Administration!
The United States Congress will establish annual funding outlays for the Medicare for All program through an annual entitlement, to be administered by the Medicare program. A U. S. National Health Insurance Advisory Board will be established, comprised primarily of health care professionals and representatives of citizen health advocacy groups.
Proposed Funding
Maintaining current federal and state funding of existing health care programs! A modest payroll tax on all employers and employees of 3.3% each. A 5% health tax on the top 5% of income earners. A small tax on stock and bond transfers. Closing corporate tax loop-holes, and repealing the Bush tax cut for the highest 1% of income earners.
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/08/19/obama-says-single-payer-health-care-makes-sense/#more-3168
August 19, 2008, 10:21 am Obama Says Single-Payer Health Care Makes Sense Posted by Scott Hensley
Barack Obama said he would consider embracing a single-payer health-care system sometime in the future as his plan for broader health coverage evolves, the WSJ’s Amy Chozick reports from the campaign trail.
“If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” Obama told some 1,800 people at a town-hall meeting on the economy in
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
But Obama repeated that he rejects an immediate shift to a single-payer system. “Given that a lot of people work for insurance companies, a lot of people work for HMOs. You’ve got a whole system of institutions that have been set up,” he said at a roundtable discussion with women Monday morning after a voter asked, “Why not single payer?”
http://www.newsweek.com/id/98083/output/print
A Clinton-Obama Slugfest Factcheck.org decodes the South Carolina debate
Viveca Novak factcheck.org Jan 23, 2008 | Updated: 10:24 a.m. ET Jan 23, 2008
Clinton: Secondly, we have seen once again a kind of evolution here. When Senator Obama ran for the Senate, he was for single-payer and said he was for single-payer if we could get a Democratic president and Democratic Congress. As time went on, the last four or so years, he said he was for single-payer in principle, then he was for universal health care. And then his policy is not, it is not universal. ...
Obama: I never said that we should try to go ahead and get single-payer. What I said was that if I were starting from scratch, if we didn't have a system in which employers had typically provided health care, I would probably go with a single-payer system.
But Obama's denial doesn't hold up. In a speech to the AFL-CIO in 2003, when he was setting up his run for the Senate, Obama said:
Obama (June, 30, 2003): I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, is spending 14 percent, 14 percent, of its gross national product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that's what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that's what I'd like to see. And as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, we have to take back the House.
That sounds to us like someone who's pretty gung-ho for a single-payer plan. But after Democrats captured control of both the House and Senate in 2006, Obama tempered his position. He said in a New Yorker interview last year:
Obama (in The New Yorker, May 7, 2007): If you're starting from scratch, then a single-payer system ... would probably make sense. But we've got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition ... would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that's not so disruptive.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/why-not-single-payer-par_b_94239.html
Why Not Single Payer? Part 5: The Single Payer Health Care Movement and the Plans of the Democratic Presidential Nominee
http://www.healthcare-now.org/2008/10/healthcare-now-interviewed-by-mickey-z/
Healthcare-NOW! Interviewed by Mickey Z October 13, 2008 by HC-N!
Filed under HCN News Mickey Z, of www.mickeyz.net, interviewed our own Katie Robbins.
