National Improved Medicare For All – Thursdays With Tracy 21 July, 2022

Last month a dear friend, Tracy, asked me to be the guest host for her 21 July, 2022 podcast whilst she was busy working on organizing her state’s Medicare For All march. Since M4A was the month’s topic, I quickly looked around for fellow advocates to join me on screen.

By some incredible divine intervention, I was able to scramble together an excellent panel!

There was myself, the CG*, Laura Fielding (craftivist, founder of Red Berets Medicare For All), Andre Stackhouse (Campaign director and board member of Whole Washington), and Congressional Candidate Rebecca Parson (WA-06).

When I do projects like this the CG is always at least in the room so she can be close by if something happens with me.

Best scenario: she helps me stay on track when my brain blanks, or can’t catch up.

Worst: she rescues me from a sudden onset of symptoms.

*And I want to say: Lorraine loves when I call her “the CG.” It’s using her professional title and said with nothing but love, honor, respect, and humility.

Here I have to stop and thank everyone that joined me; you all made time in your busy schedules to talk to me for a small podcast. You could have said you were busy, but you didn’t.. you all put in the effort and I cannot thank you enough.

The general subject was Medicare For All, but the discussion covered many topics:

• The many marches happening right now across the country (Indiana, Washington, California, New York, North Carolina, Washington DC, etc)
• Activism for state-wide single payer healthcare in WA State, how http://wholewashington.org got started
• Ballot initiative 1471
• National vs. State-by-State strategies and http://medicareforalleverywhere.org
• The documentary “Healing Us” about the for-profit healthcare system in the USA

We are all Western WA residents and the CG and I volunteer for Whole Washington’s 1471 ballot initiative campaign.

If we were to get single payer healthcare here in Washington State, it would be an incredible step forward for the many patients of tick-borne infections who live here. We need to see doctors who dare to treat outside the normal guidelines, therefore they don’t deal with insurance at all. In order to cover their practice, many charge hundreds of dollars per appointment. Some are even up in the thousands..

Most patients cannot afford that.

Insurance companies should not have the right to refuse you a treatment that you and your doctor have agreed upon.

But they do.

“Healthcare” is a misnomer in the USA; the for-profit industry is keeping sick people sick and the only motive that drives medicine is profit.

Since Borrelia is a bacterium, antibiotics are the main line of defense doctors use. But most abx for most bacterial conditions are prescribed for only 2-3 weeks. It’s not a long-term profit and therefore finding new abx is not a priority.

That is insane, to me.

In 1980 the US government decided to allow researchers to patent and profit from living organisms. For example, a scientist could discover the causative agent of an infection and then patent that organism so whenever vaccines are made, or new treatments are found.. that researcher could get their cut.

From that point on researchers and universities were no longer driven for the common good. They wanted their money.

That has to change.

#medicareforall #medicareforallEVERYWHERE #m4a #healthcare #medicalpatents #yeson1471 #wholewashington #lymedisease #borreliaetc #healthinsurance #forprofitmedicine #activism #marchforhealthcarejustice #capitalismkills #latestagecapitalism #2022election #universalhealthcare #peopleoverprofits #brandnewcongress #notmeus #Lyme #borreliosis #healthblog