It’s time each of you to make one very important phone call .
The state Assembly Appropriations Committee will be voting on SB 810, the single payer health care bill, sometime in the next week, possibly as early as Aug 4. Our Assembly person(s) and the Appropriations Committee chair need to hear from us that we want single payer health care in California. There is a state-wide calling and letter-writing campaign going on right now, to let them know.
Despite the passage of federal health insurance reform,  California still needs a single-payer health care system. That’s the official position of the California Democratic Party. The national health insurance reform bill still doesn’t take care of providing health care for everyone who needs it: for example, it will leave 3 million Californians uninsured while eliminating hospital subsidies for taking care of people without insurance. It doesn’t stop insurance companies from denying care, allows underinsurance paying as low as 60% of health care bills with the rest paid out of pocket as co-pays and deductibles, which means medical bankruptcies will continue. And of course that it doesn’t eliminate the 30% of each health dollar wasted on the excessive administrative costs of a multi-payer system.
Please call Appropriations Committee Chair Felipe Fuentes and your own Assembly person.
Here is a link to the Assembly Member Directory to find the phone numbers for your Assembly member: http://www.assembly.ca.gov/acs/acsframeset7text.htm. The Assembly Main page is http://www.assembly.ca.gov.
I hope you will participate! Thank you for your consideration.