By Dave Zweifel
The Capital Times, November 2, 2011

The answer to the nation’s health care crisis is staring everyone in the face, yet as a country we continue to refuse to come to grips with it.

It is far from rocket science. What this country simply needs is a single-payer national health insurance program that covers all American citizens from the day they’re born to the day they die — just as other advanced countries have done for decades.

We could finance health care coverage for every American by taking the resources that employees and employers are pumping into the current broken system and still have money left over for a substantial tax cut, not to mention that it would put U.S. employers back on a level playing field with their competitors in the world market.

Yet we refuse to even put that debate on the front burner where it belongs, plodding along with a system that with each passing year continues to hurt more and more Americans in many different ways.

(Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.)

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/dave_zweifel/article_e26dbb61-a1d2-5a03-86b6-ff2e6524596f.html

Comment: 

By Don McCanne, MD

As the implementation of the Affordable Care Act unfolds, it becomes ever more evident that it won’t accomplish our goals and that we will need to enact a single payer national health program.

Plain Talk: Health care solution is simple: single-payer

By Dave Zweifel
The Capital Times, November 2, 2011

The answer to the nation’s health care crisis is staring everyone in the face, yet as a country we continue to refuse to come to grips with it.

It is far from rocket science. What this country simply needs is a single-payer national health insurance program that covers all American citizens from the day they’re born to the day they die — just as other advanced countries have done for decades.

We could finance health care coverage for every American by taking the resources that employees and employers are pumping into the current broken system and still have money left over for a substantial tax cut, not to mention that it would put U.S. employers back on a level playing field with their competitors in the world market.

Yet we refuse to even put that debate on the front burner where it belongs, plodding along with a system that with each passing year continues to hurt more and more Americans in many different ways.

(Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.)

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/dave_zweifel/article_e26dbb61-a1d2-5a03-86b6-ff2e6524596f.html

As the implementation of the Affordable Care Act unfolds, it becomes ever more evident that it won’t accomplish our goals and that we will need to enact a single payer national health program.