In 2003, Barack Obama said he was for single payer.
What would it take to get single payer enacted?
“First, we have to take back the White House, the Senate and the House,” Obama said at the time.
Fast forward six years.
The Democrats have taken the White House.
The Senate and the House.
And now what’s Obama’s position?
In a speech this week in Chicago before the American Medical Association, Obama made clear he was now opposed to single payer.
And his lieutenants suggested that Obama would support legislation to make sure that single payer does not become a reality in America.
There’s only one explanation for Obama’s flip-flop on single payer.
The health insurance and drug corporations have a hammerlock on Washington.
And Obama is going along to get along.
What’s the net result?
Sixty Americans are dying every day due to lack of health insurance. (Institute of Medicine report.)
Instead of getting behind single payer, Obama and the Democrats are engaged in the what Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief at the highly regarded New England Journal of Medicine calls “the futility of piecemeal tinkering.”
Earlier this week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the most liberal of the Democrats’ tinkering plans would cost $1 trillion over ten years and still leave 37 million Americans uninsured.
