The first two paragraphs today should comprise one phone call. First up: Sen. Sanders has released S. 1804, the Medicare for All Act of 2017, and while it leaves a lot of details up to the Executive branch the way most bills do, and doesn't specify how we're going to capture the trillions of dollars we already spend on health care and divert it into the Universal Medicare program, it would allow Universal Medicare to cover virtually all of our health care needs and rein in prescription drug costs, and it would prevent private health corporations from insuring health care needs covered by Universal Medicare. It would also complete our transition to Universal Medicare over four years (starting with children under 19 within a year after passage), and would allow individuals to contract with providers for health care services not covered by Universal Medicare. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to support real health care reform in America by supporting S. 1804. (Alternately, you can text M4A to 69866, per National Nurses United; this will send your Reps and Senators a text message of support on your behalf.)
But wait, there's more! Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) have released their own health care "reform" bill, widely and inaccurately considered to be a "moderate" reform bill though neither Senator is particularly moderate (no, you should not confuse Lindsey Graham's occasionally-welcome orneriness with being a "moderate"). Their bill would convert Medicaid funding into a block grant that states could use to remake their Medicaid programs any way they like -- and then completely cut off that funding in 2027. Graham-Cassidy would also eliminate Affordable Care Act's subsidies and give states even more room to evade pre-existing conditions than the Trumpcare bills. True, it would also keep most Obamacare taxes-on-the-rich in place, but BFD if they're trying to set fire to everything else -- and since we can urge our Senators to reject the Graham-Cassidy bill and keep both the taxes-on-the-rich and the parts of Obamacare that actually work for us. (Again, use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers.)
Finally, both the National Women's Law Center and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to support the Child Care for Working Families Act (which has no bill number as of this writing). What would the Child Care for Working Families Act do? It would, as the title suggests, expand federal coverage of child care so that families making less than 150% of their state's median income pay no more than 7% of their combined income on child care. We're looking at two fundamental realities here: one, that working families have mostly been two-income families since the early 1980s, and two, that child care costs a crapload of money -- I personally know families who have paid one entire partner's annual income on child care, and I bet you do, too. Working families already pay too much for too many necessities -- health insurance, of course, also among these. The bill would also ensure that child care workers get more pay and better training, and why shouldn't they? They're not just working for working families -- they belong to working families themselves.
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