By Margaret Flowers, M.D. There is a lot of discussion about the Medicare buy-in. Since the federal legislation does not include a public option and the single-payer movement talks about expanding Medicare, people wonder if the bill introduced by Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., is a step forward. The answer, however, is no. Unfortunately, the Grayson [...]

By Chris Gray If President Obama and the Democrats in Congress won’t get behind single payer, perhaps there’s a different, more Canadian-style approach to getting universal health care: get a system designed, passed, signed into law and set up in just one state, and the rest will follow. The health care savings for employers in [...]

Direct action, insurance company shareholder resolutions, divestment The following remarks were presented at a workshop at a PNHP meeting in Chicago on May 22. Comments and suggestions are invited. Rather than starting with a tired debate over whether the new health law – the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or PPACA – is a [...]

Originally published in the Berkshire Eagle. The passage of the “health insurance” bill has been a huge political success for President Obama and the Democrats and has been compared to the historic passage of Medicare and Social Security. Unfortunately, this bill is not in the same league as those successful programs, which provide medical and [...]

This entry is from Dr. McCanne’s Quote of the Day, a daily health policy update on the single-payer health care reform movement. The QotD is archived on PNHP’s website. Documents reveal AT&T, Verizon, others, thought about dropping employer-sponsored benefits By Shawn Tully Fortune May 6, 2010 The great mystery surrounding the historic health care bill [...]

Wasichu is the Lakota (Sioux) word for “those who take the fat,” the greedy ones.  WellPoint/Anthem, the health insurance behemoth born of Blue Cross, is a wasichu corporation. As the Blue Cross movement grew in the 30’s, one of the foundational standards established in 1937 was “No private investors should provide money as stockholders or [...]

By Claudia Chaufan Oh yeah! The progressive, single payer community did look forward to the screening of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Frontline production “Obama’s deal”, frustrated as we were by our voice having been buried in a misleading, media-backed “debate” that portrayed all opponents of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” as right-wing [...]

By Pippa Abston MD, PhD, FAAP Just got back from a day at the annual MASA (Medical Association of the State of Alabama) meeting in Huntsville. I’ll have more overall impressions later, but I had to post this before going to sleep tonight, while it is still fresh in my memory (you’ll see why in [...]

I’ve noticed you get fewer people complaining about the idea of universal coverage for children, I guess because they’re cuter and we know they can’t get a job to pay for their own healthcare. Believe it or not, there are actually some people who don’t want to pay for the children of “irresponsible” parents. A new form of eugenics?

Congress adopted single payer student loans by Sheldon H. Laskin One of the ironies of the health insurance reform bill is the two dramatically different positions the Adminstration and Congress took on single payer health insurance as contrasted with single payer student loans, which were married together in the reconciliation process. Where the student loan [...]