Last night at his prime time health care news conference, President Barack Obama finally admitted to what we have known all along.
"I want to cover everybody. Now, the truth is that unless you have a -- what's called a single-payer system, in which everybody's automatically covered, then you're probably not going to reach every single individual."There it is, folks. As far as coverage goes, only single payer can fix our shoddy, expensive and unjust health care system.
Next he will be forced to confess that his plan won't save money, either. Even last night,
the president talked about the critical importance of "eliminating waste". Only single payer effectively does that, by eliminating the massive overhead (31%) generated by paper-churning insurance industry bureaucrats lining their pockets while conspiring to deny coverage even to those they nominally cover, let alone the uninsured.This is the single payer moment. Enough Democrats are in favor for it to pass without a single Republican vote. Is saving the insurance companies more important that providing everyone with affordable health care coverage? Is an abstract concept like "bipartisanship" more important than affordable, universal health insurance?
Click on "Pass Single Payer Health Care Now" to reach a form that will send your personal message to all your government representatives. At the same time, if you wish, you can send your personal comments as a letter to the editor of your nearest local daily newspaper.
Take action.
Reading list: Why markets can’t cure healthcare:
Judging both from comments on this blog and from some of my mail, a significant number of Americans believe that the answer to our health care problems — indeed, the only answer — is to rely on the free market. Quite a few seem to believe that this view reflects the lessons of economic theory.-- Paul Krugman's blog (New York Times, 2009-07-25)
Not so. One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow’s Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care, which demonstrated — decisively, I and many others believe — that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs.
2 comments:
The profit margins by corporations involved in the healthcare industry, especially the drug companies, needs to be curbed, and if this isn't tackled, then costs will not go down for health insurance. Single payor is a great idea, but the reality is that without taking away the profit motive at everyone's expense, then it will have little success in the end.
True, but single payer gives the people's representatives the power to negotiate with the drug companies and to go to other sources -- Canada, Europe, etc. -- for alternative supplies. That's unless the Congress takes that power away, as they did in the case of the Medicare drug program. That's why we all need to stay on to top of those members of the legislature beholden to Big Pharma.
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