Even if you'll take a kitten, never stop asking for the pony

[eridani]

Why start out with a wussy compromise on health care? Demand the best, and compromise only when you have to.

http://www.truthout.org/121808J

Back in 2003, an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama spoke to an AFL-CIO group and what he told them is now making headlines across the Internet. "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care plan," he said to applause. "I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody."

As Obama understood at the time, single-payer offers enormous advantages. Everyone's in, nobody's out. Patients pick their own doctors, who remain in the private sector. The government pays the bills, while private insurance companies and health maintenance organizations (HMOs) no longer act as gate-keepers, excluding pre-existing conditions from coverage and telling doctors and patients what is "medically necessary" and what is not.

<snip>

The argument is classic: "Don't let the best become the enemy of the better." Or, perhaps more to the point: "Don't pick a fight we have no chance of winning."

Daschle and Obama are two of America's brightest political minds, and they could well be right. But the best way to find out is to fight for single-payer and then, if we must, negotiate a compromise. If there was ever a time to go for the whole loaf, it is now, when the insurance companies are despised for their high-handed gate-keeping and their role in creating the current financial crisis.

How, then, do we convince Obama, Daschle and the Democrats in Congress to give up the old politics and join us in a fight for the Change We Need? Here's what I'm doing. I went to www.change.gov, clicked on "Lead a Health Care Discussion," and arranged to host a house party for other Democrats abroad here in France. If enough of us did this in our own communities, we might well remove the veto from single-payer health care.

[grannie4peace]

1. only if you can afford to take care of the kitten :):)

[notesdev]

2. Who needs more than a kitten?

Ponies take up too much space and are too expensive to feed... and nothing is cuter than a kitten! Little baby kitty wants his tummy rubbed? AWWWWW soooo cute! Purr purr purr purr purr

[dkf]

3. What is the job impact on converting to single-payer?

I'm thinking a lot of the system now is "make work".

[eridani]

4. We are facing a major shortage of nurses

Paying people to retrain would be far cheaper than continuing to tolerate insurance fuckers.

[Wickerman]

5. I think we'd have a lot of nurses that could get back to the floor

and not have to do a lot of that make work paperwork they are stuck with in the current fraud, er, system.

[eridani]

6. That would help

Many have left the field due to micromanagement of their workdays that sucks all the joy out of the profession.