Greed is killing our heath care system and the American public must demand a cost effective public healthcare system such as Medicare, that is already working for seniors, and could well do the same for all Americans.

As Mark Karlin writes in Buzzflash ~  "The goal and slogan of "healthcare reform" should be quite simple: "Medicare for Everyone ... Why do we have to wait until we are 65 to be guaranteed the right of health coverage? " http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/8801

Or as Joshua Holland writes in Truthout ~ " If there's enough pressure on Congress, we'll add a well-designed public insurance option to the current mix of private insurance and government health care programs. It would be like (the highly popular) Medicare program, but open to all comers. We'd end up with a very large insurance pool that would lower costs through efficiencies of scale. The plan would be able to drive a hard bargain with providers and cut down on overhead costs, which amount to about 30 percent of spending in the U.S. right now." http://www.truthout.org/062909G?n  

It's time to put the pressure on Obama and force him to stop straddling the line and insist on a public option. As Robert Reich has written ~ Without the government as competition, the private sector has little incentive to improve ~ and once again our health care system will continue to be gamed by greed and special interest groups.

As Robert Parry wrote in Consortium News on June 5th ~ "As the health insurance industry and its defenders in Congress lay out their case against permitting a public option in a reform bill, perhaps their most curious argument is that some 119 million Americans are ready to dump their private plans and jump to something more like Medicare - and that's why that choice can't be permitted... In other words, the Health Insurance industry and its backers are acknowledging that more than one-third of the American people are so dissatisfied with their private health insurance that they trust the U.S. government to give them a fairer shake on health care. The industry says its allies in Congress must prevent that. " http://consortiumnews.com/2009/060509.html

And I'm saying we must all demand a public option and that we already have that workable option with Medicare ~ which, quite simply, should now be available to everyone !

Allen L Roland                 

http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2009/06/30.html