Donna Smith is best known as one of the documentary subjects of Michael Moore’s 2007 movie, "SiCKO." Her journalism career includes 15 regional awards from the AP Managing Editors. Donna now works as executive director of the Health Care for All Colorado Foundation, and co-chairs the Progressive Democrats of America’s national "Healthcare Not Warfare" campaign.
'Twas the Night Before 2010 Christmas in America
‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the nation, Not a creature had true healthcare, except the richest in station. The wealthy were planning, all smug and all flush, For the days of their future, and their settings most plush. Other children of poor folks were weary of hearing ...
Silent Night, Lonely Night 2010
Susan Boyle sings on CNN. Life marches on. Richard Holbrooke is dead. Rest in peace, Ambassador. It is said you put up a valiant fight. Here I sit in Kansas City. No one knows I am alone; no one would grieve if I should die. No breaking news here. Just ...
Republicans Crush Hope for 9/11 Heroes
Tis the season. As the Republicans gloat over the tax breaks they’ve fought so hard to protect for the wealthy and the potential to extend those Bush-era breaks for two more years, 9/11 first responders asked them just to allow a vote on their bill -- the James Zadroga 9/11 ...
News Flash: 123 Americans Dead, No WikiLeaks Connection
Today, in cites and states across the United States, 123 people died because they lacked enough money to buy healthcare services. That brings the annual death toll for 2010 to 41,082. WikiLeaks had nothing to do with the deaths of the 123 people who died today or any of the ...
Rich Person's Tempest: Patients are used to being frisked
The TSA doesn’t hold a candle to the admissions’ desk clerks in U.S. hospitals or the front desk personnel in most U.S. doctors’ offices. Patients – especially the poorer among us whether insured or not – are used to being felt up and checked out before we get any services. ...
Confusion Trips Up 'Confuser' Turned Whistleblower
Sometimes you cannot make up the twists and turns in life that burst forward out of the relatively predictable stuff. Such is the case as for-profit, private health insurance spokesperson turned whistleblower, Wendell Potter, made what might have seemed at the time a minor gaffe. During one of his book ...
What Value Do They Add to U.S. Healthcare?
Most Americans I know really don’t like to get ripped off. We don’t mind paying for something that is what we thought we were paying for. We just hate the feeling of having been taken. And boy, are we being taken en masse by the private health insurance industry. Doubt ...
For Larry –- and Against Things that Go Bump in the Night
In Denver tonight, I close myself in a hotel room and wonder what might have been. But I also marvel what has been and what will be and what must be for us all in the future. In the shadows of the places where my marriage began and my children ...
Being SiCKO in a Tea Party Nation
RENO, Nevada -- I ventured backward in my memories to the fall of 2006 and wondered what might have happened differently if the Tea Party ruled this nation. It’s not that I am thrilled with the current state of political reality, but I am worried that if the trend toward ...
Selfish Sarah, Selfish Sharron not the Women I Learned to Trust
Why in the world we’ve been asked to trust the selfish sisters of the 2010 American political races, I do not know. Sarah Palin is a woman of privilege who preaches the gospel of selfishness, yet she travels around the country providing motivation for her minions and for candidates like ...
Sleeping Free of Healthcare Fear
Stress kills. Stress makes people sick. So wouldn’t it make sense that a reduction in stress might actually save lives? How about families? And jobs? And freedom from want and fear? It makes perfect sense. But that’s not what we’re all about in the United States. We don’t believe in ...
Bankers Show No Mercy, Feel No Obligation
For the purposes of giving fair warning, this piece is not about healthcare and extending a progressively financed, single standard of high quality care to all. This piece is about bankers. To the extent that bankers are closely aligned with their friends in other financial services industries – like private, ...
Gimme a Break, Real Women Don’t Abhor Compassion
It’s about now that the campaign ads start to annoy beyond belief – especially in this year of the nasty, selfish and supposedly self-made, conservative woman candidate. They may not know it, but compassion is strength. It’s easy to be selfish and self-absorbed but it takes a real woman to ...
Firefighter’s Family Gets the Healthcare Boot
You’ve seen them. I’ve seen them. Around Labor Day especially. Firefighters standing on the street corners of America with firefighters’ boots collecting money for Jerry’s kids, kids who have muscular dystrophy. What we often don’t see or hear are the stories behind some of those street-corner firefighter-fundraisers. I heard one ...
A Divide So Wide, A Disconnect So Deep
Our national obsession with individualism and the attainment of personal wealth is so sick and so deep for some of our fellow citizens that even the bonds of marriage are often no match for the selfishness. A woman with advanced breast cancer schedules her chemo and her radiation so that ...
The world mobilizes around the issue of religious intolerance – and the media has done its part. The Gainesville minister who shows hatred and religious intolerance on behalf of a Christian God clearly does not speak for all Christians even if he claims to know the will of God. Hatred ...
News Flash, “Tony Orlando Postponed” – Oh, and 123 Dead Again Today
This morning as I was pulling my Labor Day weekend brain cells back to consciousness with my first morning cup of coffee, I saw the scroll. “Tony Orlando concert postponed in New Jersey amid fears of Hurricane Earl aftermath.” I almost flew out of my chair. I watched for a ...
Two-faced Corporate Personhood: Elected and Convicted
Forgive me for being a tad confused. I am finding it difficult to understand why one person goes to jail for privately selling an appointment for elected office while others have a legal right to buy their elected positions. The U.S. Supreme Court says corporations are persons in terms of ...
