"Unless you're Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," Harvard's Dr. David Himmelstein, an advocate for a single-payer health insurance program for the United States, said in a statement.

"For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection," he added.

Now, if the expansion were not a welfare program (Medicaid) but expanded single payer (Medicare) I could get excited about it.

We have three major problems that Congress can fix:
1)    Medicaid can't possibly cover all the poor people.
2)    People & businesses that have been paying for health insurance and healthcare are being priced out of the ability to pay.
3)    The insurance industry has a non-sustainable, for-obscene-profit model, and they already own too many of our elected members of Congress.

The problem with the healthcare bill is that it only tries to address #1 & 2, and likely won't solve those problems anyway. If progressives can temporarily let go of the desire to create a big new welfare-healthcare system, we can at least solve problems #2 & 3 now, and work on #1 later.

The current bill will obviously make problem #3 much worse than it is already. If the healthcare bill passes, costs will still go up, more people will need subsidies, and the average working/middle class American will pay more for their own healthcare while being saddled with paying for the poor as well. Many progressives think Congress should pass this bill so that we can "tweak it" down the road to make it more sustainable. Unfortunately, if it passes, we'll have blocked true reform for decades. You just can not "tweak" the basic foundation of this law that forces working Americans to buy insurance instead of health care.

If we open up our currently existing single payer Medicare system to all Americans at cost, we could consolidate our resources and get health care at a reasonable price. Seniors and the disabled already pay monthly fees for Medicare, as well as medicine costs. If Congress made Medicare available for purchase by all  citizens (not to "residents" as HR676 stipulates), it would certainly cost less than what companies and individuals currently pay to insurance companies. It wouldn't be socialized medicine, because anyone can still choose to pay rip-off insurance companies instead of buying Medicare. It wouldn't available to non-citizens, so it won't become part of the incentive for bypassing immigration laws (a key issue for conservatives). Since many companies and individuals would be happy to reduce their healthcare costs by about 30%, it would be popular with voters on both the left and the right. We'd avoid the angry backlash by Independents and conservatives that we just saw in Massachusetts because it's fee-based, not a big new expensive welfare giveaway.

Expanding Medicare would mean pooling our resources (a primary function of government!) for real health care cost reductions, not just propping up the destructive and greedy insurance industry. Right now, the insurance companies get most of the least inexpensive customers as clients, while the government pays for the more expensive pool of elderly and low income Americans. This would balance government costs by pulling in our younger Americans with fewer health care problems. Furthermore, since it's not a giveaway, we'll actually see real savings for companies and the middle class, which will stimulate the economy. Once it's in place, the left can push to expand Medicaid, the free and low cost healthcare for the poor. The purpose of offering fee-based Medicare would not be to create socialized medicine, but simply to allow working Americans and our companies to obtain healthcare without paying for the obscene CEO salaries and investor's profits.

* * *