Why pick on Wal-Mart?
Editorial
Los Angeles Times
March 2, 2006
Although healthcare spending is expected to jump to $4 trillion in the next decade – to 20% of the nation’s gross domestic product – the number of uninsured is increasing by more than a million people a year, and Americans are no healthier than citizens of countries that spend half what we do. That’s the definition of bad medicine.
Fortunately, the public appears to be growing so tired of the problem that national healthcare reform is all but inevitable. Proposals range from a comprehensive overhaul to minor tweaks. More moderate reforms could simply increase the number of low-income adults eligible for existing public programs. And even after President Clinton’s disastrous healthcare reform proposals a decade ago, momentum is growing again for a “single payer” government agency that would insure everyone in the country.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-walmart02mar02,1,4847708.story
Comment: By Don McCanne, M.D.
Although the primary thrust of this editorial was to criticize the Wal-Mart targeted employer mandates as inadequate and misdirected measures, the significance of this excerpt cannot be understated.
This is not an endorsement of single payer, but rather it is a much more important comment on the momentum of the single payer movement. The editorial staff of one of the nation’s leading newspapers has observed that “momentum is growing again for a ‘single payer’ government agency that would insure everyone in the country,” and they have done so without adding the heretofore obligatory phrase, “but it is not politically feasible.”
Single payer is looking more and more like the only option that will work. Feasibility becomes a moot point when it is ever more clear that you just have to go ahead and do it.