Advocates For Shared Solutions

NASRO is a non-partisan community of small businesses, non-profits, associations, self employed people and individuals that works together for socially responsible polices and humanitarian solutions to our problems.

National Health Care

NASRO has been heavily involved in administering group health insurance plan benefits for our members since our early years of operation. Our goal has always been universal health care for all, free of the profit making business model of insurance companies and large hospital corporations. By just being an administrator we have never been tempted to become captialists and " help our members " by manageing health underwriting risks and profits. There are already enough unions and associations that started out trying to help their members and became taken over by their insurance operations and forgot their principals. Action is required this year, 2009, that will provide health care coverage to all Americans, particularly the working class and middle class people who have been priced out of being able to afford good health insurance plans. Health Insurance is an old failed system that needs to be replaced in order to control costs and provide care. It is dragging down the counrty's economy with over 16% of gross domestic product being dedciated to health insurance and health care.

Real Democracy

The next big step in expanding democracy needs to taken here at home by making voting in Federal elections mandatory for all citizens, with elections held on Saturdays. Participation in the political process in the United States remains far below many other countries. The U.S. is not number one when it comes to democracy, but it can be and quickly.

We urge law makers who are socially responsible to not engage as power brokers, but instead to represent the common and shared interest of their communities. We see their job as being to represent all the people in thier district or their state equally and to pay no more attention to the President of Blue Cross than to a member of Blue Cross. Their job is to lead the people in a positive discussion of the important issues of the month, every month in their district or state. Their job as we see, it is to interact with the children of their district and help educate them about their government; how it works, what are the principals on what it is based and to be interactive. As the League of Women Voters say, Democracy Is Not A Spectator Sport.

We know that workable solutions to the problems of our members face do exist and have been ignored. In the late 1970's some of us helped bring Francois Mitterand ( later the two term President of France) to the United States to speak at an international conference in Washington D.C. about his vision of a socially responsible society. He put many of these ideas to work when he later became the President of France, with the help of the generation inspired by the events of 1968. Now a new generation is about to come to power in the United States and the solutions to our health care, energy, housing and transportation problems are still there to be implemented, if the will, the energy and the toughness is there to match the global corporations.

Innovation that Comes from Start Ups and Small Producers

The forces of free market big business, which means monopoly business without regulation, have transformed the United States into a country with a shadow of an identity, a place without a manufacturing economy, with a labor market to be avoided. A place to avoid responsibility for the environment and a place where many citizens die premature deaths while health insurance companies prevent people from buying health insurance policies they will gladly pay for. A place where millions of people are losing their homes and apartments and the government is so worried the whole financial system could fall apart that the taxpayers are bailing out top investment banks to the tune of 24 billion dollars for just one transaction.

Economic Democracy to Replace Wall Street that Is Beyond Reforming

Despite these conditions, NASRO remains hopeful that the forces of social responsibility are on the rise in the United States. When we became a functioning organization 17 years ago, only a handful of businesses saw the importance of preserving our natural resources, revolutionizing our energy polices and curtailing our wasteful consumption. Today, most businesses are planning how to participate in the new green economy.

Seventeen years ago we were a society without large numbers of experienced physicians, nurses, health care administrators and human resource managers who understand how to make the idea of universal health care a reality in their industry. We have fought for universal health care for decades and have gained experience in how to conduct winning campaigns against the health insurance companies. We have come to understand the limitations of our politicians and the value of their promises

to support universal health care when there is actually a vote that means something. States like Massachusetts are half way there to the lifetime goal of universal health care.

Just as with the founding of the Republic of the United States and the abolition of slavery, we face an entrenched adversary, who has much to lose. Those who exercise private business control of health care, will not let go of their grip on power over our lives without us taking it from them. In the end,there is no middle ground with health care. That does not mean we are against compromises. But, we have reached a point of no return. Once again the world must be turned upside down, for us to gain justice for ourselves, our army and our economy.