Americans are so brainwashed. "Socialized medicine" is akin to Communism. Yet when it comes to "socialized" programs most of us don't even realize that we've been using it successfully for a long time. Public Schools, the Library, the Fire Department, the Police Department ALL are socialized services they we all pay for and all benefit from. Do we receive a BILL from the Fire Department to put out your house fire?? Of course not! We all as taxpayers consider these services essential and so we ALL pay for it, not just the end user. Wake up people. Medicare should be offered to Everyone. We all pay for Social Security and it should remain strong and viable so future generations can use it too.

Rather than exporting jobs overseas, suggest exporting the people to do the jobs overseas for 2-3 years in a country with a national health care system.
See what they say when they come back...
In my previous life in the UK I never had to:
Worry about getting sick if I didn't have a job and paying for treatment
Worry about getting sick if I did have a job without health care and paying for treatment
Worry about getting sick if I did have a job and paying for treatment and then losing all my savings, house etc etc.
That is an awful lot of things NOT to worry about.

Until the power of the FDA is broken, an end run around insurance companies will do little or nothing to affect health care costs.

It is the entire system (except emergency medicine) that is broken and sucks dollar after dollar for poor results. There is only "managing", not healing and as long as the rest of the monopoly is in place (AMA, hospitals, Pharma, medical devices, labs etc.) and environmental toxins continue to increase, costs will continue to rise. Medicare has been in the red for years, thanks, in part to the prescription drug bill from Hell.

Of course everyone should have access to health care but a one-size fits all type of health care results in what we have today, a drugged society that is bled dry by the medical monopoly and remains sickly. At the very least, Medicaid clients ought to be given medical savings accounts so they can spend primary care health care dollars as they see fit. I've seen several low income families bereft, not because they don't have access to health care--they do, with Medicaid--but they can't see naturopaths or even MD's associated with Dr Weill, et. al., practicing functional medicine/nutritional medicine. Those MD's won't accept Medicaid or Medicare because everything they do is challenged,the paperwork is vast, and sometimes they are threatened with loss of license for using "unapproved methods".

And regarding Europe, the medical monopoly is working as fast as it can to destroy those systems. Herbal medicines are already under control of Big Pharma and unavailable directly to the people. Many nutrition supplements are also unavailable, even in Canada. IV vitamin C is anathema, altho it can cure viral illness and some forms of cancer. Several years ago, I read that in Australia, they will usually reimburse only generic drugs; if you have high blood pressure, the drug that is paid for is Lasix. Don't know what they do now but that is how to control costs and we don't do it and those who support single payer never even talk about this.

Those who see that our gov't is basically a corporate kleptocracy but want to turn over all health care to them just puzzle me.

Yes, global corporations are buying governments everywhere in an effort to take over utilities, food supply and health care.

Ever see the tax return of an MD? An acquaintance whose husband is a radiologist of some sort just received a job offer for $600K a year plus bonus and five weeks vacation. She claims to need $20K per month cash to make ends meet. The problems of the rich!

The problem with medical today is the cost. Doctors make too much money. Big Pharma makes too much money - just look at industry profits and executive compensation. Insurance companies make too much profit and pay for too few procedures. Hospitals have been privatized and operate on the profit motive just like Exxon and GE. The problem with medical in the US today is that every medical dollar spent is overburdened by capitalism. Too much profit in a medical dollar vs medical care delivered.

Single payer to an overpriced system would be helpful but not solve the problem. Single payer to not for profit providers is the answer. A doctor needs to tighten his belt and learn to live on less than $600K a year. Soon, only Paris Hilton's kids will be able to afford medical school. This problem is only getting worse. Blood in the streets may be from homeless people with no access to medical.

For those who missed it, last Friday October 28th the Obama Administration approved California governor Schwarzenegger's and Jerry Brown's request to CUT another 10 percent from their Medicaid program for the poor called Medi-Cal. Last year the Obama Administration issued a "Medicaid waiver" to California allowing that state to essentially violate the spirit and letter of the Medicaid law from the Johnson Administration by allowing 100% PRIVATIZED Medi-Cal. The waiver also allows the newly burdened Medi-Cal HMOs to use Medicaid dollars for advertising, and to offer differing levels of healthcare by county, among other things.

