Which Way to Universal Healthcare?

[dcsmart]

Two leading reformers debate the role of private insurers

The numbers have never been this grim. Almost 50 million Americans are uninsured. The average annual premium for a family is nearing $13,000, and racing upward at rates that wages can’t hope to match. If nothing changes, by 2050, government healthcare spending will consume 37 percent of the gross domestic product, and private health spending will be far more. There will be little left for education or wages or leisure.

Economists have a dictum they call Stern’s Law, and it is simple: If something cannot go on forever, they say, it won’t.

Our health system cannot go on in this fashion forever. It will break the back of the federal budget and crush individual consumers. But between “cannot” and “will not” lies an ocean of impediments and questions.

Some of those barriers seem to be dissolving before the moral force of the issue. For the last eight years, our government lacked either the will or the interest to act on health reform. After Jan. 20, 2009, that will no longer be true.

President-elect Barack Obama has not only stated his intention to reform healthcare, he has also staffed his administration with eager reformers, notably former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who has written a book calling for comprehensive healthcare reform and who will serve as the administration’s “health czar,” as well as its Health and Human Services secretary.

But if the incoming administration has the will, few are sure of the way. It’s an old debate, and a consequential one. As the saying goes, the status quo is everyone’s second choice. And when you have reformers squabbling over what they want, and industry uniting to defeat what they don’t want, the outcome is never progressive.

In an attempt to encourage dialogue in advance of the legislative battles to come, In These Times invited representatives from two leading reform groups—Steffie Woolhandler, co-director of Physicians for a National Health Program, and Richard Kirsch, the national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now (HCAN)—to talk out their differences. An edited transcript of their conversation follows.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4159/which_way_to_universal_healthcare

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

1. we can look at the way many other countries do it

New Zealand and Australia have had public health care for years.

They can purchase private insurance if they want it, but everybody's in!

Even Taiwan has Universal Health Care. They got it in the early 90s I think.

The US can look at the different ways it is done and look at what we need
and take it from their.

Just don't bail out insurance companies. Let them go broke.

I don't have health insurance, haven't since 2003.

[area51]

2. Kick.

It's amazing that the U.S. govt. thinks it's good policy to let 100,000 people die per year because they can't afford healthcare. Too bad the so-called "pro-lifers" can't get exercised about the people who are here now.

Single-payer healthcare NOW.