Boston Glob, December 31, 2006
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT | UNSUNG DEVELOPMENTS OF 2006
Silent majority for single-payer By Marcia Angell,MD
IN SEPTEMBER, an ABC News/Kaiser Family Foundation/USA Today survey found that 56 percent of Americans preferred a government-run universal health system “like Medicare” to our current employment-based system run by private insurers. That is, they want a single-payer system. Among the causes of rising costs, respondents were most likely to name private insurance and drug company profits.
If this were a presidential election, it would be a landslide. Yet policy makers and the media dismiss single-payer by telling us the public doesn’t want it. They falsely raise the specter of rationing and restricted choice of doctors. So we end up with schemes like Massachusetts’s squeeze-blood-from-a-turnip health plan, which preserves the insurance industry while requiring individuals to pay most of the costs.
Why is this? The insurance lobby has succeeded not only in blocking single-payer health care, but in keeping it out of public discourse. We are the only advanced country with market-driven private health care. Other countries spend about half as much per person, cover everyone, and get better health results. Shouldn’t this option be on the table?
Marcia Angell, MD, is senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
To learn more and to get involved in the work for health justice, visit these MA activist org’s: MassCare http://www.MassCare…. and/or the Alliance to Defend Health Care http://www.DefendHea…
No reason to list the Health Care Amendment site any longer, but old habits die hard http://www.HealthCar…
I did see this and couldn’t get over the irony of a newspaper lamenting the stories that didn’t get enough news coverage.
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God forbid they divert any ink from Britney’s antics to cover real news.