Health Care Reform

Health care reform must include the "Public Option" and should be a "one payer "system if it is to be called reform at all. Any thing less is a sham and will still leave us all at the mercy of the private insurance industry. There really is already a "one payer" system; It is called Medicare/Medicaid and it works reasonably well.

Real reform would expand Medicare and Medicaid to cover all Americans and everyone who resides in the United States, and our major effort, once the single payer system is in place for all, should be to tweak the Medicare/Medicaid system to make it even better. It can and should be done. I am now 75 years old and a life-long Democrat, having voted only once for a republican, Tom McCall of Oregon; I will never vote for a Democrat again if a true health care reform bill is not passed by Congress and is not signed by the President.

And yes, I'm a liberal Democrat and proud of it. How anyone except the very wealthy can be anything but a liberal Democrat is beyond me.