Healthcare-NOW

Against the health care mandate

By Helen Redmond for Socialist Worker – IN A highly charged and polarizing case, the Supreme Court heard a series of legal challenges to President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). The case was brought to the high court by 26 Republican-led states that are hell-bent on a showdown with the Obama administration,…

Is Single-Payer Inevitable?

You may have seen dozens of articles and news clips claiming that if the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act in June, Democrats will have no choice but to turn to single-payer as the necessary alternative to healthcare reform. “It’s inevitable,” they say. It thrills us to see single-payer in the limelight, but…

GOP Attorney General Suing Over Obamacare Supports Single-Payer

‘I Trust The Government More’ By Scott Keyes for ThinkProgress – According to one Republican attorney general in the lawsuit against the health care individual mandate, the problem with Obamacare is that it’s not a government takeover of health care. ThinkProgress spoke with Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Caldwell…

All Parties Ignore the One Way to Reduce Health Care Costs: Single-Payer

By David U. Himmelstein MD and Steffie Woolhandler MD, MPH, for Truthout – In a recent full-page newspaper advertisement, IBM touted massive medical savings through computerization. It’s a promise they’ve made before, starting with a report issued in 1961. If only these promises were true. For 50 years, we’ve been told that computers would give…

As Supreme Court Hears Landmark Case, Does Law Do Enough to Fix Health Crisis?

By Democracy Now! – As the Supreme Court weighs whether the Affordable Care Act goes too far, we host a debate on whether the law goes far enough. The case is reviving the heated tensions that surrounded the healthcare reform law in the debate leading up to its passage two years ago. Although support for…

Injecting Single-Payer Into the Mandate News Cycle

With the Supreme Court hearings on the individual mandate happening this week, healthcare reform is back in the news. It’s time to send letters to the editor all over the country saying, “Individual mandate or not, we need Medicare-for-all.” The Supreme Court hearings on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate provision to…

Ryan Budget May Lead to Single-Payer Health Care

By Ezra Klein for Bloomberg View – Let’s play a game: I’ll describe a health-care bill to you. Then you tell me if I’m describing President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act or the budget released this week by Representative Paul Ryan. The bill works like this: The federal government subsidizes Americans to participate in health…

The Conservative Case for Single Payer Health Reform

By Dr. Joe Jarvis for Utah Healthcare Initiative Blog – Recently, Charles Krauthammer, conservative Washington Post commentator and Fox News analyst, who is also a physician, spoke to an audience of mostly physicians in San Antonio (find coverage of the speech in the San Antonio press here). Excerpts: If President Barack Obama’s health care reform…

Health Care Costs Will Be Higher Than Half Of Country’s Income By 2037

From Huffington Post – Health insurance will cost more than the median income of an American household by 2037 — and that’s the best-case scenario, two doctors contend in a new study. The reason: Wages for U.S. workers are stagnating and health care costs are rising so quickly that even if the health reform law…

Stagehands Working for Single-Payer Health Care

By Marc Bussanich for LaborPress – The Affordable Health Care Act is two years old, and recently the Department of Health and Human Resources produced a report showing how the reforms enacted will save Americans enrolled in traditional Medicare about $3,500 over the next 10 years. But Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical…