Straight talk about health care reform

There is no greater indictment of our money-talks system of government than the difficulty of achieving effective health care reform. Even Obama seemed to want to keep advocates of a single-payer plan out of the negotiations and hearings.

Why? Simply because of the lobbying power of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies. It's true, a single-payer system would decimate the health insurance industry and greatly reduce profits for big pharma.

THE HEALTH NEEDS OF THE PEOPLE MUST ALWAYS BE SACRIFICED FOR THE HEALTH OF CAPITALISM.

Now, in the 11th hour of the debate -- on a comedy show !!! -- the public is going to hear about the single-payer plan. Dr. Aaron Carroll, of the Indiana University School of Medicine, who published a study last year showing 59 percent of U.S. physicians now support national health insurance, will be on The Colbert Report tonight (Tuesday) at 11:30pm.

Dr. Carroll has written:

“There are now more uninsured people in the United States than at any time since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-1960s. … These numbers represent extraordinary suffering, unnecessary disability and premature deaths — at least 18,000 deaths per year, according to the Institute of Medicine. …

“There is one sure-fire way to make these numbers come down. It worked for seniors in the 1960s and it still works for them today. You may hear politicians demonizing government-run health insurance, but you will hear none run on a platform of eradicating Medicare; nor will any turn it down for themselves when they turn 65. Call it whatever you want: National health insurance, Medicare-for-all, ‘single payer’ or socialized health insurance; it doesn’t matter. Research shows that Medicare-for-all could save enough on administrative waste (over $350 billion) to cover all the 47 million uninsured and improve coverage for everyone else. A single-payer national health insurance system is the only way to drop the number of people lacking health insurance to zero.”

Rep. John Conyers Jr. has introduced a bill in the House, H.R. 676, that would implement a single-payer system; the bill now has 85 co-sponsors. Recently Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a single-payer bill in the U.S. Senate, S. 703.

Makes sense. I support it. Why can't we do something that works, for a change. We'll spend a trillion dollars on a cobbled together plan, trying to please everyone, and it will only marginally improve our expensive, stupid health care system.

Ralph