Deborah Burger, R.N.
President, California Nurses Association
National Nurses Organizing Committee
Oakland, Calif.
Wall Street Journal
Letter to the Editor
May 21, 2007; Page A15
Your May 14 editorial “Illinois Tax Implosion” was right about one thing: Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s backward health-care reform plan deserved to be voted down. But his plan was hardly “Canadian health care,” as you label it. Instead it was much more of the same: Using public dollars to subsidize private, for-profit health insurance corporations so they can turn a buck by denying care to our patients.
The simple fact is we could learn a thing or two about health care from Canada, France, Taiwan and every other developed nation in the world. They all manage to provide better health care at about half the cost. The difference? They don’t have a bloated insurance bureaucracy wasting one-third of care dollars and propelling medical inflation. Instead they guarantee care through versions of the “single-payer” model, where patients pick a doctor or hospital who is paid directly from a national, nonprofit fund. Workers are taken care of and employers aren’t distracted by the health-care mess.
The good news is that we have the chance to enact such a system with Rep. John Conyers’s (D., Mich.) bill, which already has 69 co-sponsors and the support of hundreds of labor, religious and community organizations. Americans are eager for solutions to the health-care tragedy; it’s time for Washington to get the message.