{news} Health Care for All? Not with M. Jodi Rell!

[ken krayeske]

For Immediate Release
Nov. 6, 2006
For more information, contact Ken Krayeske, 860-995-5842

Health Care for All? Not with M. Jodi Rell

Green Calls for Compassion, and Demands Single-Payer Health Care

Hartford _ If Connecticut wants universal health care, it must look 
beyond the Rowland-Rell administration for help in securing the human 
right of proper medical attention.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell's 12 years in office are replete with examples of poor 
health care management: secret insurance contracts, hospital closings, 
and job cuts, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Cliff Thornton said today.

"Why hasn't the state stepped up to insure that health care is available 
to everyone?" Green Party gubernatorial candidate Cliff Thornton asks. 
"The money is there. Our priorities are askew. With the Green Party in 
office, the residents of Connecticut would be assured that everyone 
would have equal access to health care."

Starting in 1995, the state Department of Social Services began doling 
out more than $744 million in contracts with for-profit HMO's to manage 
the health care for more than 300,000 Medicaid recipients, among them 
adults and children, according to attorney Sheldon Toubman at the New 
Haven Legal Assistance Association.

Toubman has led a fight to open the records of these companies to the 
sunshine of the  Freedom of Information Act, with no help from DSS.

"We are not allowed to know how this money is being spent, and if it 
being spent effectively, and that is a tragedy," Thornton said.

Child Advocate Jeanne Milstein is no less pleased with the system's poor 
management, especially where it concerns the mental health of children. 
She is demanding that three of the four insurance companies comply with 
the FOI ruling to open the records.

"I remain very concerned that, without appropriate public oversight and 
transparency of practices, this system will not successfully meet the 
expectations for service to chidlren," Millstein wrote in a July 6, 2006 
letter to Patricia Wilson-Coker, the head of DSS.

Good leadership in the Governor's office could change this, Thornton said.

"The governor could stop all this nonsense, but she chooses to issue 
platitudes and do nothing," Thornton said.

The promise from Rowland/Rell was that privatizing the insurance system 
would save money and improve health care access. But in Toubman's Oct. 6 
letter to all gubernatorial candidates, he wrote, "After eleven years, 
the promise has not been fulfilled."

The people of Winsted are waiting, too. In 1996, during the first term 
for the Rowland-Rell administration, the 92-year-old Winsted Memorial 
Hospital closed due to the pressures of rising insurance costs and an 
unfair hospital tax that took money from small, rural hospitals and 
pumped that cash into large, urban hospitals.

Fast forward to Oct. 5, 2006, when the New Milford Hospital announced it 
was cutting the equivalent of 20 full-time employees and freezing the 
wages of the entire managerial staff because of more than $1 million in 
cuts from federal Medicare reimbursements.

"I find it unbelievable that when Connecticut desperately needs health 
care infrastructure and jobs, the Governor would allow a hospital to 
eliminate people," Thornton said. "Where is the compassionate response 
for the patients and their families, and the workers and their families? 
I know my grandmother wouldn't accept any of this in good conscience."

Thornton is calling for an elimination of the redundancies in our health 
care system, the reduction of the profit-motive in health care and for 
the creation of a single-payer health care system.


-30-

-- 

Peace,


Ken Krayeske

Campaign Manager

Thornton for Governor

P.O. Box 1971

Manchester, CT 06045

www.votethornton.com

860-995-5842


*This message is paid for and approved by Thornton for Governor, Max 
Wentworth, Treasurer*