May 22, 2009 | In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told an AFL-CIO meeting, "I am a proponent of a single-payer universal healthcare program."
Single payer. Universal. That's health coverage, like Medicare, but for everyone who wants it. Single payer eliminates insurance companies as pricey middlemen. The government pays care providers directly. It's a system that polls consistently have shown the American people favoring by as much as 2-to-1....
Fast-forward six years. President Obama has everything he said was needed -- Democrats in control of the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. So what's happened to single payer?...
President Obama [now] favors a public health plan competing with the medical cartel that he hopes will create a real market that would bring down costs. But single payer has vanished from his radar.
link: Rx and the single payer | Salon
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