Day: November 18, 2009

Members of the HCAN coalition are divided about the Stupak amendment to HR 3962. Some are pro-life. Most of are pro-choice. As a organization, however, we are working to remove the Stupak amendment from both the Senate bill and the bill that comes out of the conference committee. What’s Wrong With The Stupak Amendment In our view, the Stupak amendment is not about federal funding for abortion. It is much broader than that.  It prevents millions of women from getting insurance coverage that covers abortion services and that is widely available now. Continue reading

Introduction I want to set out why, after over twenty five years of thinking and writing about health care reform, and two and a half years as a health care activist, I’ve always been ambivalent about single payer. That ambivalence is well known to progressive activists in the state. To judge by what they say to each other in emails that friends forward to me, let alone from what they’ve said out in the open, I’ve been public enemy number for single payer advocates in Pennsylvania for a long time. Partly that’s because I’m the leader of HCAN in Pennsylvania, and we have created the largest issue campaign in Pennsylvania history behind the Obama health care plan, a plan that has a very good chance of being enacted this year and that embodies our principles not those held by advocates of single payer. But that’s by no means the whole… Continue reading