What Midterms? It’s All About Paying the Bills
Seems hard for elected folks and think tankers and others in the upper crust to imagine or recall, but most Americans aren’t spending a lot of time thinking about the subtleties of political gamesmanship or strategy for the midterm elections. Most Americans are thinking about paying the bills. The insistent ...
Nation Fails to Honor, Protect 9/11 Heroes Again
For nearly nine years the 9/11 rescue workers have labored to have access to healthcare to treat the injuries sustained when they worked at ground zero on September 11, 2001, when planes slammed into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. And the bill that would finally have granted those ...
Who Tells the Dead Patient Stories Now?
Since the health insurance reform bill passed this past spring, you’d think we suddenly stopped having American patients die and suffer unimaginable horror at the hands of the corporate owned and operated healthcare business system in the United States. No one tells the stories. The reality is that patients were ...
What We Make Our Sisters Do for Healthcare
Sisters, we are allowing great pain and suffering. Sisters, we are doing more than allowing great pain and suffering, we are participating in it. All around us, our moms, our daughters, our cousins, our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and, yes, our sisters are fighting in quiet desperation against a ...
It’s About Human Rights, Not the Money
No matter which intellectual or which political candidate or which self-righteous activist from which camp on the right or the left or anywhere in-between says differently, the absolute need to reform and transform our healthcare system still rests in the outing of the human rights violations and the human suffering. ...
I Can See Healthcare From Here
DETROIT – As I wake each morning here in Detroit at the US Social Forum, I glance just a few hundred yards across the way, and I know people have healthcare without regard to financial or other barriers. And it hurts like hell to see the cars “over there” winding ...
US Social Forum in Detroit: Activists Converge on Motor City
The summer sun was hot as marchers made their way down Woodward back to Cobo Hall in Detroit for the opening ceremonies of the US Social Forum. But spirits were high and the collective energy of so many activists devoted to social justice gathering in one place was more than ...
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May 24th, 2013
How Many U.S. Dead for Health Care Profits Does It Take to Cause Alarm?
We keep winning the race to see who can charge the most for health care services around the world. We also keep winning the race ...
May 22nd, 2013
Aetna Needs Their Money, I Just Need Health Care
I lost my health coverage because I could not afford to keep paying the COBRA premiums. As soon as I lost my coverage, Aetna set ...
May 19th, 2013
Saturday Night Dead ---- Courtesy of the U.S. Health Care System
There are 123 fewer Americans watching and laughing at the 2013 season ender for Saturday Night Live tonight because they were killed by the U.S. health care ...
May 16th, 2013
Tornadoes, Suicide Bombs, and the U.S. Health Care Dead and Broke
The news today is grim, to be sure. Tornadoes in Texas with the dead and the missing, Roadside, suicide bombs in Afghanistan with U.S. casualties. ...
May 15th, 2013
Protecting Angelina's Honor as U.S. Health Care System Kills 123 People Daily
Yesterday I wrote about the recent revelations from Angelina Jolie about her double mastectomy. I said nothing ill-willed about the mega-star nor did I imply ...
May 14th, 2013
My Breasts and My Life Not as Valuable as Angelina's
While women and men around the world applaud Angelina Jolie for her bravery in writing such a public opinion piece in the New York Times today about her ...
May 11th, 2013
Thousands Dead in 2013 U.S. Health System Failure
Beginning tonight, I want to create the U.S. health care death toll count for all to see and read. These are the dead due to ...
December 24th, 2009
A Patient’s View of the Senate Christmas Healthcare Gift
So, all the great fanfare and all the king’s horses. The great and almighty U.S. Senate has spoken. I will have to buy private health ...
July 15th, 2011
‘Let ‘Em Eat Peas’ Can Be the Modern Age Elitist Mantra
It has been a challenging week for many people. While our elected officials have been broadly reported to be at odds about exactly how to ...
August 15th, 2012
Dead Woman Working: American Dream Died Long Ago
It was a slow and torturous death, my American dream. And for millions of others, I am guessing it is the same. Nothing this current ...
October 21st, 2012
Dead Woman Working: Who is the Best Looking Candidate?
Several years ago, it made me angry when I heard a family member remark that she was voting for the candidate who she felt was ...
September 5th, 2011
Worker’s Ode to Labor Day 2011
Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get up. Do it again.Work. Be grateful to be working. Work harder. Work ‘till you drop. Stop. Drop. Get ...
January 11th, 2010
White House Believes “Liberal Angst” Over Healthcare Will Go Away
Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. Better it is to be of humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide ...
May 14th, 2013
My Breasts and My Life Not as Valuable as Angelina's
While women and men around the world applaud Angelina Jolie for her bravery in writing such a public opinion piece in the New York Times today about her ...
'Dirty Wars' by Jeremy Scahill
Why have you started a comedy festival in northern Michigan in the middle of winter?
Because if you were here in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere (which is actually somewhere to us), you'd need a few laughs too ... Continue Reading
Michael Moore on MSNBC with Michael Eric Dyson, 3/22/13
Michael Moore on Democracy Now!, 6/28/12
Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow Show, 5/11/12
Michael Moore on MSNBC, Super Tuesday, 3/6/12
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Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow Show, 2/27/12
