Our goal was to create a visually pleasing site that provides unique information about our federal and state campaigns. HCAN is pushing to defend and implement the Affordable Care Act, protect Medicare and Medicaid, and hold corporations and the GOP accountable for attacking our health care, the public sector, labor unions and all things that benefit the 99%.
On our home page, we highlight our most recent actions, reports and important news items. Scroll down to see a list of the latest Press Releases, a revamped Blog and our Grassroots in Action section, which highlights the work of our partners and features videos and photos of actions. The Must Read section has top news stories affecting HCAN’s work, health reform and progressive change. In the HCAN In The News area, we highlight the workHCAN and our partner organizations are doing to ensure access to quality, affordable health care and to expose the role of corporations in undermining our democracy.
Further down the page there are Resources, a little bit more about our organization, and the many ways you can connect to Health Care for America Now through social media.
One of the most useful new features on the site is the Our Issues area, where visitors will find in-depth information about the specific topics we focus on:
Texas residents continue to be the most likely in the United States to lack health coverage, with 27.2% reporting being uninsured in the first half of 2011. At the other end of the spectrum is Massachusetts, where 5.3% of adults are uninsured.
The Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by the President in March 2010, gives you better health security by putting in place comprehensive health insurance reforms that hold insurance companies accountable, lower health care costs, guarantee more choice, and enhance the quality of care for all Americans.
Last week, I applauded the announcement that an effort to block legislation I authored, which would restorethe ability for King County Metro to provide service to sporting events, had been overturned. All Seattle sports fans have a right to affordable and efficient transportation toand from sporting events, and this public transportation will support our local sports teams, bolster the local economy, and decrease traffic during sporting events.
“Ruling to allow Metro to offer service to sporting, community events”
Urging Republicans to Take Medicare Benefits Off the Table
I strongly urged myRepublican colleagues to take Medicare benefits off the table during the ongoing budget negotiations. The Republican plan would shortchange American seniors who rely onMedicare to meet their health care needs. We will not allow Republicans to balance the budget on the backs of our seniors. I’ve heard from seniors across the state, telling me thatthey need their benefits to be protected. These seniors simply cannot afford the Republican plan.
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Giving Children an Early Start on Education
I introduced the Readyto Learn Act, which would help prepare children for kindergarten by providing funding for states to establish and administer voluntary preschool programs. As a formerpreschool teacher, I’ve seen first-hand the impact that high-quality early childhood education has on the success of our children. That’s why my bill will help families and communitiesacross the country provide their children with the strong educational start they deserve.
“Bremerton schools garnernational acclaim for early learning efforts”
Last week, I reintroduced the Protecting America’s Workers Act, which amends and updates the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 to make sure thatworkers are protected in the 21 st century economy. I spoke on the Senate floor to urge my colleagues to support this critical legislation because every worker, inevery industry, deserves to be confident that while they are working hard and doing their jobs, their employers are doing everything they can to protect them. This effort to make our workplacessafer is especially important to communities like Anacortes, still shaken by the tragedy at the Tesoro Refinery that killed 7 workers.
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Bringing Technology to the Classroom
Earlier this month, I used internet videoconferencing to holdvirtual conversations with students across Washington state to discuss the role technology plays in their classrooms, and how it can be approved. I also told them a bit aboutthe ATTAIN Act, which would help schools like theirs get the resources and support to integrate technology into learning. Students are clearly excited about using technology to learn—andI’m excited about working to make sure schools can make that happen.
In Oct. 2009, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) urged Congress to use the insurance program he created in Massachusetts as a model for nationwide health reform. This proved to be excellent advice, since President Obama signed a law that is based on Romney’s health plan several months later. Nevertheless, Romney plans to deliver a “major policy speech” later today disawowing the very advice he gave Congress less than two years ago — laying out a plan to repeal “Obamacare” and replace it with an unambitious array of minor health reforms. Moreover, Romney’s speech comes just two days after a federal court of appeals heard the first appellate case challenging the ACA on the grounds that it is unconstitutional to require someone to either carry insurance or pay slightly more income taxes. Even though the the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent both unambiguously establish that the ACA is constitutional, the GOP has nearly unanimously endorsed the meritless constitutional attack on the ACA. It wasn’t always this way, however.
THE MANY FACES OF MITT ROMNEY: Romney’s support for a health plan that provides life-saving, affordable health care to nearly every Massachusetts resident has not endeared him to the GOP primary electorate, which is why he’s tried to distance himself from his own single most significant accomplishment. Earlier this year, Romney tried to excuse his decision to sign the prototype for the ACA by explaining that it was just fine for him to sign a state health care plan, but absolutely unacceptable for Obama to sign an almost identical federal health care plan. Needless to say, this kind of hairsplitting did nothing to rescue Romney’s incipient campaign. Sixty-one percent of Republicans in the crucial state of Iowa indicate that they will not vote for someone who “supported a bill at the state level mandating that voters have health insurance.” More importantly, Romney’s bizarre state/federal distinction is at odds with his longstanding position on federal health reform. As far back as 1994, Romney indicated that he would support a Republican health plan that included an insurance coverage mandate. Today’s speech is Romney’s second attempt to wash away his proudest achievement. In it, Romney will recycle a discredited McCain-Palin proposal that would cost 20 million people their employer provided health care, he will embrace the GOP’s plan to gut Medicaid, and he supports a completely unworkable scheme that will allow patients to wait until they get sick to buy insurance, draining all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into and leaving nothing left for the rest of the plan’s consumers.
THE GOP’S INDIVIDUAL MANDATE: In 1991, four conservative health policy scholars proposed requiring all Americans to carry health insurance in an effort to “persuade President George H.W. Bush and his administration to adopt a universal health-care proposal that would keep the government from eventually taking over the sector.” Two years later, Sen. John Chafee (R-RI) and 21 mostly Republican co-sponsors introduced a bill which took up this proposal for an individual insurance mandate. Five senators who opposed the ACA — Robert Bennett (R-UT), Kit Bond (R-MO), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Richard Lugar (R-IN) — co-sponsored Chafee’s bill. In mid-2006, Romney became the first elected official to sign an individual insurance mandate into law. Two Republican Senators even voted for an insurance mandate before they voted against it. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) voted in support of a Senate Finance Committee proposal which included an insurance mandate, and Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) voted in support of Romney’s health plan as a member of the state legislature. In other words, for all their strident rhetoric against insurance coverage requirements, the truth is this requirement was invented, nurtured and supported for nearly two decades by the GOP.
TEARING UP THE CONSITUTION: Hypocrisy, incoherence, and unworkable plans are the least of the GOP’s sins. They are prepared to tear up the Constitution as well. In a series of lawsuits challenging the ACA, Republicans claim, falsely, that Congress has never before passed a law that imposes a consequence on people who don’t buy a product, and that this somehow makes the ACA unconstitutional. Yet, as a panel of federal judges pointed out on Tuesday, this claim has no basis in the actual text of the Constitution. Rather, the Constitution provides that Congress may “regulate Commerce…among the several states,” and the very first Supreme Court decision interpreting this language made clear that this power is “plenary,” meaning that Congress may choose whatever means it wishes to regulate interstate marketplaces so long as it does not violate another textual provision of the Constitution. Thankfully, it is very unlikely that the Supreme Court will take the GOP up on its offer to replace the actual Constitution with a tenther manifesto, but the fact that one of the nation’s two great political parties believes that they can rewrite the Constitution shows nothing less than utter contempt for the nation’s founding document.
Be a Seed for Change 
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