Washblog

People who have actually worked on universal single payer health care bills in America really wish that people who comment on them in public forums would do their homework and lay off the scaremongering.  The single payer bill currently proposed in the Washington State Legislature, like its counterpart SB 840 in California, specifically states that nothing in these measures shall be construed to rule out getting extras through negotiations with employers, whether through a union or individually.

At any rate, even with their system's extra restrictions, Canadians still have many more choices about their medical care than most insured or uninsured Americans--they can see any doctor they wish to see, and will never be subjected to paying for treatment for "pre-existing conditions," patient dumping, or drive-by mastectomies.  The Health Care for All Washington help line sends uninsured Americans there by the thousands, where they can get office visits at half the price they would have to pay here.

Pointing out that millions of Americans who are insured are satisfied with their coverage and its associated options says absolutely nothing about the overall quality of the system; this is as utterly meaningless as similar opinions offered about the performance of their local fire departments.   The odds are against most people ever getting expensively sick or having a fire, so they know nothing whatsoever about the quality of their coverage or the skill of their firefighters, and if they are lucky they will never have to find out.

People in America are being killed (18,000 per year minimum) for lack of the ability to pay for health care, for the sake of the profits of private insurance companies whose only added value to the system is processing claims--everything else they do subtracts value, and we are bankrupting ourselves paying for it.  It's about time that we started treating health care as a public good, just as education, fire and police protection and transportation infrastructure are public goods.  Or maybe you'd prefer two or three competing fire departments who all agree that they'll put out fires everywhere except in the census tracts that are most likely to have them?