Dudley and miniralphbon
Mrs ralphbon kindly offered to make me a poster for yesterday’s big single-payer rally in Washington. Wracking my brains for a slogan, I rejected the ironic expropriation of a wingnut mantra (For-Profit Insurance Stops a Beating Heart), the internecine snipe (Keep Insurers “Honest”??? Make Them GONE!), and the unvarnished-truth angle (Investor Profits = Patient Deaths).

I opted finally for Dudley, which proved a crowd-pleaser, with only one or two people asking me over the course of the day who this Do-Right gentleman was and could I elaborate on his health plan.

The occasion, as you know, was Medicare’s 44th birthday. I chose to hop in the car in predawn Brooklyn darkness to arrive for the morning’s special activity: distribution of Medicare birthday cupcakes (and single-payer literature) to all members of Congress.

Washington was already as steamy as a Brighton Beach bathhouse by the time Dudley and I met up with single-payer supporters from around the country, with whom I stood in line to be assigned legislators for cupcake delivery. The New York congressional delegation having already been snatched up, I spotted a loose 3×5 card for progressive good guy Rush Holt of New Jersey and grabbed it, then volunteered for two other unassigned congressmen who also had offices in the Longworth building: Mike Quigley (D-IL), who beat out the more progressive Thomas Geoghegan for Rahm Emanuel’s seat, and Sam Johnson of Texas, whom you can tell is a Republican because his web site is meticulously scrubbed of any indication as to his party affiliation.

I was issued three information packets, three cupcakes, and three candles. However, no one had matches for the candles, since, as studies by both the Lewin Group and Commonwealth Fund have documented, single-payer activists have the lowest percentage of smokers among health reform advocates, followed in ascending order by sorrowful public option supporters, enthusiastic public option supporters, state co-op supporters, mandates-and-regulation-only proponents, Blue Dogs, and Black Lungs.

When I arrived at Longworth, it turned out guards weren’t allowing people through security with cupcakes anyway. I asked a guard how long Congress had had a no-cupcakes policy, and he responded, “About 10 minutes.”

I retreated to the adjacent Rayburn building to see if I could get my cupcakes through there (so as to double-back to Longworth through the basement connector tunnel). However, by this time the entire Capitol Hill security apparatus had been alerted to the cupcake threat. The only way to deliver a cupcake was to call up to a legislator’s office and have an aide come to the lobby to accept it personally under a guard’s vigilant eye.

So it was that a single-payer volunteer from Oregon met an aide to his congressman in the lobby and gave her all ten or so cupcakes he’d been planning to distribute to different legislators. I gave her my three as well. The Oregon congressman and his staff made out like bandits, unless they treated the cupcakes as presumptive biohazards, which would have saddened me but for which I suppose I could forgive them.

I still offered Medicare birthday greetings to the perky aides of my three selected legislators and offered regrets about the cupcakes. The perky aide to the Republican Congressman perkily treated my single-payer information packet like so much hazmat.

The rally commenced some hours later and was at least as well attended as the one on May 13, all the more impressive given the oppressingly moist heat this time around and the interim attrition of some portion of single-payer advocates to the ranks of sorrowful – and in odd cases even enthusiastic – Obamacare supporters.

John Conyers, father of HR 676 Expanded and Improved Medicare for All, led off with an air of feisty exasperation. “I’m going to do something I hope my colleagues don’t get mad about,” he said. “I’m going to mention them.” He chided, in particular, Senators Kennedy, Mikulski, Rockefeller, Boxer, Feingold, and Feinstein for walking back earlier support of single payer. “Let’s be honest,” he implored, about what current health care reform bills are and aren’t.

Conyers was the first at the rally, and far from the last, to offer uncharitable assessments of HR 3200. In what (at least for me) seemed an actual nugget of news, he vowed not to vote for the bill if it lacked a “real public option” and if it were stripped of the Kucinich amendment (passed in the House Education & Labor Committee version of the bill), which waives federal restrictions on states that pass their own single-payer initiatives.

Bernie Sanders was no less rousing, as were Dr. David Scheiner, Barack Obama’s personal physician for 22 years; Dr. Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen; Donna Smith, Katie Robbins, and Dr. Margaret Flowers of, respectively, CNA/NNOC, HCN!, and PNHP; Terry O’Neill, President of NOW; and Sameer Dossani of Amnesty International. Tim Carpenter of PDA and Medea Benjamin of Code Pink drove home the linkages between health care reform and antiwar activism.

Holy rescission
Two particularly moving moments came when Frankie Hughes, who just turned 12, recounted her recent arrest along with 8 adults in a protest at Wellmark BC/BS in DesMoines, and when Nadina LaSpina of Disabled in Action, who’s been arrested some 50 times in various protests, spoke of how most disabled Americans have no choice but to go on Medicaid because of medical impoverishment under our system. Dr. Ogan Gurel discussed the 700-mile walk he just completed, from Chicago to Washington, to publicize the plight of patients in our country.

The rally was followed by a second and more intensive lobbying push, as well as a briefing on the Kucinich amendment to HR 3200 to permit state single-payer initiatives. If there was one recurring – and actionable – theme of the day, it was that the Kucinich amendment

1. Is no joke;
2. Could make a real difference to millions of lives regardless of the shape, scale, and “robustness” of Obamacare;
3. Will need massive public support over the August recess if it is to have a shred of a chance at surviving the consolidation of HR 3200, much less the House/Senate conference deliberations; and
4. Deserves particular support from progressives who’ve chosen to focus for now on a public option, with the hope that if robust, it could lead to single payer. Legalizing state single-payer initiatives constitutes no less plausible a seed for future single payer than a robust public option itself. If we succeed in keeping both in the final legislation, we’ll have planted two seeds rather than one.

These points were driven home in their own ways by two eloquent and forceful state legislators, Jim Ferlo of Pennsylvania and Mark Leno of California. Their two populous states present the best chances in the near future of enacting state-level single-payer systems.

Pennsylvania, although largely conservative, is especially hard hit by the economic downturn, and it has high union membership. As a result, not just progressives but conservative Democrats and a growing subset of Republicans have been joining in support of single-payer (eg, John Murtha just became a co-sponsor of HR 676). A single-payer bill stands a good chance of passing the legislature and getting signed by Governor Ed Rendell. But it needs the federal waiver as set forth in the Kucinich amendment to move forward from there.

In California, a single-payer initiative has passed the legislature twice now, only to be vetoed by the Governator. Mark Leno says it will pass, and be vetoed, at least one more time. With a change of governors, the fate of the bill could be much different. But that (and the federal restrictions on implementation) is only the first step in the struggle. As Leno explained, unlike the Republicans of Pennsylvania, California’s Republicans are solidly obstructionist. They aren’t strong enough to block passage of a single-payer bill per se, but they are strong enough to block its funding under the rules of the regressive Proposition 13 of 1978.

If a Democratic governor enters office, and the Kucinich amendment stays alive, and the state single-payer bill finally gets signed into law, Leno said, overcoming Republican obstruction under Prop 13 will constitute the real battle line in the early part of the next decade. Fortunately, he reports, California single payer has some powerful allies, including Lily Tomlin. In a series of short spots, Tomlin is reprising her role as Geraldine, who’s moved from the phone company to a health insurance firm.

Sharp satire, ridicule, and shame – plus the Kucinich waiver – could help California, with a population comparable to that of Dudley Do-Right’s homeland, show the rest of the nation how to do health care right.