The S-Word
Dave Zweifel in today's Madison Capital Times does a good job dismissing President Bush's "wrongheaded" call for health savings accounts.
More importantly, Zweifel expresses the frustration that so many of us feel because our "leaders" in Washington refuse to make the obvious fix to our terminally ill health care system:
What's so confounding is that our health system could be fixed so easily. All the United States needs to do is create a Medicare-modeled system for the entire country covering every man, woman and child. The money we employees and employers already spend on health care would easily cover a national single-payer health plan and make it fair for everyone.
So what's stopping us? First, the obvious:
[T]he economic clout of the national and international corporations who all have a huge stake in maintaining the status quo — the pharmaceuticals, the insurance industry and others who benefit from layers and layers of duplicate services that strangle the current jury-rigged system.
But Zweifel cites another reason that I believe plays an even more decisive role than corporate clout:
There are those in high places in the medical fraternity and the national government who firmly believe that a national health care plan is "socialist" and must be avoided even if it would work. Heaven forbid that a great capitalist nation like the United States would kowtow to anything as subversive as socialism government-run programs like Social Security and Medicare, for example.
And that's the irony and the shame of it. We've allowed a conditioned phobia of a mere word to scare us away from a simple, efficient single-payer system, even if it would work.
Get over it, America. Time to grow up.
