From Harper’s: Luke Mitchell on Single-payer Health Care

The argument for single payer is straightforward. When everybody is in, you don’t have to spend a lot of time and money deciding who to keep out. You also don’t have to worry about what to do with the people you’ve kept out when they get sick anyway. (Uninsured sick people cost insurers nothing, but since they often end up seeking expensive emergency-room treatment, they cost taxpayers a lot.) If you want to quit your job and work someplace else, you can do so without fear of losing your health insurance, which means that labor is more mobile. And employers don’t have to carry the burden of benefits, which means that capital is more mobile. If you get sick, you don’t have to worry about losing your coverage or your house. Your insurance is paid for through taxes. And your taxes don’t go up just because you have a preexisting condition; under single payer, there is no such thing as a “preexisting condition.” Moreover, your provider—the single payer—has an incentive to keep you healthy your entire life, rather than just getting you to age sixty-five and then dumping you into Medicare. And if the experience of most other countries is any indication, the whole thing would cost a lot less than our current bloated mess of a system.

The benefits of single payer were at one time if not a matter of consensus then at least a topic considered worthy of discussion, at least among Democrats. “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health-care program,” Barack Obama said in 2003. “As all of us know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, we have to take back the House.” And yet as Democrats began to take all of those things back, Obama began to reconsider. In 2007, he recast the debate in terms that were more reflective than prescriptive. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he told The New Yorker, “then a single-payer system would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off.” And now that Democrats have the White House, the Senate, and the House, it is clear that a single- payer program is not a part of their agenda.

Read the rest of “Sick in the Head: Why America won’t get the health-care system it needs” for free…

From Ralph Nader, “The Single-payer Taboo” in Op-ed News:

There is no place at the table for single payer advocates in the view of the Congressional leaders who set the agenda and muzzle dissenters. Last month at a breakfast meeting with reporters, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) responded to a question about health care with these revealing and exasperating words: “Over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it’s not going to be a single payer.” Thus spake Speaker Pelosi, the Representative from Aetna? Never mind that 75 members of her party have signed onto H.R. 676-the Conyers single payer legislation. Never mind that in her San Francisco district, probably three out of four people want single payer. And never mind that over 20,000 people die every year, according to the Institute of Medicine, because they cannot afford health insurance.