Pelosi On Health Care Reform

Pelosi Pushes For Truth Commission - Hotline On Call

Speaker Nancy Pelosi chatted with reporters during a Christian Science Monitor event in Washington.

On health care reform:

'This is a very exciting initiative for us. It's going to be historic in its nature when it is passed by the Congress, and I believe that it will be. ... We are all working in partnership on this. It's teamwork. ... As our members came back from their recess, a great deal of what they heard out there was public options, public options, public options, public options. In our caucus, over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it's not going to be a single payer. ... We had an opportunity for that awhile back, and it was not realized. And that's not what it's going to be. So we had to take people from a place that they see universal, affordable, quality health care available best in single payer and say this can be achieved in other ways.'

Well, Nancy, we have never tried for single payer before and the nation has never needed it as much as it does now.

As Don McCanne says:

"Nancy Pelosi’s comments reveal just how determined the Congressional leadership is in keeping single payer off the table. Presumably her comment that “we had an opportunity for that awhile back” refers to the Clinton effort at reform, even though that was a process that quite explicitly excluded single payer as a reform model. The closest the nation has come to embracing the single payer model is the enactment of Medicare. Even though the program requires updating, it has been more effective and more efficient than any other program. A new and improved Medicare is precisely the reform that the nation needs.

For an administration and a Congress that advocates for using science in policy decisions, it is astounding that they would reject health policy science and leave us in the Dark Ages in health care reform."