Single Payer, Universal Health Care

In today's Trib, from Clark Newhall, a local MD and attorney, a succinct and angry account of what is going on in American health care:

The price of our privately run, profit-driven medical-industrial complex has caused this famine. About one-third of every dollar going to health care pays for administrative costs -- for utilization reviewers, for computer programmers, for advertising, for sales managers, for executives of all kinds, for billing clerks, for coding clerks, for CEO bonuses in the millions and hundreds of million -- and for profits.

We are not talking about government waste. We are not talking about the cost of actually treating the sick and nurturing the healthy. We are talking only about the cost of running our profit-making health insurance industry.

One third of the health-care dollar -- that amount is far more than enough to give excellent medical care to everyone in the nation. It is far more than enough to fund the (privately-owned) surgical centers and imaging centers and Lasik centers that sprout up on every corner. It is even more than the amount we have given to Wall Street to bail out financiers and bankers from their hubristic near-demise.

The famine has grown while insurance companies charge higher premiums and reduce coverage, while employers cut their contributions and increase deductibles, while legislators reduce Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program budgets, and on and on.

I agree. We are not just at the brink, we are over the edge and falling fast. The current system is unsustainable, and little tweaky fixes that keep the current players rich is not going to stop the whole thing from crashing.

It is time for national single-payer health insurance. It is time to remove
the profit-making middleman from medical care. It is time to see health care for
the public good that it is and not for the profitable business it has become.
Support Medicare for all.