""Millions of dollars have been spent by political advocacy groups to commission polls and statistics "proving" that their health reform is "politically feasible." Yet political winds do not make good health policy. Careful examination of science and experience do. And it is in the science and experience that we see that single-payer offers the only way to truly comprehensive, universal and sustainable health care, and that "public option" schemes offer only more of the same: tens of millions of uninsured, rapidly deteriorating coverage, an epidemic of medical bankruptcy, and skyrocketing costs that will eventually cripple the system.First, because the "public option" is built around the retention of private insurance companies, it is unable - in contrast to single-payer - to recapture the $400 billion in administrative waste that private insurers currently generate in their drive to fight claims, issue denials and screen out the sick. A single-payer system would redirect these huge savings back into the system, requiring no net increase in health spending.
In contrast, the "public option" will require huge new sources of revenue, currently estimated at around $1 trillion over the next decade. Rather than cutting this bloat, the public option adds yet another layer of useless and complicated bureaucracy in the form of an "exchange," which serves no useful function other than to police and broker private insurance companies.
Second, because the "public option" fails to contain the cost control mechanism inherent in single-payer, such as global budgeting, bulk purchasing and planned capital expenditures, any gains in coverage will quickly be erased as costs skyrocket and government is forced to choose between raising revenue and cutting benefits.
Third, because of this inability to control costs or realize administrative savings, the coverage and benefits that can be offered will be of the same type currently offered by private carriers, which cause millions of insured Americans to go without needed care due to costs and have led to an epidemic of medical bankruptcies.
Supporters of incremental reform once again promise us universal coverage without structural reform, but we've heard this promise dozens of times before.
Virtually all of the reforms being floated by President Obama and other centrist Democrats have been tried, and have failed repeatedly. Plans that combined mandates to purchase coverage with Medicaid expansions fell apart in Massachusetts (1988), Oregon (1992), and Washington state (1993); the latest iteration (Massachusetts, 2006) is already stumbling, with uninsurance again rising and costs soaring. Tennessee's experiment with a massive Medicaid expansion and a public plan option worked - for one year, until rising costs sank it."
Talk with progressives in Congress fell on deaf ears, unfortunately. The public option successfully distracted those for reform. In fact, the same problems that affect and impact elections decimated the movement for real reform. That is, individuals chose the most "electable" health policy, the one that politicians were most likely to support and exploit to their advantage during their re-election campaign, and abandoned single-payer.
Again, those who chose to not follow the facts and figures and push for single-payer lost. They did not get a public option.
Advocates for single-payer applied pressure on the process. The Baucus 8 were arrested on May 5th for challenging Sen. Max Baucus' exclusion of single-payer from the debate on health care reform.
In October, the Mobilization for Healthcare for All (a coalition of groups for single-payer) began staging acts of civil disobedience in offices of insurance companies and offices of senators and representatives getting in the way of health reform. Doctors and nurses participated in these actions.
The Mad as Hell Doctorsled a tour across the nation to create attention for a Medicare for All system in this country. And, Dr. Margaret Flowers of PNHP became a lightning rod for the movement for real healthcare reform especially after appearing in an edition ofBill Moyers Journal in February of this year.
The single-payer movement never let up--never succumbed to the stigmatism that Democrats were trying to attach to it as they suggested they might, like Kucinich, be trying to "Nader" health reform. (The impetus being that Nader helped elect Bush and the movement might help Republicans defeat healthcare and possibly Obama in 2012 if they don't abandon their principled stance on healthcare.)
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