Everyone should have health care coverage and a single-payer system is the best solution, especially for private businesses, say organizers of a free film series in Port Angeles and Sequim.
The Clallam County League of Women Voters’ Health Care Study Group will show two documentary films exploring health care coverage reform and advocating a national single-payer system. The films will be shown Tuesday in Port Angeles and Thursday in Sequim.
“Fix It: Health Care at the Tipping Point,” released in 2015, and “Now is the Time: Healthcare for Everybody,” which was released in October, “advocate the creation of a single payer system for health care reimbursement as an affordable and common sense solution,” said Mary Wegmann, chair of the league’s health care study committee.
The League of Women Voters of Washington 2017 supports a single payer concept that offers publicly-funded privately-delivered health care, Wegmann said. The league favors a national health insurance plan financed through general taxes in place of individual insurance premiums, Wegmann said, citing the league’s 2017 Issue Paper on Health Care (http://tinyurl.com/PDN-LWVhealthcare).
The films will be shown Tuesday in the Carver Room of the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St., at:
• 2 p.m.— “Now is the Time: Healthcare for Everybody.”
• 4:30 p.m. — “Fix It: Health Care at the Tipping Point.”
• 6:30 p.m. — “Now is the Time: Health Care for Everybody.”
The films will be screened Thursday in the Sequim Transit Center, 190 W. Cedar St., at:
• 2 p.m. — “Fix It: Health Care at the Tipping Point.”
• 6:30 p.m. — “Now is the Time: Health Care for Everybody.”
After each film, Wegmann will moderate an informal discussion.
Port Angeles resident Patrick Noonan, who is briefly — “for about 20 seconds” — in “Fix It,” will introduce the film and take questions about it at each venue.
Noonan is a retired consultant for orthopedic devices and a longtime advocate of a single-payer system. Although he is not a doctor, he is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program as well as of Healthcare for All — Washington and has been known to “testify in front of the Legislature now and then.”
“Single payer is misnamed,” Noonan said Thursday. “It should be called Medicare for all. “By putting the entire country into a pool, the price comes down and everybody can be covered for considerably less money than we are spending today.”
Among opponents of the idea are the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, Noonan said.
“Fix It” speaks directly to private business, she and Noonan said.
“It’s funded and produced by an employer,” Noonan said.
The website https://fixithealthcare.com/ says that the film is the result of Richard Master, the founder and owner of MCS Industries — an international firm dealing in picture frames and decorative mirrors that is based in Philadelphia — attempting to “find a solution to the dysfunctional U.S. healthcare system.”
“Now is the Time: Healthcare for Everybody” was created by a husband and wife team, Oregon licensed counselors Laurie Simons and Terry Sterrenberg, according to its website, http://www.nowsthetimemovie.com/.
