Health Care Reform: The elephant in the room

"Distinguished leaders went round and round on Thursday debating the problems of delivering and paying for health care for the American people without finding actionable agreement. Not one mentioned a simple known model to cut costs dramatically and deliver care efficiently to everyone -- Medicare for all.

"No one dared to recommend this common-sense way to extract the poisons of useless costs and unnecessary complexity from the system." -- Connell J. Maguire, Riviera Beach, Fla., Letter to the Editor (New York Times 2010-02-27).

Of course that just might be because no senator or representative who supports single-payer -- Medicare for All -- was allowed in the room; neither the president nor the health care industry's paid representatives in Congress want to talk about it. Ever since the House leadership took single-payer "off the table" at the insistence of the Obama White House, discussion of the only system that reliably can deliver affordable, universal health care has been verboten. As the senior White House correspondent Helen Thomas put it the other day, "In my opinion, Obama blew it big time when he refused to fight for a single payer program." You think?