We Will Get Single Payer Universal Health Care One Day

Democrat Gives Up Single-Payer Measure to Back Party Leaders

Representative Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of New York, a fierce champion in Congress of a single-payer health system that would be fully run by the government, said Friday that he had agreed not to insist on a vote on that issue, in an effort to help Democratic leaders pass their plan.

Previously, Mr. Weiner had obtained a commitment from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to allow a vote on a proposal to create a single-payer system like the one used by Canada and many countries in Europe, including England, France and Spain.

via Democrat Gives Up Single-Payer Measure to Back Party Leaders – Prescriptions Blog – NYTimes.com.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY)

The battle for a single-payer, Medicare-for-all style health care system has been a very long one. Since the days when Presidents Roosevelt and Truman tried to pass universal health insurance, the dream of guaranteeing health care for every single American through a system of not-for-profit, government-run health insurance (which is privately delivered through private doctors and hospitals) has been a battle that comes up every now and then only to be pushed aside by politics (often bred by the dollars of industries that would hate such a system — insurers and the drug industry).

There have been steps in the right direction. Medicare is one. It is a sort of single-payer system (Part A is a pure system) that runs extremely efficiently — which is the big draw of a single payer system. Having 1300 insurers jams hospitals with unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy. Having a “single payer” makes things much cheaper and easier to administer, which is where the potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of saving we’ve had if we switched to such a system would come from. Heck, we’d actually not have to spend a net amount of money to administer such a system — we’d already save enough to cover everyone with the move.

Yet, for a variety of reasons, such a system has been taken off the table by Washington. There were, until recently, two tiny cracks of single payer legislative activity. One was an amendment that was passed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) to his committee’s health bill that would allow states to waive ERISA requirements to allow them to administer their own single payer systems. It was ditched by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) when she compiled the final House health bill. The other crack was Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) single payer amendment to the bill, which would replace the complicated package of subsidies and controls on private insurance (with a watered-down public option) with a single payer system, which the House leadership told him he would get a vote on before the full House.

At the last minute, the leadership began to renege on that promise. Then, it changed its mind. Then, single payer’s legislative advocates changed their minds. Kucinich, Weiner, and single-payer bill co-author Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) decided that having a vote on single payer at this time would not be productive. So they essentially agreed with the leadership to call it off.

I know that today many single payer advocates are disheartened. You have every right to be. Your health care idea, which has many, many merits, and a great deal of support all over this country, has essentially been tabled right now.

But I don’t think single payer advocates should lose hope. The single payer vote was called off by the fiercest advocates of such an approach. They saw the wisdom in not calling a vote for something they’d get only 20 minutes to debate, to seeing the idea voted down in a flurry of opposition.

I have faith that the simplicity and strength of this idea will one day beat out the strength of the entrenched monied interests, and even move the sometimes seemingly unshakeable political class here in the capital to embrace the idea and stop settling for half-solutions. It’ll be a long fight, and a hard fight — if the battle for relatively mild reform we’re currently engaged in is any indicator — but it’ll be one that we will all rise to the occasion to be a part of. We’ll have this single payer fight one day, but when we will, we’ll be ready for it, and it’ll be at a time and place of our choosing. And when we finally do that, we’ll win.