Will America enact national health insurance in 2009?

A video editorial by Dr. Quentin Young, Physicians for a National Health Program

Transcript of Dr. Young’s remarks:

By Quentin Young

The 43rd anniversary of the passage of Medicare is an appropriate time to examine just why this single-payer government-run national health insurance has not been expanded to everybody. Despite its deficiencies, Medicare serves the elderly remarkably better than the confusion of for-profit private insurance schemes that have steadily disserved the American patient.

Of course, the failure to have fundamental health care reform has been the result of the awesome power of the industry, which profits from the present arrangements — big pharma, for-profit hospitals, and health insurance giants. In addition to the increasingly frustrated “beneficiaries,” America’s physicians have suffered under the health system organized to assure returns to investors.

Doctors have, at long last, realized that there is something worse than government: corporate-run health care.

Heretofore the prevailing political and health policy wisdom has been that expansion of Medicare to everybody was simply politically unfeasible. Billions of dollars are ready to be spent resisting health reform; recall “Harry and Louise” in 1993.

Recent months have seen a huge shift in public positions on single-payer health care. In a recent AP poll, 65 percent of the public agreed that the United States should “adopt a universal health insurance program … like Medicare that is run by the government and financed by taxpayers.” In January, the American College of Physicians endorsed single payer for the first time as a pathway to universal coverage. In April, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a national survey of physicians indicating that 59 percent of doctors support the adoption of legislation to create national health insurance.

Significantly, on June 23, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, representing cities of over 30,000 people, unanimously endorsed legislation for Medicare for All, H.R. 676.

Could 2009 turn out to be the year this nation takes the leap to enact a national health system?

That’s my opinion. I’m Dr. Quentin Young, national coordinator, Physicians for a National Health Program.