health care "debate"

The health care debate rages and for many of us who watched the previous one under the Clinton administration, there are eerie and deadly similarities. Once again, special interest groups who have a stake in keeping an often pathetic health care system in the United States underweight and underfed are using fear, innuendo, and outright lies to derail any reform. Frankly, I am bitterly disappointed that the Obama administration has taken the single payer option off the table in the name of political expediency. However there may be enough there remaining that if we had a responsible debate about it, we just might craft something that decreases the rolls of those who have limited or no access to quality health care and those trying to find or maintain their health on inadequate care.

The single payer system features a centralized payment for doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers and facilities. Some argue that is a way deliver near-universal or universal health care at a controllable cost. The administrator of the fund could be the government but it could also be a publicly owned agency regulated by law. The outcry against this tends to be that it is socialist (still an effective fright word) and point to the flaws in health care delivery in Britian, Canada, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and other countries who have some version of single payer plans as "proof" that the United States should never adopt a single payer system.

Last week, I watched mainstream news reports about the mobile clinic has been organized by Remote Area Medical (RMA) in Inglewood, CA. RMA provides free medical, vision, and dental care for uninsured, underinsured, unemployed, under-employed persons in remote areas around the world. Although they traditionally have focused on the rural poor, they worked in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The LA clinic is running from August 11-18 as thousands are coming to receive free medical care that they would not have received otherwise. Folks had their blood pressure checked, eye tests, mammograms, immunizations for children, dental care, acupuncture, and saw kidney specialists. What more "proof" do we need that what we have now in the U.S. is highly suspect and not representative of a democracy.

Our health care system is flawed and far too many of us are among the uninsured (roughly 46 million) and the numbers have continued to rise since 2000. We must stop wasting time on townhall meetings were the talking points of those shouting the loudest against reform were issued by those who have the greatest interest in stopping reform. We can be and must be better than this as a nation and begin to embrace the notion of "we the people" once again rather than "me and mine."