The health care bill has been thoroughly polluted with a stifling complexity, a result of all the haggling and trying to please all sides. The best solution is the simplest one, the one that has worked well for decades in every other industrialized democracy in the world (in various forms): single payer. In fact, it has even worked just fine here, in the form of Medicare for seniors. What we need is Medicare for All.I firmly believe it is immoral to deny health care to anyone, and that's ... Read Full Story
A letter by a supposed Dr. Stephen E. Fraser, MD to Senator Bayh has been making the rounds as an email since at least August, but is still a hot topic among obsessed Republicans.There is a thorough debunking of these recycled fabrications at the Read,Think,Go blog. Please spread it around to your Repub friends to try to counter the insanity.The health care bill we'll end up with is far from what we really need, which is a single-payer system. But the lies being spread need to be countered, a... Read Full Story
I don’t envy President Obama. While I can take issue with some of his strategies – I believe we should get out of Afghanistan, for example, and he should stop compromising away real health care reform – I can appreciate just how monumental the task of turning this country around is.Reforming health care? It’s only been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first campaigned in 1912 for it. As Obama told Congress on September 9th of this year, “I may not be the first president to tackle hea... Read Full Story
By backing an independent conservative in a New York race (23rd Congressional District) over the Republican nominee who was too "liberal" for them, Sarah Palin and the rest of the rabid neo-con pack hoped to really sock it to Obama and show the country that conservatives were on the rebound. Oops! The strategy backfired! The Democrat was elected to the historically Republican-held seat!Talk about a rift in the party -- the GOP is reeling! By letting the loony neo-con talking heads on Fox and ... Read Full Story
From Robert Creamer, HuffingtonPost.com:We spend $7,290 per person and end up in 37th place. They spend only $3,601 and they are number one. That's just not right.On the average, Frenchmen live almost three years longer than the average American. That's infuriating.What's more, every legal resident of France is covered by health insurance, and in the U.S. 46 million people are uninsured. When someone in France goes to the hospital, everything except a small co-payment is covered - it's that s... Read Full Story
The New York Times devoted some rare space on September 20 to discussing single-payer (or Medicare-for-all) health reform.NYT public editor Clark Hoyt ran a piece devoted to undermining the case for single-payer health care without allowing advocates to make the case in support of Medicare for all. Seems awfully one-sided. And as is predictable in such a one-sided article, they got it all wrong.Single payer is the way to go, and enjoys huge support among those that matter - the citizens... Read Full Story
There are some who are trying to make Sept 12 a day to divide America along ideological lines. I suppose by making it Sept 12, they think they are avoiding charges of trying to exploit Sept 11. And they pretend their Sept 12 events are about uniting 'patriotic' Americans, as opposed to the rest of us slobs who support our elected president.Funny, I remember how the same folks were foaming at the mouth with charges of 'treason' when anyone dared criticize George W. Bush for anything -- includi... Read Full Story
From Citizens for Tax Justice:Newly revised estimates show that the Bush tax cuts cost almost $2.5 trillion over the decade after they were first enacted (2001-2010). Preliminary estimates from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office show that the House Democrats' health care reform legislation is projected to cost $1 trillion over a decade after it would be enacted (2010-2019).And yet, many of the lawmakers who argue that the health care reform legislation is "too costly" are th... Read Full Story
