Have you ever watched the Tonight Show where Jay Leno or one of his people goes out amongst the public to ask them questions? You know, he’ll ask them if they know who the vice president is or if they know who the secretary of state is. Sadly, of course many of them don’t even know who the president is! However, I have another question that Jay Leno should be asking Americans on the street and that is; do you have health insurance? If you were sick could you afford to go see a doctor? If you had to get an operation could you afford to do so? How about, can you afford your prescription drugs? I don’t think that his audience would find that a laughing matter.It is clear there is something horribly wrong in America when there are forty-six million plus Americans with out healthcare coverage. I also would include myself as one of them. For decades there have been people who have tried to do something about this problem from Harry Truman all the way to Hillary Clinton; only to be shut out by the opposition in the government and media. It seems that there has always been a strong opposition to providing universal healthcare. I believe that the insurance companies have one of the most powerful lobbying arms in the nation which has prevented any progressive legislation from moving forward at the local or national level. You’ll now even see other corporations coming out in favor of universal healthcare so that it would remove that burden off of themselves. You then see the insurance companies coming out to put the other corporations in check. It really seems to be a united country when it comes to the corporations and their interests. They sure stick together for the overall corporatist cause! Meanwhile the American people continue to suffer. Why as a country must people go to Canada to get affordalbe prescription drugs I’ll never know. If this keeps up people may just start moving there!

When it comes to universal coverage I believe that you can go two routes. One is the way of the UK and Canada where they have socialized medicine. This basically means that healthcare professionals like doctors and nurses are employees of the government. Healthcare facilities such as hospitals are also owned by the government. Of course this is all funded by tax dollars. But what I’d like people to think of is how much it costs to pay for all the emergency room visits that people without health coverage have to make now anyway. People without health coverage postpone seeking treatment for their ailments. This results in billions of dollars lost to society when their illnesses become more serious. This creates an increase in cost and a tremendous burden on the healthcare system. Compare that to any eventual tax increase for socialized care. Even socialized medicine would be better than what we currently have.

Yet, I think there is a better way and that is with single-payer health insurance. This means that the government acts as the insurance company allowing people to see whomever they want for treatment. It allows for the delivery of care to remain private. I like to think of it as an extension of Medicare to everyone. I think this paragraph from the Physicans for a National Health Program website (http://www.pnhp.org/) sums it up when they say, “A single-payer system would be financed by eliminating private insurers and recapturing their administrative waste. Modest new taxes would replace premiums and out-of-pocket payments currently paid by individuals and business. Costs would be controlled though negotiated fees, global budgeting and bulk purchasing.”

The bulk purchasing of medication is absolutely critical. Of course single-payer would eliminate many of the billing and administrative jobs that health insurance companies now pay people to do. Therefore, we must find ways to retrain and employ these people into new jobs; possibly in a newly structured single-payer system working for the government. I’d like to see this happen eventually; perhaps some trial and error should begin at the state level. Yet we cannot ignore the immense power the insurance companies have. To negate that power there needs to be lobbying reform and changes to campaign finance law. These reforms have to be done locally and nationally. It’s time we say that the healthcare system is not a racket!