Dear Don,
Despite the Supreme Court leaving most of President Obama's health care law intact, the prognosis is still grim for America's broken health care system.
Republican governors and conservative state legislators are already planning to reject the Medicaid expansion envisioned in the health care law.
This will leave millions of low-income Americans without any kind of health care coverage, in addition to the tens of millions we already knew the law wouldn't cover. 1
And Republicans in Congress are determined to repeal the law — and they might gain the power to do so in the next election.
We need to solve America's health care crisis, and we know it may take awhile. So with health care reform back in the public debate, we need to start advocating now for the real solution: single-payer health care.
Every other industrialized country in the world provides quality, universal health care at a fraction of the cost of the U.S. system.
Private insurance companies are a big part of our problem. And while President Obama's health care law made some positive reforms and will expand health care coverage to millions of Americans, it guarantees customers and profits for insurance companies who put profits before people.
These companies didn't want to compete with a "public option" for a reason — they want to maximize profits and minimize care.
Medicare, on the other hand, already covers 40 million Americans over the age of 65, providing quality care at prices that are much lower than the private market. It's also quite popular and unquestionably constitutional.
We should expand it so that it covers everybody.
Let's remember, when health care reform went through Congress, a single-payer system like Medicare for All wasn't even on the table.
In another example of Democrats pre-emptively caving to Republican obstructionists and their insurance company lobbyist friends, the starting position for the Democrats was a compromise in the form of a public health care option that might compete side-by-side with private insurance plans.
And then that compromise was compromised even further when the Democrats jettisoned the public option.
With health care back in the national spotlight, we can't let the strongest voices be the Republicans in Congress who are working to defeat President Obama and the insurance companies looking to wring as much profit as they can from the rest of us.
If we do, we know how that will turn out.
America's health care system is in crisis, there's no more time for half-measures and unworkable compromises when we know Medicare already works.
Tell Democrats: Support Medicare for All. Click the link below to automatically sign the petition:
Thank you for all you do.
Underdog = Don Jones
