Single-Payer Would Fix Medicare

The reason Medicare is inadequate is because the Republicans and the conservative Democrats--the very "Blue Dog" vermin who, engorged on health insurance, hospital and pharmacy bribes and campaign donations, are undermining and destroying the already lousy health care "reform" plan of President Barack Obama--have been underfunding it, and performing a slow "privatization" of the program, chipping away at its benefits, adding increased self-pay requirements, and raising the Medicare tax on all workers.

They get away with this treachery because their actions only affect the minority of Americans served by Medicare.

If Medicare was expanded to include all Americans, suddenly this kind of political backsliding would be opposed by everyone who was in the program. It simply couldn't happen. Rather, the public would, as one, demand better coverage, fewer self-pay requirements, and an end to supplemental insurance. The right knows this, and the health care industry knows this, and that is why they are all bitterly opposing the expansion of Medicare--and yet it is so obvious that Medicare is the answer to America's health crisis--and it's staring us all in the face. It works, it's cheap, and it could be implemented immediately.

We are being betrayed by President Obama and by the Democratic leadership in Congress, who will not talk about single-payer.

The so-called "reform" bill that is going to emerge from the current process is going to be the legislative equivalent of road kill, barely recognizeable either as health care or as a "reform." It will be a Christmas present for the insurance industry, the hospital industry and the phramaceutical industry, all three of which struck secret deals behind closed doors with the White House.

It will set back health reform in America a generation, will require everyone to buy inadequate and overpriced insurance, overpriced drugs and to go to overpriced hospitals. And the cost of healthcare to individuals, businesses, and the nation as a whole (already the highest in the modern industrial world), will continue to soar.

Read it all here.