Universal health care for all would spark a strong economic recovery. Thousands of new hospitals and clinics would have to be built to handle the demand for services. That would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in finance, construction and health care. To pay for it we could terminate the Wall St bailout and tax lobbyists and political contributions. We also could cut our defense budget by half and use that money to rebuild our infrastructure and still spend more than anyone else in the world on defense.

Yes, me and Spider Martin did that…

Forbidden Sister City

Ending the Cuban Embargo Could be a Boon for the Southeastern Economy

By Glynn Wilson and Spider Martin

http://www.southerner.net/v3n1_2002/cuba.html

There are 50,000 lobbyists in Washington. Not all of them corporate, of course and certainly not all insurance lobbyists, but likely at least a few thousand. They are the people who actually see members of Congress, and their staffers, on a regular basis, not constituents. They are the people who, thanks to the power-corruption system in DC, get heard when legislation is being drafted.

In order to get a working universal care plan into operation, an end run around those lobbyists is necessary. A dive play, a run up the middle or even a long pass will not work. They’re ready with the best defense available: money and lots of it.

The end run of a cooperative/trust plan would have much greater chance of success – lobbyists would be caught off guard and not prepared to defend that end run. And, as I opined in another reply, this type of plan keeps corporate and political interests as far away as possible.

Different countries have different political and cultural environments. Health care has been nationalized for a long time in France and Germany, so it’s impossible to know whether the French or Germans are really happy with a one-payer system or it’s just a matter of their never having experienced anything different.

As for the Cubans, it’s impossible to know since they haven’t had free elections in quite a number of decades – even before Castro, the unlamented Batista was an authoritarian autocrat. I.e., what the Cuban people may actually want is unknown. And any survey taken in such an environment would likely not be scientifically valid.

Universal care, yes. Run by a Byzantine, corporately-corrupted political establishment in Babylon-by-the-Potomac, no.

I say screw the corrupt insurance companies. Give us national health care now!

But it won’t happen, because Obama is trying to play bipartisan and protect the for-profit market.

We all get screwed again…

Independent NGOs chartered and mandated to serve various public interests are the way to go for any number of services presently provided, or proposed to be provided, by government.

The reason for that, in my opinion, is that just as much as corporate elites have agendas that do not involve serving the public, so too does the top of the federal bureaucracy and most elected politicians, notably the 535 Byzantine courtiers who sit in Congress.

Cooperatives and independent trusts accomplish the two things that have to be accomplished to make social programs and services truly serve all the people: (a) they are removed from political and corporate influence; and (b) by having independent boards of trustees or directors, accountable to the “clientele” of the service, they are many times more likely to succeed.

Any other plan or scheme will eventually look a lot like Medicare or Amtrak and fall way, way short of achieving its goal, which in the case of health care is true universal coverage.