Just when the prospects for single-payer or full Medicare for everyone, with free choice of doctors and hospitals, appear to be going nowhere, from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley comes a stirring that could go national and make single-payer a reality. Throwing down the gauntlet on the grounds of efficiency and humanness, businessman Richard Master, CEO of MCS Industries Inc., the nation’s leading supplier of wall and poster frames, is bent on arousing the nation’s business leaders to back single-payer – the efficient full Medicare for all – solution. The woefully wasteful and profiteering health care industries have blocked majority opinion, and a majority of physicians and nurses, to keep the present sky-high costly system in place, that receives huge taxpayer subsidies without any reasonable, and meaningful, […] Read More
Tag: Medicare
Last month marked fifty years since Congress created the Medicare program. Medicare is often pointed to as proof that yes, Virginia, government can run a health care program that provides quality care to its beneficiaries. Even many of those who argue the program needs massive changes in order to avoid bankruptcy agree that the Medicare model is an effective way of guaranteeing health care to America’s seniors. But does Medicare really provide effective and compassionate care? Dr. David Hogberg’s, health care policy annalist for the National Center for Public Policy Research, new book, Medicare’s Victims: How the U.S. Government’s Largest Health Care Program Harms Patients and Impairs Physicians answers this question. In case the title does not give it away, the answer is NO. Dr. Hogberg […] Read More
Private health insurance drives up costs for everyone. Medicare — signed into law fifty years ago, on July 30, 1965 — was supposed to be just the first step. For the fifty years before Medicare’s enactment, progressives had fought unsuccessfully for universal, government-provided health insurance. In 1912, President Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party platform advocated universal, government-sponsored, health insurance, but he was defeated in his quest for another term as president. In 1917, the California legislature approved universal health insurance, and the governor supported it, but a 1918 ballot resolution defeated the measure after a massive, well-financed business and physician-fueled campaign against it. President Franklin Roosevelt seriously considered including national health insurance in his 1935 Social Security legislation, but decided against it out of fear that […] Read More