Letter to the editor, City Paper, April 29, 2009
We appreciate your video on the HCAN Bridge to Health Care event [The Clog, “Health Care for America NOW! protests at the Ben Franklin Bridge,” Daniel Schwartz, April 14, 2009]. But your report gives a misleading account of the current debate over health care.
The choice we face this year is not between the two proposals being put forward by progressives: the hybrid public/private plan that President Obama and Health Care For America NOW! support and the single-payer proposal. There is little support for single payer in the congressional leadership, mostly because they remember the lesson of our failure in 1993. Over 90 percent of Americans who vote have health insurance and most of them like it. We live in a country with a long anti-statist tradition and a recent history of Republican misrule that has further discredited the government. Asking Americans to give up health insurance they like and accept a government health insurance plan will make it impossible to create the broad coalition we need to defeat insurance company opposition to any reform. The vast majority of Americans strongly prefer a plan that offers them a choice between private and public insurers that compete with one another to either purely private or purely public health insurance.
We in HCAN believe that the public plan is critical to reform. Some of us think that it will eventually lead to single payer. Others think that competition between public and private insurance will give us the innovation we need to control costs and improve care.
Either way, the real battle in Washington is about whether a public insurance plan open to all at affordable rates will be part of the legislation that emerges from Congress. All progressives should be united in demanding it.
Marc Stier
PA State Director
Health Care For America NOW!