Information, discussion & community! Monday Night Forum!! Occupy Forum is an opportunity for open and respectful dialogue on all sides of these critically important issues!
Americans don’t have a health care system, they have a free enterprise system beholden to corporate executives, shareholders and investors from the industries that benefit the most from high costs. While pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and medical product companies profit, taxpayers are getting squeezed at an accelerating rate. Our market-based, profit-driven health care system in the United States has put necessary care increasingly beyond the reach of ordinary Americans. Primary health care, the fundamental foundation of all high-performing health care systems in the world, is a critical but ignored casualty of the current system. Unfortunately, primary care is often poorly understood, even within the health professions.
Don Bechler, chair of Single Payer Now (who has worked for twenty years to pass Single Payer), will describe what has become a crisis in primary care, define its central role, analyze the reasons for its decline, and assess its impacts on patients and families. He will also show the film, “The Health Care Movie” about the Canadian Health Care System. Bechler will present a constructive approach to rebuild and transform U.S. primary care with the urgent goal to address the nation’s problems of access, cost, quality and equity of health care for all Americans.
Don Bechler is on the executive committee of the national grassroots single payer organization, Healthcare Now.
He has lead speakers training for over 1400 health care activists, and also been an officer of various UAW and the IAM unions.