Guaranteed Healthcare

The idea of a Medicare for All type, single-payer healthcare system will be heard on the Senate floor.  Late last evening, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont filed Senate Amendment No. 2837, and there are two additional original co-sponsors of this amendment, Senator Roland Burris of Illinois and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

In Canada, it took the dogged determination of one province, Saskatchewan, and a visionary leader Tommy Douglas, to pave the path to a national health care system, which they call Medicare.

For all the detractors of the Canadian system in the studios of Fox News and the board rooms of rightwing think tanks, consider this one note: In 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation conducted a national poll to select the greatest Canadian of all time. The winner in a landslide -- Tommy Douglas. 

With the final White House Forum on healthcare scheduled Monday, April 6 in downtown Los Angeles, advocates of single payer/guaranteed healthcare have one more opportunity to shake up what has become a dreary conventional wisdom about the presumed acceptable parameters of the debate.

Hundreds of nurses, doctors, healthcare and labor activists will rally at 9 a.m. outside the California Endowment, 1000 North Alameda St., Los Angeles.

It will mark the fifth time, at all five White House regional forums, that the single payer/Medicare for all message will come to the stage, outside and inside the forum.  You can extend that to the town hall meeting at the White House last week where the President was asked why we can't have a national healthcare system like they have in other industrialized nations.

Haven't we heard this song before? It sure looks like the people who already control our healthcare system are framing the biggest issues of the present healthcare reform debate.

From the back rooms to the committee hearings to the White House summits to the front pages of the newspapers, the demands of the insurance industry are given enormous deference and accommodation.

Is it fear of Harry and Louise, the insurance campaign that some believe torpedoed the muddled Clinton health proposal? Is it the considerable influence of insurance industry contributions in the pockets of many legislators?

It's time to lay to rest the myth that spending billions on more high tech is the salvation for rising healthcare costs. Some people will peddle any notion to avoid addressing the best way to rein in costs, pushing the insurance companies out of the way with a single payer system.

It's become an article of faith that a national system of electronic medical records would produce huge savings.  President Obama made it a centerpiece of his healthcare plan during the campaign (as did Sen. John McCain), and has emphasized it repeatedly in legislation and speeches.

As a first step, the stimulus bill allotted $17 billion in incentives to prod doctors and hospitals to get on board during a five year period beginning in 2011, along with financial penalties if they don't.