Medicare For All

Marchers in Baltimore demand a single payer health care system, shown in the video below.  Aside from the computer glitches rallied around by mainstream media, the American health care crisis continues, and as come January 1st, a number of insurance companies across the country are planning to significantly raise their rates in response to what they describe as the increased costs thrust upon them by the Affordable Care Act or "Obamacare."  Healthcare Is A Human Right, Maryland organized the march seen in the video and is preparing a push for statewide single payer like Vermont.

 


Also, CUNY Professor Frances Fox Piven gives an informal keynote address (shown below) at the October 6th Healthcare-NOW! Strategy Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.  Healthcare-NOW! is involved in organizing towards a national single payer system via expanding an improved Medicare to the entire country. 


 

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers write October 30th, 2013 in an article titled, "Obamacare: The Biggest Insurance Scam in History,"

Rather than being distracted by the problems of the exchanges, the more pressing issue is whether we want to continue using a market-based approach to health care or whether we want to join the other industrialized nations in treating health care as a public good. This conversation is difficult to have in the current environment of falsehoods, exaggerations and misleading statements coming from both partisan directions, echoed by their media supporters and nonprofit organizations.

Of course, the Republicans attack Obamacare for partisan reasons. And they are often blatantly dishonest in their criticism. Their foundational claim, calling Obamacare socialized medicine, is the opposite of reality. And, the Obama administration and its allies in the nonprofit world also have their fair share of falsehoods about the ACA.

Zeese and Flowers report that, in 1965, when Medicare was first started, everyone was enrolled within 6 months with index cards, something Dr. Steffie Woolhandler also references in her Democracy Now! interview concerning the single payer alternative.  In other words, it's worth pointing out, in the national single payer discussion, that the Medicare system is also uniquely well designed to effectively accommodate massive expansion and improvement - and apparently, even without computers.