Election 2008
September 05, 2008
An interview with PNHP Senior Health Policy Fellow Dr. Don McCanne on McCain and Obama's health care proposals.
Dr. McCanne served as PNHP President in 2003-2004 and writes a daily health policy "quote of the day" for single payer advocates.
July 23, 2008
Unhealthy Reporting
On The Media
In a series of blog posts for the Columbia Journalism Review, CJR Contributing Editor Trudy Lieberman takes the press to task for its under-coverage of both candidates' proposals for health insurance reform. And she explains why Obama's plan is neither 'national' nor 'universal.'
July 09, 2008
Dr. Quentin Young with Sen. Barack Obama
PNHP National Coordinator Dr. Quentin Young with Sen. Barack Obama at Dr. Young's 80th birthday party in 2003.
June 06, 2008
2008 Presidential Candidate Health Care Proposals: McCain and Obama
This side-by-side comparison of the candidates’ positions on health care was prepared by the Kaiser Family Foundation with the assistance of Health Policy Alternatives, Inc. and is based on information appearing on the candidates’ websites as supplemented by information from...
June 04, 2008
Barack Obama on single payer in 2003
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June 02, 2008
Empty promises on health care
By Marie Cocco | Indy Star
Neither presumptive Republican nominee John McCain nor Democrat Barack Obama, the likely nominee of his party, has pledged to cover all of the 47 million uninsured Americans who are falling through the cracks of a system that already is at a breaking point. Neither has proposed a health-insurance plan that would make health care more fair and equitable by putting everyone in a pool in which risks are shared among those who are healthy (but might one day get sick) and those who are not. This is how insurance -- whether it be government insurance, such as Social Security, or private insurance, such as the policies we buy for automobiles -- works. With everyone in the same system, everyone shares the burden of paying as well as the benefit of coverage when it is needed.
May 08, 2008
Video: Who will fix America's broken health care system?
The Real News Network
[Right wing] author Regina Herzlinger and PNHP Senior Health Policy Fellow Don McCanne each take a look at how effective the proposals will be in increasing quality of health care and the number of insured.
April 30, 2008
The Folly of McCain-Care
By Jonathan Cohn | The New Republic
A big problem with [McCain's] scheme, as critics like me pointed out, was that it wouldn't do much for people who were already sick. Insurance companies generally won't offer coverage directly to people with "pre-existing conditions," since they represent such bad financial risks. (It turns out people with medical problems need medical care!) So buying insurance on their own really isn't an option.
April 29, 2008
Side-by-Side Comparison of the Candidates' Positions on Health Care
Kaiser Family Foundation
This side-by-side comparison of the candidates' positions on health care was prepared by the Kaiser Family Foundation with the assistance of Health Policy Alternatives, Inc. and is based on information appearing on the candidates' websites as supplemented by information from candidate speeches, the campaign debates and news reports.
April 24, 2008
Health Reform You Shouldn't Believe In
Marcia Angell | The American Prospect
For all their promise of change, Democrats are remarkably timid about changing the health-care system. The system now costs twice as much per person as those of other advanced countries and delivers worse average outcomes. It prices tens of millions of people out of health coverage altogether and limits care for countless others. Yet leading Democrats are clinging to this system, proposing to cover more people but not changing the system itself except at the margins.
February 13, 2008
10 Myths About Canadian Health Care, Busted
By Sara Robinson | TomPaine.com
2008 is shaping up to be the election year that we finally get to have the Great American Healthcare Debate again. Harry and Louise are back with a vengeance. Conservatives are rumbling around the talk show circuit bellowing about the socialist threat to the (literal) American body politic. And, as usual, Canada is once again getting dragged into the fracas, shoved around by both sides as either an exemplar or a warning -- and, along the way, getting coated with the obfuscating dust of so many willful misconceptions that the actual facts about How Canada Does It are completely lost in the melee.
January 08, 2008
Add Insurance Industry to the Iowa Loss Column
Rose Ann DeMoro | The Huffington Post
As the scorecard in Iowa is tallied, add insurance companies to the loser camp along with the disgraceful, rhetorical sham that forcing individuals to buy insurance is universal healthcare.
January 03, 2008
Editorial: Honesty in health care
By Bangor Daily News Staff
Polls show that health care is a major issue -- rivaled only by the Iraq war -- in the current presidential campaign. Complaints about the present system include the mounting cost, the many left out, poor service and too much paperwork. Yet all the major candidates of both parties advocate only makeshift modifications of a system widely viewed as broken.
December 05, 2007
The Presidential Candidates on Health Care
Farhana Hossain | The New York Times
The leading Democrats are competing among themselves over who has the better plan to control costs and approach universal coverage. The Republicans, for the most part, are promising to expand coverage without increasing the role of the federal government, and reduce cost through tax incentives. Most of the candidates have not presented a detailed outline of their health care plans, but here is what they have said so far.
September 19, 2007
Hillary Learned the Wrong Lesson from 1994 Health Care Fiasco
By Rose Ann DeMoro | The Huffington Post
The pundits might have it right on this one. Hillary Clinton did learn a lesson from her 1994 fiasco on healthcare reform. Unfortunately for most of us who don't have an Inc. after our name or a private jet to cart us around, it was the wrong lesson.
August 20, 2007
In search of vision on health care
Editorial | Des Moines Register
What's needed: a president with the vision and passion to reform this country's health-care system the way Johnson and Congress eventually did.
It's up to Iowans - who are in the unique position of being visited by droves of presidential candidates - to demand that kind of vision and passion from our visitors.
May 31, 2007
Sen. Obama, Please No More Deck Chairs on the Insurance Industry Titanic
By Rose Ann DeMoro | The Huffington Post
The first misconception in the health care debate is the portrait of all of us as "consumers" of health care.
Sen. Barack Obama's healthcare plan, announced today, is yet the latest to perpetuate the present misguided system that sacrifices all of us to this concept.