Shameful

Flashback, the campaign issue of the 1992 presidential election, and we all eagerly awaited the results of the task force created the following year with a goal to come up with a comprehensive plan to provide universal health care for all Americans. Fast forward to 2008, and another election cycle with even more contentious debates over universal health care. Now we have a plan proposing an opportunity to buy into the same health plan federal government employees use.

How many have died, how many more are in bankruptcy due to health care costs? How many have needlessly gone without essential care due to the loss of employment?
Opposition to the plan is mainly from conservatives, libertarians, and the health care industry. Why is the United States the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care? How can you be opposed to health care? Would you still be opposed if you had to look each and everyone in the eye and explain to them why they can’t have access to health care?

http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/patients/articles/?storyId=25945

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced a single-payer health reform bill, the American Health Security Act of 2009, S. 703, in the U.S. Senate March 25. After calling for such national legislation for years, a grassroots movement of citizen coalitions, nurses, unions and progressive medical groups like Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) will surely be rallying for the bill.

PNHP calls the plan “the most fiscally conservative option for reform” because it eliminates costly administrative and bureaucratic overhead from the delivery of health care. Insurance and associated administrative costs represented one-third of every dollar spent on health care, according to some analysts.

PNHP said the $400 billion saved annually can be redirected into clinical care that would cover all 46 million presently uninsured Americans and eliminate the co-pays and deductibles that everyone with insurance current pays.

The single-player plan is at odds with the health care reform proposals now getting the most attention. Those plans are being advanced by President Barack Obama and Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). Those plans, still in development, promise to maintain a central role for the insurance industry and likely would involve a public mandate to purchase insurance, and public subsidies to enroll more low-income people in insurance programs. It is unclear who would fund those new enrollments under the plans, how they would contain growing Medicare and Medicaid costs, and how they would reduce the waste in the current system.

The White House and Baucus-Kennedy proposals will be a tougher sell to the public today, particularly after disclosures about the billions contributed to members of Congress by financial lobbyists and the unpopular financial bailouts.

So what’s it gonna be this time around?