Lucas,
You might want to sit down.
Earlier this week, the Business Roundtable — a trade association made up of the CEOs of giant corporations — sent a letter to Congress.
What do they want to do?
- Increase the eligibility age for Medicare.
- Make access to Medicare dependent on income.
- "Modernize" — a.k.a. privatize — Medicare.
In other words, the millionaires who run the largest corporations on Earth want to slash the social insurance programs the rest of us rely on.
You know what — never mind what I said about sitting down.
We have to stand up.
We have to stand up for the basic protections that have kept generations of Americans from living out their lives in sickness and poverty.
We have to stand up to people who have more money than they could ever need yet still want to squeeze even more from those who have never had enough.
At Public Citizen, we're fighting not only to preserve Medicare, but to improve and expand it into the universal, single-payer health insurance system our nation needs to make the ideal of health care as a human right the reality for every American.
Stand up to corporate greed — and help us keep doing critical work like fighting for single-payer, improved and expanded Medicare-for-all health insurance — with a donation to Public Citizen right now.
The Business Roundtable's leadership consists of CEOs from AT&T, Boeing, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, JPMorgan, Walmart and other mega-corporations.
What do they know about what it's like to worry if you can retire with dignity and security?
You know the facts:
- The United States is practically alone among developed nations in adhering to an immoral (and ineffective) for-profit health insurance regime.
- 48.6 million Americans — almost one of every six of us — is uninsured.
- 45,000 Americans a year — 123 a day — die because they don't have health insurance.
- The private health insurance industry eats up $350 billion a year in administrative costs, waste and profits.
- A single-payer, Medicare-for-all system would cut drug prices by 40% or more.
- Inflated medical bills are the number one cause of personal bankruptcies in the United States.
- The majority of doctors and the American people support a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system.
With your help, we can make sure that the facts — not the propaganda of corporate lobbyists like the Business Roundtable — shape our nation's response to the disgraceful tragedy that is the private, for-profit health insurance establishment.
Contribute now to help Public Citizen stand up to Big Business.
Here are three things (among others) that Public Citizen is doing to defend Medicare and advance the fight for single-payer, Medicare-for-all health insurance:
1. We are mobilizing the public and our allies in Congress to block any cuts to Medicare.
2. We are continuing to marshal support for a national single-payer system. Just the other day, around the anniversary of Medicare's founding, I joined Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. John Conyers — the congressional champions of single-payer legislation — for a news conference and rally around our plans to push forward.
3. We are supporting state efforts to adopt a single-payer system in the framework of the Affordable Care Act. We just issued a report that provides step-by-step guidelines for state policymakers interested in switching to a single-payer program.
With your support, we can do all that and more. I promise you we won't stop fighting.
Thank you for standing with us.
Onward,
Robert Weissman
President, Public Citizen