Universal Healthcare News
A Real Win for Single-Payer Advocates
Canada did not establish its national health care program with a bold, immediate political move by the federal government. The initial progress came at the provincial level, led by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation’s Tommy Douglas when he served from 1941 to 1960 premier of Saskatchewan. The universal, publicly-funded “single-payer” health care system that Douglas and his socialist allies developed in Saskatchewan proved to be so successful and so popular that it was eventually adopted by other provinces and, ultimately, by Canada’s federal government.
Single-payer health care: dead in Washington, but alive in the states
President Obama delivered a stirring address to Congress last night, but the federal government’s inability to truly overhaul our broken healthcare system — which now leaves more than 46 million uninsured — is becoming all the more apparent.
"American Values" -- A Smoke Screen in the Debate on Health Care Reform
Amid all the rhetoric about health care reform, one claim has emerged as a trump card designed to preserve the current patchwork of private and public insurance and to stop discussion of a government-sponsored single-payer system in its tracks: the claim that single-payer health care — a Canadian-style Medicare-for-all system — is antithetical to “American values.” The idea that American values dictate a particular approach to health care reform is often stated explicitly, and it is implicit in the generalization that “Americans want” a particular system. The underlying premise is that an identifiable set of American values point incontrovertibly to a health care system anchored by the private insurance industry. Remarkably, this premise has received very little scrutiny.
