by Eliot Chandler

Created on: March 12, 2009

Healthcare: Offer Americans a Choice

Where private health insurers only focus on the bottom line, Medicare is instead concerned about the health care of its members. And to supply better health care for less cost is a very worthy goal.

Private, for-profit, insurers spend more than 15 percent of collected premiums on administrative costs, where Medicare's are only about 2 percent. And a universal Medicare system would not need to spend money on advertising or marketing

For-profit insurers are fighting the idea of Medicare for all, not in calling it "unfair, but in attacking it as "socialism." Another tremendous advantage, economically, in providing a Medicare program available to all, would be its benefit to businesses, large and small, by removing the cost of health coverage from the shoulders of employers. Small business companies are having to abandon offering it to their employees. Many big businesses are in trouble, General Motors for instance, has a deficit of over $50 billion in its health care fund, and is considering cutting coverage to its white collar employees in an attempt to forstall bankruptcy.

Nicholas Kristof wrote that "American businesses are at a competitive disadvantage when they have to pay for health care and foreign companies don't

Today's conservatives are attempting to rewrite the history of the thirties, some saying that FDR's New Deal had nothing to do with bringing the country out of the depression, that it really was World War II.

They all were agreed that the President's spending money on all the New Deal attempts to get us out was the wrong approach, just as they are saying today.

Relief, they claimed, could only be brought about by giving tax cuts to the wealthy and allowing laissez faire to reign.

Actually, the depression began long before FDR became president, and his attempts to reverse it by pumping millions of dollars into programs like the WPA and CCC in order to get people working again began to take effect, but very slowly.

By 1937 there was significant progress, and the government then convinced the President to stop spending more money that it didn't have. As a result the country dropped back into recession and WWII war production finally brought the nation back up out of its financial problems.

President Obama's plan is to maintain for-profit healthcare's status quo, asking only that it be tweaked a little. He is now being repeatedly accused ofpromoting "European-style socialism," even though he appears to have succumbed to

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>