John Bizwas wrote:
>
> Even red baiters or post-mos who think Hardt is more interesting than Lenin.
> I'm betting the socialists of a Marxist bent come up with the best compositions. I promise I'll write and post mine before I read the other ones (see how optimistic I am?).
>
> In 500 words or less tell us how, if you were a US president with a majority in Congress and lots of nationwide governor support, you would implement a health insurance and health service system that would guarantee basic access to health care for all the people living in the US.
This seems to me vaguely analogous to something like, "If the constant e were to change suddenly, what would happen to the universe?" Also, such a nominal situation in D.C. & the state governors can't be even vaguely imagined without also trying to imagine what had happened in the preceding 10 to 20 years to bring about the balance of forces that would have made that possible. One would also have to imagine how those hypothetical or imagined events would have affected the consciousness of the bulk of the police forces & national guard units in the nation. I can't begin to fill in all those blanks, but pretending that they have been filled in with material which makes the electoral results conceivable, then my first thought, remembering Juan Bosch and Maurice Bishop and Salvador Allende, would be pure terror for my personal safety, and I would convoke all my advisors to develop a plan by which we could win the loyalty of the men and women of various state national guards, and then begin the process of crippling the army.
If these unimaginable events had occurred, then one could _start_ thinking about nationalizing the drug companies, dissolving and seizing the financial assets of all insurance companies, and instituting a national health service. It would be ridiculous, however, to detail the administrative details of such a move. I would imagine it would have to be done from two end points. At the top a committee of physicians, professors, and civil service bureaucrats who had been urging such a system. At the bottom, the staffs (medical and non-medical) of all hospitals would be temporarily mobilized as councils for temporary control of the actual delivery of medical services. (Probably it would be necessary to use terror to force drug company executives to begin supplying drugs etc. in proper quantity.)
>From then on it would be a matter of interchange between the hospital
staffs at the bottom and the Temporary National Health Committee at the
'top' to transform the system into somethin reasonably decent over about
a five-year stretch. There were some articles in Socialist Register a
few years ago by some English physicians I believe that would give some
indication of how this process would be followed.
Carrol