Gar Lipow wrote:
>
> So single payer
> health would be better for workers even if financed 100% via
> regressive taxes , not only collectively but individually in the
> majority of cases. That is most currently insured USAians would be
> better off under a regressively financed single payer plan than under
> the current system. True?
At one point (perhaps) -- say during the administrations of Truman & Eisenhower, or (though were verging here on the matter of if pigs had wings) even the first Clinton Administration -- this discussion of what would be "best" for workers would have been a rational discussion. But now we have to start not with wankery on the technicalities but rather with a focus on the immense political power of the insurance and pharmceutical companies. (The power of the medical profession is less relevant, as more and more physicians are being clearly 'proletarianized.') Given that power, the circumstances under which even the weakest national health program would become politically possible would _also_ be the conditions under which it would be silly -- in fact traitorous -- to stop with anything else than a complete nationalization of health care. That is, the power to impose a weak single-payer program on the insurance industry would be the power to socialize health care, period.
Incidentally, a somewhat analogous situation confronts the Palestinians. A decade or two ago a two-state solution would have been possible and, because possible, desirable. But now the power to create a two-state solution is no different from the power to create a unified secular Palestine.
Carrol