Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather, Tommy Douglas, was voted the greatest Canadian of all time in 2004. Why? Because he did what few politicians ever do. He started Canada on the way to a successful single-payer system of health care. He’s admired in his country and Canada’s health care system is admired world wide.
UPDATE: Since Bush brought up health care in his STOU address, this rebuttal of his suggestions is appropriate here:
The president…realized…that the American people want a national health care system for themselves and their children as much as they want our troops out of the killing fields of Iraq. So he offered several unworkable and ridiculous suggestions: relief from payroll taxes and a tax credit to the uninsured. What is he thinking? That the uninsured have big salaries and are seeking some kind of tax shelter?
His proposed $15,000 income tax deduction for middle-class families would jeopardize both Medicare and Social Security while not providing enough money to purchase real health insurance, projected to cost $16,500 for a family of four by the year 2009. And employers would be encouraged to bail out of the health care system even faster than they are today.
His plan for fixing the health care system is more of the same—more big bucks for the insurance companies. He believes that government has a responsibility for the children, the elderly and the disabled—but for everybody else, “private insurance is the best.” Then he offers several plans to provide more billions of federal dollars to the private insurers who have driven the cost of the health care system up 73 percent since 2000.I guess he means the private insurance companies that use up 31 percent of every health care dollar for their own CEOs’ salaries, payments to lobbyists, media campaigns and the multiple bureaucratic costs of thousands of insurance companies rather than a single payer such as Medicare. Those same private insurance companies provide no health care to anyone in this country. (Well, maybe they provide health care for their own employees, who number in the tens of thousands.)
He must mean those same private insurance companies whose highest-paid CEO (at United Health) gets $122.7 million dollars a year—enough to cover the health care costs of roughly 34,000 American citizens.
The president also gave a big plug for the idea of so-called federal/state partnerships. He said he will be urging the provision of federal funds to the states so that the poor and the sick can be covered to purchase insurance—with an “affordable choice.” More money for these same insurance companies! In every one of these instances, the president is talking about reckless additional spending for health care “insurance”—not a net savings such as that which we would get from a single-payer system. That’s why his highly applauded promise to balance the budget rings false—and cold-hearted.
From TomPaine
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