Operation Healthcare

Like Congressman John Conyers and the seventy-four House co-sponsors of his United States National Health Care Act (HR 676); like the thirty-seven state AFL-CIO councils and more than 500 union organizations that have endorsed that legislation; like the American Medical Student Association, the California Nurses Association and the thousands of doctors associated with Physicians for a National Health Program; like 59 percent of the Americans surveyed in January by CBS News and the New York Times, we would prefer to see Congress respond to this country's healthcare crisis by scrapping a failed for-profit system and replacing it with a comprehensive national health insurance program.

Even President Obama has said, "If I were designing a system from scratch, then I'd probably set up a single-payer system." We believe that program would work best if it expanded and improved on Medicare to cover everyone. Unfortunately, the political establishment--susceptible as it is to the influence of health insurers--has shown scant inclination to embrace the best cure for what ails our system.

Obama and his Congressional allies are trying instead for a partial cure: expanding public options while maintaining private-sector competition. Many progressives are supporting the public-plan option on pragmatic grounds, pushing for what they see as a politically feasible fallback from single-payer. As J. Lester Feder points out on page 11 of this special healthcare issue, the public plan "may be a crucial cost-containment measure--if it can run more efficiently than private plans, it can force costs down across the system through competition."

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