For those interested in HR676 activism, I thought I’d pass along some notes I took at a discussion on health insurance/health care sponsored by the League of Women Voters at a nearby community college here in western PA. Seven people affiliated with our local group for single-payer care carpooled to the meeting. We were affluent (well, I’m culturally affluent) professional people; our driver had an Obama sign in his yard, but no horns or tail.

We were able to leave our literature next to the Obama leaflets on a table in the hall. The main event was a panel discussion moderated by a local chiropractor running for the state senate. The audience was between 30 and 40 people, mostly middle-aged to early retirement age.

The panelists were a Pittsburgh pediatrician/long-time single-payer activist; Allen Kukovich, a former state senator now working on Governor Rendell’s plan; and an Obama representative. Everybody who spoke except the Obama person seemed pretty committed to single payer. That’s not Rendell’s plan by a long shot, but that’s because of the political realities in PA, where even his weak plan is four votes short in the state senate, and Kukovich seemed pretty frustrated and pessimistic about it. (He claims he introduced a state-level single-payer plan 25 years ago, and has been fighting like mad for every tiny bit of progress we’ve made here ever since.)

The presentations:

Single-payer: short and sweet. Emphasis on how easy it would be to pay for it by getting the insurance companies’ claws off our money.

Kukovich on Rendell’s plan: says this is the best we can realistically do right now. A confusing presentation, focused on how bad our problems are and the political difficulties of raising the money. The plan itself sounded quite weak. Funding originally included a tax increase; they had to replace that with something else to get it through the state house of reps. The bill would be “a great first step”, and has the support of SEIU. Not too enthralling. Kukovich has obviously fought hard, and sounds rather defensive about the incremental approach. I felt for him.

Obama plan: they didn’t send a policy expert, instead a nice, middle-aged working-class woman who cobbled together some PowerPoint slides from the campaign web materials. Everyone was nice to her, but no one questioned her much since she was obviously just telling us what she had found on the web.

A number of questions and rants were taken from the audience. The most interesting things that came out, for me, were comments by Kukovich. When asked, “what is the positive contribution of insurance companies?” he said, flatly, “Nothing. They are entrenched. The senate Republicans of Pennsylvania are an arm of the insurance industry.”

Someone from the audience brought up a recent Republican proposal in the state senate. Laughably weak, everyone agreed, but perhaps it’s a good sign that they felt the need to say something. Kukovich said it proves “pressure is mounting.” He then spoke some more about the propaganda power of the right wing, and how Grover Norquist used to be considered a nut and now dictates the daily Republican talking points. We need to push back from our side. It’s good to advocate single-payer (he didn’t say “shift the Overton window” but that’s what he meant) and also good to craft “something possible”.

There was a definite feeling in the room that our time is near, maybe not for single-payer, but for something at least as good as Obama’s plan. Some evidence of this is that the single-payer guy said that Ted Kennedy promised that if HR676 gets 100 sponsors in the House (it now has 90), he will introduce a single-payer bill in the Senate.

I asked Kukovich if he believed it would do more harm than good to pass a “universal”, but not single-payer, plan. He said that is certainly a reasonable view. Then I asked him if he thought that having a “Medicare for all” option included in a non-single-payer plan (as Edwards’s and Clinton’s plans seem to do) would provide an avenue to eventual single-payer. He said that is certainly a reasonable view. Perhaps he thinks we’re delusional to imagine we can even get Obama’s plan.