America's Agenda: Health Care for All

The mission of America's Agenda: Health Care for All is to secure affordable, comprehensive health care for all Americans by first winning universal health care state by state. To this end, America’s Agenda provides the critical tools state universal health care campaigns need to win.

America's Agenda Health Care Education Fund

The America’s Agenda Health Care Education Fund is a non-profit research and public education organization established with the mission of carrying out public education, leadership training, and research activities related to achieving affordable, high quality health care for all Americans.

The Health Care Crisis
The crisis in health care coverage for the American people hardly requires explanation. It is well-documented and widely publicized. Over 45 million Americans have no insurance at all to cover the spiraling costs of healthcare for themselves and their families.

Corporations across America are relieving the growing cost pressure by reducing health benefits and raising costs to employees at rates many times greater than their wages. Fewer employers every year offer their employees any health coverage at all. Staggering medical bills are the largest single reason for bankruptcy among working families.

Seniors living on limited incomes are forced to make cruel choices between paying for expensive pharmaceuticals or spending for other basic needs. And all this as aging baby boomers enter retirement in ever-increasing numbers.

Americans need universal healthcare coverage.

New Obstacles
Few people, if any, seriously expect the US Congress to enact the far-reaching reforms that are needed – at least not soon.

In response, local healthcare reform movements emerged in a number of states with the common goal of winning universal healthcare reforms at the state level. State healthcare coalitions put a variety of innovative universal healthcare plans before the public in states from Oregon to Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont to New Mexico and California.

As state plans moved toward a public decision, however, each of them was countered by intensive anti-reform lobbying, public disinformation campaigns, and media blitzes funded by a well-heeled and nationally coordinated opposition. Despite setbacks, public interest has not diminished. To the contrary, it has been fueled by exclusion of more Americans than ever from access to affordable health insurance.

New kinds of obstacles demand a new strategy for success. The new fiscal realities call for a new federalist strategy for funding the take-off of universal healthcare in the states.

Adoption of universal healthcare plans remains politically feasible in the new fiscal environment of the states if the short run start-up costs of pilot state plans are subsidized by the federal government. Such an approach would cost the federal government only a small fraction of the costs currently projected for plans that would reform the nation’s entire healthcare financing and delivery system. A new federalist strategy offers a way forward for the citizens of states that would seriously consider universal healthcare reforms, but are unable to shoulder the start-up costs, alone.

Our Mission
The battle for healthcare reform must be fought on two coordinated fronts: 1) in key states where the political prospects for winning state-based universal healthcare reforms are the strongest and 2) at the federal level, where relatively modest federal appropriations (compared to the costs comprehensive federal healthcare reform) will be needed to share the risks and start-up costs of pilot universal healthcare plans in states that adopt them.

Currently, the opponents to healthcare reform enjoy some significant advantages. The opposition springs mainly from a small number of extremely profitable industries with a vested interest in perpetuating the current system of healthcare financing. They have substantial assets, pooled resources, and national coordination of anti-reform campaigns.

By contrast, homegrown state universal healthcare initiatives vary in approach, reflecting differences in state demographics, politics, and healthcare delivery systems. Most of these have been defeated by intensive lobbying, disinformation, and media blitzes funded by a well-heeled and nationally coordinated opposition

We face an asymmetrical match-up. To win, the built-in political and financial advantages wielded by the national opposition must be neutralized. Neutralization can only be achieved by executing coordinated and effective communications and public information strategies that will cut through the fog of disinformation to bring the American voters the truth about the costs and benefits of universal healthcare reform.

This is the strategy and the purpose of America’s Agenda.

The Winning Ingredients
Respect for diverse state solutions to providing universal healthcare is a guiding principle for America’s Agenda. Our mission is to win real universal healthcare reform, not to design it. By winning universal healthcare reform according to the plans and approaches endorsed by the citizens, state-by-state, we will build momentum toward the national universal healthcare reform that is ultimately needed.

America’s Agenda will provide three kinds of assets essential to carrying out a coordinated state and federal strategy that can win universal healthcare in America:

1) Public Information
America’s Agenda will utilize TV, radio, print media and the internet to mount creative and coordinated “truth campaigns” in the pilot states and in the congressional districts were the public will face pivotal choices about healthcare reform.

America’s agenda will coordinate a national network of business leaders, physicians, elected officials, and labor leaders who will be effective messengers of truth about the costs and benefits of specific universal healthcare proposals. We will build and train teams of their peers within targeted campaign states. Directly and through the media, these messengers of truth will help level the playing field by carrying accurate information to the voting public and the decision-makers they elect.

2) Strategic Consultation
Good ideas, alone, are just not enough to win healthcare coverage for all Americans. If they were, the insurance industry and its allies could not have defeated universal healthcare initiatives in Congress and in states across the country.

America’s Agenda will provide the kind bare-knuckled campaign support that state campaigns need to defeat opponents of healthcare coverage for all. We will provide strategic advice and assistance based on extensive analysis of healthcare reform battles in states across the country. The campaign support available through America’s Agenda will include opposition research and campaign analysis. With this kind of information in hand, reform campaigns will be far better equipped to inoculate the public to disinformation and to neutralize opposition tactics before they are leveled at voters.

Polling and other kinds of public opinion research will be among the specialized healthcare campaign tools available through America’s Agenda. These will be critical to crafting effective public messages and delivering them efficiently to “swing” audiences.

3) Intelligence Sharing
The opponents to universal healthcare reform are well-coordinated. The same corporations and the same consultants fight and defeat reform initiatives in state after state. They accumulate experience and refine their tactics from one campaign to the next.

At present, the same is not true for state healthcare reform campaigns. These tend to be geographically separate and politically atomized…and this puts reform advocates at a real disadvantage. America’s Agenda will level this piece of the playing field by facilitating the sharing of campaign intelligence among reform campaigns across the country. Shared intelligence will include opposition research, of course. . It will also include collection and evaluation of campaign literature, radio, and TV spots from every side. America’s agenda will be a focal point for collection and analysis of the diverse tactics and experience in the areas of grassroots organizing, political mobilization, and media strategies in both pro and anti-reform campaigns.

Our capacity for sharing knowledge – for learning and applying the lessons of our collective experience in fighting for universal healthcare reform -- will determine, ultimately, whether we win.