If we ignored the candidates and instead sat down with each other, we could find common ground on health care.  Governor Arne Carlson, R, Minnesota, outlined ways they created insurance pools for the uninsured and used a 2% tax on providers to finance the care.  Minnesota now has 92% of it’s with insurance coverage.

These ideas and others will be explored with Governor Richard Lamm, D, Colorado, at CodeBlueNow’s Health Care Town Meeting on Thursday, September 18th at the Bell Harbor Conference Center on Seattle’s Waterfront.  The program starts at 7pm.  Registration fee:  $10.

Kathleen and Governor Carlson will be on KUOW “The Conversation”  at 1 pm PDT, Thursday, September 18th.  Out of town listeners can go to:  www.kuow.org

They were on the Dave Ross Show on KIRO 710 yesterday.  You can find out more here. 

Cheers and more later.   Kathleen

By Robert D. Ray, R, former Governor of Iowa and Paul G. Rogers, D, former Congressman from Florida

This is the last of the rerun of the CodeBlueNow! Papers.  This piece ran in December 2005. The points of affordable, quality, safety and administrative simplification still hold, but starting next week, we will start to introduce some elements CodeBlueNow! has been working on and refining over the past five years.

Over the past several weeks, prominent individuals have been writing about the problems in our health care system and the need for comprehensive health care reform to fix those problems. It’s good news that there are solutions that can provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans. And those solutions are not only doable, they are affordable. In fact, the cost of inaction – of not doing what is necessary to fix the system – is greater than the cost of needed action. It is not more money we need; it’s a better system for delivering and paying for health care, and we need it now.

A recent international survey released by the Commonwealth Fund reported an astonishing finding: of six Western nations examined, the U.S. leads all of them in the number of medical errors, out-of-pocket health care expenses, and people going without health care services due to costs. And this is in spite of the fact that the U.S. spends twice as much per capita on health care as any other industrialized nation in the world.

The fact is, we can change the system, and we can afford to pay for it, as well.

Like CodeBlueNow!, the National Coalition on Health Care is rigorously non-partisan. Our Honorary Chairmen are former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford.  Our members are major businesses, unions, patient advocacy and consumer groups, associations of health care providers, health and pension funds, insurers, and religious denominations. We believe that an effective response to our health care crisis is more than urgently needed. But it requires leadership.  Now.

Continue reading. . .