As our health care “system” continues to fall apart in its crisis of access and affordability, new coalitions are popping up all around us, each espousing the urgent need for “ health care reform”. These are some of the bigger, more recent coalitions: Divided We Fail (includes AARP, the Business Round table, and the ServiceEmployees [...]

An article that was providing some Texas focus to the recent Census Bureau report, shows the true homicidal insanity of Republican ideology and free-market fundementalism gone amok: “But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain’s [...]

I spend a lot of time talking with people about the potential benefits of a single-payer national health program. “Single- payer” health insurance refers to a single public plan in which the government would be the only insurer for all Americans, in contrast to the current system of multiple payers, which includes both the federal [...]

The AP has a story out of the meetings in Pittsburgh regarding the small shift in language in the Democratic Party platform from where the Obama campaign was when they running against Edwards and Clinton in the primaries. I will review where we have been, are, and are going. And why speaking personally I support [...]

Starbucks has been a model among U. S. employers for its social and moral responsibility to its work force since its founding in 1982. Howard Schultz, who founded the company, grew up in Brooklyn, New York in a hard-working family without health insurance, and never forgot the plight of working class people struggling every day [...]

Last week’s action by Congress to override President Bush’s veto of the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act (HR 6331) was a landmark step toward reversing the tide of privatization of Medicare over the last three decades.  The votes in Congress were a resounding defeat for conservative policies and the lobbying efforts of the [...]

The emergency room provides a crucial vessel for our community, a place where, at some unexpected moment, each of us might need to pour all of our hopes. Perhaps that is why the video of the unattended waiting room death of Esmin Green, an appalling, preventable tragedy, inspires such anguish and outrage. As the New [...]

Something interesting is happening. First, “Health Care for America Now” (HCAN) announced their $40 million K-street-based grand coalition, that had many good points to it, but tried to take Single Payer off the agenda. Then they put up a Blog on their website, and it promptly filled up with the real grassroots supporting Single Payer [...]

We who are advocates for the Single Payer (aka: expanded and improved Medicare for all) approach to acheving real universal health coverage in the United States are often accused of being zealots opposing the supposedly acheivable good (pre-compromising proposals like HCAN’s) for the an idealistic unacheivable best. A more balanced then most version of this [...]

We are told regularly by advocates of the free market that more choice, as granted by the unfettered private marketplace, is the key to greater efficiency and value for consumers, whether in health care or otherwise. AHIP (the American Association of Health Plans) is committed to providing an “abundance of consumer choice” in its offerings. [...]