall percentage of adults with employer-based coverage declined from 61 percent to 58 percent, while health insurance premiums in California rose 61 percent from 2000 to 2004. A single-payer plan in California would save $344 billion over 10 years even while providing coverage to all state residents according to a 2005 study by the Lewin Group.

The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee is working with Physicians for a National Health Program, Health Care-Now and other nurse groups across the U.S. to promote Moore’s film and use it as an educational and organizing tool.

The union, which recently affiliated with the AFL-CIO, hopes to build a broader movement for genuine reform, like SB 840 or HR 676 in Congress, which would establish a national single payer, “Medicare for all” system. Many unions around the U.S. have endorsed HR 676.

“At a time when the apologists of accommodation are promoting the lowest common denominator, Moore most of all offers a vision and hope,” said the CNA’s DeMoro. That hope, she says, is symbolized by SB 840, which is pending before the state legislature, and HR 676. She called the recent Senate vote to pass SB 840 “a beacon of hope for Californians who fear for their health and economic security.”

She noted that SB 840 “is the only reform in California that will assure everybody has care where and when they need it without being held hostage to a callous and uncaring insurance and healthcare industry that long ago abandoned its caring mission in favor of the pursuit of profit at any cost.”

DeMoro said that “nurses experience first hand the pain and terror of every patient and their families as they are forced to confront a callous and uncaring health care industry when at their most frail and vulnerable, and the inevitable personal tragedies when they can’t receive needed care due to escalating costs and the ‘care containment’ damage endemic to the industry’s medicine-by-spreadsheet credo.”

In a recent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Daily News, DeMoro wrote that, “Forcing everyone to buy insurance, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes, or providing tax credits or shifting more government money to the HMOs won’t solve the crisis; it will just reward the insurers for their system of preventing care and make them wealthier.”