OntheWilderSide

On Wednesday, August 5, 2009 at 7pm, the Babylon Green Party Gathering will feature a showing of Michael Moore’s film, “Sicko” The film uses humor to point out the sad state of medical coverage in the United States.  It outlines how much more successful a single-payer universal healthcare system has been in every other industrialized country. This showing is an extension of the Babylon Green Party’s 100 Days series which discusses issues that President Obama needed to address in his first 100 Days. www.BabylonGreens.org The event will be held at Pisces Café, 14A Railroad Avenue, Babylon, NY (631-321-1231)www.piscescafe.net map) Come hungry! For directions to the Babylon Green Gathering, call 631-422-4702 or email ian.wilder@yahoo.com Children are welcome. All gatherings are free of charge, and open to the public.

A social media version of this press release can be found at http://pitch.pe/17653

Unlike the Democratic and Republican Parties, the national Green Party supports

a universal, comprehensive, national single-payer health insurance program as the only solution to the current disastrous for-profit system.

Recently, the 2000 Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader explained that the inability of the U.S. auto industry to compete is due to the U.S. being the only auto-producing nations that does not have single payer healthcare. The 2008 Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney said in her acceptance speech that

Only a sick government would place  . . . an insurance lobbyist in-between a patient and his doctor.

During her six terms in Congress, McKinney said she was “a cosponsor of every bill to create a national system for universal access to health care under a single-payer model.”

According to a CBS new poll, ninety percent of Americans believe the American health care system needs fundamental changes or needs to be completely rebuilt. Two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government should guarantee universal health care for all citizens.  This belief is shown to have good cause by a UN Human Development Report which showed that while the United States leads the world in spending on health care,

countries spending substantially less than the US have healthier populations.… The infant mortality rate for the U.S. is now higher than for many other industrial countries.

And the New England Journal of Medicine shows that a prime cause of the problem is insurance companies’ greed and inefficiency.  They reported that

administrative costs account for 31 percent of all health care expenditures in the United States. The average overhead for U.S. private health insurers is 11.7 percent; for Medicare, it is 3.6 percent; for Canada’s national health insurance program, it is 1.3 percent.

Yet neither the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, nor the corporate media are willing to even discuss a single-payer system.

President Obama has consistently excluded single payer universal healthcare from any discussion.  At the President’s healthcare forums around the country, discussions of single payer were dismissed despite audience support. The President also publicly excluded Rep. John Conyers to the White House summit on healthcare despite Conyer’s Single Payer bill HR 676 having 90 co-sponsors in Congress.  The President was later embarrassed into inviting Conyers.

The corporate media have done no better in discussing single payer healthcare as an option.  A new study released by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found the

views of advocates of single payer have only been aired five times in the hundreds of major newspaper, broadcasts and cable stories about healthcare reform over the past week. No single-payer advocate has appeared on a major TV broadcast or cable network to talk about the policy during that period.

Babylon Green Party Gatherings are held on the first Wednesday of every month:

• The September 2, 2009 Gathering will feature folk legend Bob Westcott
• The October 7, 2009 Gathering will feature Sr. Jeanne Clark speaking about World Peace Day activities
• The November 4, 2009 Gathering will feature Terry Morrone speaking about “The Selling of 9/11”
• The December 2, 2009 Gathering  will feature musician Hank Stone for the annual Green Party Holiday Party.
• The January 6, 2010 Gathering will feature the bluesy folk-jazz of Stephanie Carlin

The Green Party is an alternative party to the Democrats and Republicans. The four pillars of the Green Party are:

• Nonviolence/Peace;
• Grassroots Democracy;
• Social and Economic Justice; and
• Ecological Wisdom.

For more information about Green Party activities, please go to www.gpsuffolk.org or call Green Party of Suffolk Chair Roger Snyder at 631-351-5763. You can enroll in the Green Party by checking the box marked “Other” on the voter registration form and writing in the word “Green” on the line next to it. Click here to find a voter registration form. You can send donations to the Green Party of Suffolk,14 Robin Drive, Huntington, NY 11743.

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