Someday We'll All Demand Single Payer Health Care

Senator Rockefeller said it best yesterday; if you want single payer public health care, vote to defeat the current health reform. The status quo health care system will continue to bankrupt people, and provide less care at ever higher prices. The current system will eventually implode. At some point in the future we’ll be demanding a single payer government plan to reduce costs and bail out a failed private system.

I hope he’s right. What is so special about the health care system that we have to maintain the status quo? I’ve heard that 1/6th of our economy is wrapped up the health care industry. But who actually would be impacted by a single payer system? Not the hospitals. Not the doctors. Not the medical equipment suppliers. Not the instrument and equipment suppliers. Not the pharmaceutical industry. They all stay happily employed regardless of who pays them. It’s who pays them that will go away. The insurance companies take our money in and pay it out, and keep some for themselves, with no added value in the process. About 30% of every dollar you pay for insurance goes in their pockets. They also maintain near monopolies in most states- unregulated and keeping prices high.

I’ve been enthralled by Ken Burns “National Parks” documentary on PBS. The central theme in the struggle to establish the National Parks is simple; to be preserved for all people to enjoy today and in the future- public land, for the people, all the people. The health reform debate parallels the struggle our National Parks endured.

Opponents of the parks argued that people should be free to build communities, mine, cut timber, build dams, graze cattle, and grow crops – all good uses for profit instead. If it had value, it was the American way to exploit it, tame it, and bring it to it’s knees until it was consumed, raped bare, or just too butt ugly to have any residual use. Congress, on the argument that it had no commercial value, gave Yosemite to the state of California. If gold had been discovered in Yosemite, it never would’ve happened.

In 1900, the entire White Mountain National Forest land was a wasteland of slash timber, deforested and abandoned. After it was ruined, the Government stepped in. Here are a few photos of the White Mountain forest after the rape, before the government saved it:

In a way, health reform is running the same course. We can’t make it a public program as long as it can be dollarized. We’ll continue along the same American way- exploit the enterprise until it’s been milked dry. When it is- when people can’t afford insurance anymore, and our medical infrastructure completely fails us, then people will demand that the government step in and save it. I hope Senator Rockefeller is right. I hope we can limp along until that day comes.