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We can't trust most of the media, either, since commercial and public broadcasters like NPR accept insurance and HMO money in the form of advertising contracts and underwriting. The result has been a near blackout of accurate information, sometimes any information at all, on Single-Payer in news about health care reform.
Leadership for real universal health care is coming from groups like Physicians for a National Health Program ( http://www.pnhp.org ), the Healthcare-Now Coalition ( http://www.healthcare-now.org ), and Single-Payer Action ( http://singlepayeraction.org ). Politically, the leaders are independents, the Green Party ( http://www.gp.org ) and other noncorporate alternative parties, and Democrats (perhaps a few Republicans, too) frustrated with their own party's retreat on health care and other big issues.
As businesses lay off employees and cancel health benefits, this is the best time for a mass education effort on Single-Payer. It's our best opportunity to persuade Americans that for-profit health insurance and HMO coverage are a lunacy of the same rank as privatizing fire departments, and that legislation to sustain for-profit health insurance firms and HMOs is as nefarious as multi-billion-dollar taxpayer-funded bailouts for financial corporations and their CEOs. No other industrial democracy in the world tolerates the rule of private health insurance bureaucracies. Why should Americans?
