Universal Healthcare.... Not

Read this fine editorial, Health care coverage is a human right, not a commodity by Joyce Mullins. Excerpt:

....I've always been bothered by the idea that if you lose your job you lose your health insurance, too. Then I read somewhere that JAMA, that prestigious publication of the American Medical Association, had published a report advocating a Single-Payer National Health Insurance for all Americans! Wow! I couldn't believe it. Doctors? Guys with M.D. and D.O. behind their names were in favor of this? I got it (the Aug. 13, 2003 issue) from my doctor, who said he's so busy trying to take care of patients while not getting paid by insurance companies that he would never have time to read it. The physicians who wrote the report didn't pull any punches. Among the wealthy, so-called civilized nations of the world, they said, ours alone "treats health care as a commodity distributed according to the ability to pay, rather than as a social service to be distributed according to medical need." I can't read that without wondering why every elected leader in the country is not hanging his or her head in abject shame. The JAMA report told me that too many of our leaders are on the wrong side. "They would shift more public money to private insurers; funnel Medicare through private managed care; and further fray the threadbare safety net of Medicaid, public hospitals, and community clinics. These steps would fortify investors' control of care, squander additional billions of dollars on useless paperwork, and raise barriers to care still higher," the report said. They called for "a fundamental change in U.S. health care -- a comprehensive National Health Insurance." They said it out loud: a single-payer, universal health care system is what we need! They said, "Access to comprehensive health care is a human right," and health coverage should not be tied to employment, and we should be able to choose our own physician(s) and my heart started racing! "Pursuit of corporate profit and personal fortune have no place in care-giving," and "personal medical decisions must be made by patients and their caregivers, not by corporate or government bureaucrats." That part almost took my breath away! There's hope, I thought. But I wasn't too surprised to see that while all the presidential wannabes could almost taste how sweet it would be to take credit for fixing the health care mess, only Dennis Kucinich was fully committed. That leaves us with John Kerry vs. George W. Bush.....

Another episode of "If Only Fairy Tales Came True".