|
|
Eino has a unique and important role to play despite the several existing excellent sites
in the arena of universal health care. We hope to make that clear on this page, even though it
could be gleaned from careful analysis of our materials and comparisons with
other leading sites.
Several excellent websites provide information on the struggle for universal
health care and challenge the domination of the market-driven medicine.
Several of these websites originate from strong organizations and have been
working for quite a long time already in this arena. Some also provide
some information on state organizing and legislative efforts towards universal
health care (which is our major focus). We acknowledge and applaud these
efforts and intend to list them all here and on our page of
links.
UHCAN has been
functioning since 1992 and clearly has the most similar website to ours at
Project EINO. Their site offers a good deal of information, links and
resources and some information on state work. UHCAN differs
from EINO on a couple of major points, most notably in their attitude towards incremental reform of the health care
system. They have endorsed incremental reform and have contrasted it with
what they call "piecemeal reform".
We do not endorse the approach of incremental reform and our website will
not serve to give any great detail of the legislative efforts at incremental
reform, none of which, we believe, will ever get us closer to universal
health care. This we state on our homepage, mission statement and in our
principles. We do believe that a plan for universal health care might have
a "roll out" or timetable of several years, but allowing for that is
very different conceptually and strategically from endorsing incremental
reform. We believe this is a crucial point and that state movements have
already been defeated largely on this point.
Read EINOs argument against the UHCAN position.
Read EINOs frequently asked questions/answers
about incremental reform strategies.
Read an editorial on the history of
incremental reform attempts in the USA as a method for achieving UHC.
Physicians for a National Health
Program is a premier organization in this area
of public policy and has a first rate website. The website gives free
access to a great number of valuable documents. EINO makes use presently
(and plans to increase) the amount of data borrowed from this website. The
organization is one of physicians with some representation of other health
professionals, whereas EINO hopes to pull in and stimulate discussion among all
people in this country. We are also much broader than PNHP in that we
include material on a variety of possible solutions to the present crisis of
market medicine, besides that of a single-payer national health program. Interestingly, some of the most influential people at PNHP have
expressed a disinterest in anything interactive being developed at their website,
while at EINO we hope to make innovative use of interactive content to further
engage activists and interested citizens.
The Massachusetts Ad Hoc Committee to
Defend Health Care has a website which until recently
(spring 2000) performed many of the functions EINO now performs and is trying to
build upon. Our webmaster who was responsible for that effort Nov 1999 -
May 2001 found that the organization was not genuinely committed to a national effort
or responding to the needs in other states. Nonetheless, they continue to be one of the
most active and committed state organizations. Currently, they
offer very little of the information available at EINO and their plans for their
"national website" are unknown.
Families USA is an organization
that offers some excellent reports and documents.
Some of these materials deal with issues of central concern to EINO
like the uninsured and the crisis of market-driven medicine. As they make
clear they are a "consumer group" and they are largely concerned with
incremental changes and bills being offered (and resisted) currently around the
country.
Covering the Uninsured is a phony project devised by enemies of UHC (like the insurance industry) to portray themselves as "The Advocates" for the uninsured and to propose public (tax) subsidies to further prop up the profits of private insurers so that they might actually be willing to insure the sick and at-risk populations in the country as well as the young and healthy they have already cherry picked.
|
|
|
|
