It's Time for Single Payer Health Care

You are going to be hearing a lot of nonsense from the right and other idiots about single payer healthcare in the next weeks and months as the big insurance companies gear up to fight President Obama's call for a fix to the current system. Whatever you see in the media about how we can't afford it and socialism and French and you'll never be able to see a doctor and just look at England and Canada....just ignore it. The reality is that we cannot afford not to have "Medicare for all".

Here is some of what we can expect to see if we adopt a single payer health system in this country. It is from a larger report that you can read here.

Single-payer national health insurance is a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health financing, but delivery of care remains largely private. The Institute for Health and Socio-economic Policy(IHSP) is a non-profit research group for the National Nurses Organizing Committee. According to the analysis of their proposal for a single-payer universal health care system, IHSP found that “full medicare benefits for all” would have these immediate effects:

* $317 billion in increased business and public revenues throughout the US economy.

* 2,613,495 new permanent jobs, at an average of $38,262 per year.

* $100 billion in additional employee compensation.

* $44 billion in increased tax revenue.

The biggest impact of the proposal would be coverage for the 46 million uninsured Americans, but ‘Medicare for all’ would also get rid of the “current chaos of eligibility, exclusions, family coverage, premium costs, and high out-of-pocket expense,” unenviable consequences of the present system.