Community-health forum provides input to Obama's transition team

Despite very short notice, close to 150 citizens gathered in the ballroom of the Marriott Residence Inn on Dec. 22 to discuss health-care reform needs in our country.
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President-Elect Barack Obama's transition team, who encouraged communities to hold discussions on the health care system and provide them feedback, inspired this meeting. ...

... Approximately 60 percent of attendees supported a single-payer national health-insurance plan as the best solution. Specifically, the U.S. National Health Insurance Act (HR 676) was widely supported.

Forum attendees outspoken on health care reform

Some audience members cited administrative hurdles and limited reimbursements for some medical services as barriers to adequate care.

Harriette Seiler, secretary for Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care, is a native of Canada, where much of her family still lives.

“The Canadian single-payer system works,” she said.

Seiler noted that patients in need of non-emergency care might have to wait and that care is prioritized based on the severity of the case.

“Our care is rationed by the ability to pay, and that’s a national disgrace,” she said.

Report: Montanans like 'Medicare for all'

As part of a grassroots effort to reform health care, Montanans are sending ideas to President-elect Barack Obama - and, so far, many are saying that a national, ``Medicare for all'' system is the way to go.

``The consensus of (our group) was that we did not see a lot of change coming unless we went to a single-payer, universal health system,'' said Deborah Hanson of Miles City, who organized a meeting of local citizens at the behest of Obama's transition team. ``That was sort of a general consensus - knowing, of course, that may not happen.''

These house parties do not seem to have worked out quite the way Daschle intended.

Residents send health care reform recommendations to Obama

The results are in and the word is out to the Obama-Biden transition team: Sonoma wants sweeping health care reform.
At a Sonoma Valley community discussion last week, part of a nationwide response to invitations from the Obama-Biden transition team to communities throughout the country to speak up on health care, nearly 70 people spoke out individually and worked together in groups to express the problem and recommend solutions to what many described as a broken system.