After all the fanfare and high expectations that accompanied the prospect of national health care reform at the outset of this year, the legislation is staggering to a particularly inglorious end.

At its heart, the single biggest weakness of the bill rapidly advancing in the Senate, which mirrors the central...

Enough already on the hand wringing over the plan to start taxing employee health care benefits.

The tax is not a threat to the type of reform plan expected to emerge from Congress. It's a central element -- to pay for the massive public bailout of the health insurance industry...

Nurses are worried that it might be time to call a Code Blue on Washington's healthcare reform.

What started as a response to the healthcare crisis has morphed into a full-fledged healthcare reform crisis. The worse these proposals get, the more likely it becomes that our "cure" will do...

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell deserves a new nickname, The Mitch Who Stole Christmas, for his mean-spirited attack on union auto workers.

The cynical ploy by McConnell and a number of his GOP colleagues to hold working people hostage to their political agenda of vilifying unions is a...

The secret is out. There is a Marxist in the Presidential race. She's just not on the Democratic ticket. The real Marxist is in the McCain camp, the Neiman Marxist adorned in that fetching $150,000 wardrobe.

Contrast that with say, Geri the nurse who can be outfitted in scrubs...

On the heels of reports Thursday that the Bush Administration is considering taking part ownership of U.S. banks, it's time to ask, why can't we have a similar approach for our collapsing healthcare system.

Clearly, the proposal to partially nationalize some banks comes as our financial system continues to plunge...

Now that she has passed the debate test, deemed a winner of sorts by the pundits because she managed to get through the night without falling off the stage or starting to speak in tongues, Sarah Palin has been unleashed to do her original job.

Freed from the annoyance, as...

For advocates of improvements in health care, retirement security, and such fairness issues as pay equity, there's a lot at stake in the November election.

Amidst the worst economic crisis in this nation since the 1930s, the prospect of a John McCain-Sarah Palin administration hardly offers much confidence for...

The big splash of news and internet coverage for the new Health Care for America Now coalition of labor, progressive and liberal groups is a reminder of the critical importance of health care reform. And a reminder that partial solutions, such as those proposed by the coalition, will only perpetuate,...

The small Gold Rush town of Magalia in the shadows of the Sierra Nevada mountains just north of Paradise, Ca. might not be the first place you'd think of to look at what's so very wrong with our health care system.

But Magalia is a...

With all the fireworks over health care in the Democratic primaries, John McCain has managed to stay under the radar on our national healthcare nightmare.

McCain's health care views should be considered in the context of the tanking economy.

Household mortgage and consumer debt now add...

Behind the escalating debate on the health care between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on individual mandate -- she's for it, he's against it -- is a critical policy battle that not only cuts across health care reform but also the neo-liberal privatization dreams, the home mortgage crisis, and...

Before the leading Democratic candidates come to California for the upcoming super Tuesday primary February 5 and spend a lot of time talking about their health plans, they might want to cast a look at the demise of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's much ballyhooed healthcare bill.

Despite a year of fawning...

As the scorecard in Iowa is tallied, add insurance companies to the loser camp along with the disgraceful, rhetorical sham that forcing individuals to buy insurance is universal healthcare.

Individual mandate, the policy wonk lingo for requiring the uninsured to purchase private insurance premiums, was the key talking point of...

Christmas came one week early for California insurers Monday.

In a present gift wrapped by the California Assembly with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Santa, Assembly members passed a bill mislabeled as healthcare reform that will guarantee not health care but millions of new customers for the insurance industry, with California...

If Dick Cheney were anyone else, he'd probably be dead by now. That's the headline of an ad we - the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee - ran in ten Iowa newspapers this week.

Imagine if you had the Vice President's health history. Four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery,...

Apparently taking their leadership from Karl Rove who warned that the Republican candidates must focus on healthcare because the issue is "on the mind of a lot of swing voters," the Republican candidates for president have now latched on to healthcare.

But in the true spirit of their mentor Rove,...

The pundits might have it right on this one. Hillary Clinton did learn a lesson from her 1994 fiasco on healthcare reform. Unfortunately for most of us who don't have an Inc. after our name or a private jet to cart us around, it was the wrong lesson.

In the...

Those presidential candidates who continue to tip toe on the critical issues facing voters ought to take a close look at poll results in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.

The poll shows again how far the voters are ahead of the cautious politicians, especially on such essential matters as overhaul of...

"Who are we?" asks Michael Moore mid-way through his brilliant new film, "SiCKO." "Is this what we've become?"

Moore has issued a ringing challenge to all of us, and tens of thousands are about to answer the bell. When "SiCKO" opens Friday, nurses in red scrubs, doctors and healthcare activists,...