The opposition to single-payer health service, ie., universal health or socialized medicine, is beginning to show the gross hypocrisy of our political elite toward free market principles. Growing up, I suffered Ronald Reagan's Magic of the Marketplace to resolve any and all social problems rather than what the elites called the heavy hand of government imposing such resolutions, thereby enslaving the American people.
The heavy hand is not, however, from the left, from progressives, from socialists like me. The heavy, anti-laissez faire, centralized-planning position is coming from the right wing elites and the establishment. They do not want to relinquish private, for-profit controls over health care, despite over 70% of Americans wanting it. They do not want a marketplace of choice, where the average citizen might leave the private option for the public one. And to the extent a choice may happen, they are demanding the private option limit enrollment and/or be restricted from charging less than the pirates.
Aren't cartels, like OPEC, which jointly fix prices, illegal in the US?
Central Planning is nothing new, and I am not the first comment-monger to note this is not a purely capitalist system, nor was the USSR or Cuba purely communist. When it comes to the flow of profits, the establishment and their servants in the so-called think-tanks and in Congress, will stoop to any low.
President Obama may be more calculating than I thought. He knows a single-payer system will never leave a Congressional committee. Why he won't with the stroke of his pen eliminate the age requirement for Medicare by Executive Order perhaps has to do with the political points he will have to spend fighting the fall out. Instead, he is offering to set up an alternative system, a public health care system.
Then, by the highest, noblest principles of capitalism, the magic of the marketplace will whither and die and the Establishment can entomb in their mausoleum.
1 comment:
Great post!
Only a single-payer approach to healthcare reform will END THE INHUMANITY OF OUR FAILED HEALTHCARE INSURANCE SYSTEM, WHERE PROFITS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PATIENTS’ HEALTH, and where people die because of it.
There are two single payer bills in Congress:
In the House: HR 676, The United States National Health Insurance Act.
In the Senate: S 703, The American Health Security Act.
ASK your Senators and Representatives to support single-payer healthcare reform NOW!
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