If Medicare for Everyone is So Bad, Why Does Every Nation Who Has It Keep It?

By GottaLaff

Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash. No BuzzFlash graphic today because my computer's in the shop and I've been using a 10-inch laptop for two days solid. Don't. Ask:

Questions Should You Find Yourself at a microphone at a 'Town Meeting':

1. If Canada's single-payer system is so god-awful, why have repeated Conservative governments at the provincial and national level in Canada never touched it? Canada is a democracy. If Canadians don't like their health care system, why haven't they gotten rid of it in 35 years? Since the system there is run by the separate provinces, many of which are very politically conservative, why has not one province ever tried to get rid of single-payer?

2. Why is rationing by income, as we do it here, better than rationing by need, as they do it in Canada?

3. Wouldn't single-payer mean that companies could no longer threaten working people with the loss of their health insurance? Why is this a bad idea?

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5. Why should we be allowing politicians who are taking money from the medical industry to write the new health care legislation?

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7. If Medicare--a single-payer system here in America--is so popular with the elderly, how come it's no good for the rest of us?

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9. The AMA, the Pharmaceutical Industry, and the Insurance Industry all bitterly opposed Medicare in 1964-5 when it was being debated in Congress and passed into law, with the right, led by Ronald Reagan, calling it creeping socialism. It became a life-saver for the elderly and didn't turn the US into a soviet republic. Why should we give a tinker's damn what those same three industry groups and the Republican right think of expanding single-payer now?

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