TALK TALK TALK about single payer while we are watching a fraudulent Democrat breaking up the closest thing we ever had to a national single payer healthcare system.

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"Health Care Solution is Simple: Single-Payer"

Here is a headline that didn't need an article. Everything you need to know is summed up in the title.

The US spent $2.5 trillion on health care in 2007. Annual per capita health care costs in countries with single payer systems (and uniformly superior outcomes) are 1/3 to 1/2 of those in the US. Do the math. A functional single payer system in the US should save the country between $800 million and $1.25 trillion per year. Why isn't this a no-brainer to those who insist the US spends too much?

As a Brit, I was unaware until reading this article that FDR's plan for single-payer healthcare was scuppered by World War 2. It was WW2 that made Britain's National Health Service possible. Given the likelihood of German bombing and even invasion, all Britain's private hospitals and other medical services were put under a national government controlled structure at the outbreak of hostilities.

The Labour government that came to power in 1945 had little more to do than make this structure permanent by buying the agreement of the medical profession - in the memorable words of Health Secretary Aneurin Bevan, "by stuffing their mouths with gold".

The US will find it much harder to do something like this now - not that that should stop you trying.

Getting Single Payer is simple too:

Lets give "free" enterprise two more years to produce: 1. Superior health outcomes compared to France; 2. Lower cost per patient compared to France, and; 3. Everyone is covered.

I'm sure capitalism will have no problem demonstrating that it is superior to socialism - just look at what the last 60 years of private health insurance has produced.

The voters are getting what they voted for. Dem/repubs will never support Single Payer.

If you want Single Payer, you should have voted for NADER

As a liberal, I find the faith of my fellow liberals in single payer touching.
I mean, you are expecting M Bachmann, E Cantor, J Coburn, etc to produce this wonderful thing that is gonna make all our problems go away....if you belive that, I've got a bridge in brooklyn I can sellyou cheap.

What we have to remember is that better health care is going to be a continuous fight, lasting for the rest of our lives, and that while single payer may help, there will be a lot of other battles

You know those standardized tests like the SAT? The easiest questions on them are designed to separate the mere ignoramuses from the complete morons. Similarly, at the national level, the question of whether to have a single payer system or not is one of those "easiest questions". All of the respectable countries have now answered this simple question correctly: the health system has to use the single payer mechanism. (Congratulations to South Korea for example for relatively recently answering correctly.) Anyone claiming that single payer is not the best solution is a complete moron, not just a mere ignoramus.

Moreover, anyone supporting the heavily private and regressive American health system is a killer when you look at the big picture. According to recently published scientific research (that was fairly heavily reported) for every 1,000,000 people who can not afford health insurance, there are roughly 1,000 preventable deaths per year. So among the approximately fifty million people right now who do not have health insurance in the States, there are about fifty thousand preventable deaths each year.

But wait, it could be far worse than even this. If those studies assumed, as they probably did, that everyone who has health insurance fully uses it when they get sick, then they seriously underestimated the number of deaths caused by the failed American system. There are tens of millions who do not adequately use the health insurance they have simply because they can not afford the very high and rising co-pays, deductibles, and uncovered items including often prescription drugs. For example and with respect to the drugs, if someone knows in advance that they can not afford the drugs, they are likely to choose to forego the examinations and the diagnostic tests (and not do anything at all about a health problem except hope and pray and self medicate) thereby saving a lot of money (needed for survival basics such as housing and heat) that would go to co-pays and deductibles if they did use their health insurance.

Many of those who support the US system and who oppose single payer are in the elite 1%. Most of those same people support sky high military spending and the use of it to illegally invade foreign countries and to kill civilians who happen to be in the way of those conquests for profit. For example, recently the US, NATO, and Al Qaeda teamed up with rebels opposing Gaddafi to overrun Libya. (I’m sorry, but I’m not going to for one second support Al Qaeda or any other racist / terrorist organization regardless of who it is teamed up with.)

So there are many in the top 1% who at least indirectly support BOTH the killings of civilians abroad and the killing off of civilians in the states (via those early preventable deaths). So don't think that the killings in support of the far right system prevailing in the US today are just confined to foreign countries.

Relatedly, highly paid physicians (in or near the top 1%) who participate in administering the death penalty in the death penalty states are obviously violating the ethics of their profession. With respect to the death penalty, as with military spending and invasions and as with single payer, you can see the pattern: for many elites (in or near that top 1%): the pattern is that money is more important than morality. The common denominator of all of these matters is that there are many elite Americans supporting killings if killings are necessary to support the process of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer (the process also known as the profit motive and also known as the predatory capitalist system and also known as the "free enterprise system").

So although the elites who support these killings have in effect answered the easiest questions on the SAT incorrectly and thereby proven themselves to be complete morons, at least they are consistent with respect to killings: they are in favor of them in many different contexts! I always thought that those in support of killings were complete morons and it seems I was proven to be correct on that.

By contrast, I myself and many others here at Common Dreams are sick and tired of all of the killings. We don’t think humans should be killing each other off in so many ways and contexts.

It is especially disturbing that even physicians are sometimes and to some extent killers in the States.

And remember that the Occupy protestors are protesting not only economics failures but also moral failures. (Thanks again to all of them.)

So I say: “Have and keep the faith Common Dreamers, and keep on keeping on with the comments and with supporting Occupy and so forth”. (And obviously I also hope that Occupy keeps on keeping on.) I wish there were a lot more comments than there are and a lot more traffic to the Site than there seems to be.

When I first heard about single payer health care as a kid in the 50's, I thought it was a great idea. When I lived and worked in Germany in the 70's I loved the health care system there. When I could go to the doctor or dentist or check in to the hospital and needed only to sign my little "krankenschein" and hand it to the receptionist, it was bliss, so easy, no worries.
And here in the USA in 2011, the Republicans are still howling about the evils of socialized medicine, big government takeover of health care, death panels and all that crap and the politicians of both parties as still taking bribes from the health care lobby, it breaks my heart. How can we ever get beyond this insanity?

"Health Care Solution is Simple: Single-Payer"

That's true, but it will never happen. CD loves to publish fantasy articles about solutions that the system would never allow.

Don't forget that we've been screwed out of a Single Payer with Universal Healthcare/Medicare for all Americans healthcare system by everybody, all the way from Richard (Tricky Dick) M. Nixon to Barack Obama.

Obama, in a way, is the biggest hypocrite of all, since he campaigned for Single Payer with Universal Healthcare/Medicare for all Americans while a POTUS Candidate, and then threw it under the bus the minute he took office. Priceless!

Hey, Dave (author of article). You wrote "what we have today is a system that costs Americans nearly double the cost of single-payer national health insurance — in short, Medicare for all — in countries like England, France, Germany, Canada and even China."
I've been pouring over these numbers for many, many hours and researching many years of OECD (free-market countries') data. I suggest to you that we have a system that costs Americans well over double. My examination indicates to me that we are consistently paying 250% or 2.5 times (not 2.0 times or almost 2.0 times) the cost of the average of other free-market countries for many years.
That might sound like a big difference but when you're talking about 312 million people and going on 313 million people 250% is a huge difference in comparison to 200%.

Here's how that looks comparing the USA to France, Japan, Australia, Spain, Italy, and Canada
http://www.mforall.org/p/Cost_per_Person#barchart

I selected those countries because they were the top six out of nineteen countries on minimizing deaths under age 75 from preventable causes, as indicated here ...
http://www.mforall.org/p/Amenable_Mortality#barchart

-- Bob the Health and Health Care Advocate

Let's hear it for Frances Perkins! The fact that she was a woman is often overlooked because of her name. The fact that single payer is so clearly needed and yet so beyond reach politically makes it a perfect battle cry for the Occupy movement.