From 2008: 'Obama Touts Single-Payer System for Health Care' - WSJ [View all]

[WillyT]

Obama Touts Single-Payer System for Health Care
Amy Chozick - WSJ Staff
AUGUST 19, 2008, 9:30 AM ET

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Barack Obama said he would consider embracing a single-payer health-care system, beloved by liberals, as his plan for broader coverage evolves over time. “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” Obama told some 1,800 people at a town-hall style meeting on the economy. A single-payer system would eliminate private insurance companies and put a Medicare-like system into place where the government pays all health-care bills with tax dollars.

Many liberals have long embraced the coverage plan, saying it would cover everyone, take the profit out of health insurance and allow for greater efficiencies. But Republicans cringe at such deep government involvement in the private sector, calling it socialized medicine. And many Democrats, including Obama and former rival Hillary Clinton, have taken a much more moderate approach.

Obama’s health-care plan aims for universal coverage by offering a new government-run marketplace where Americans could buy insurance, mostly from private plans. He would offer subsidies to individuals and to small business owners that offer their workers coverage. His plan also would require that parents get insurance for their kids. And he aims to lower health-care costs to make coverage more affordable. His plan includes one small step toward single payer. His new marketplace would create a new government-run plan, like Medicare, to compete against the private plans.

But Obama repeated that he rejects an immediate shift to a single-payer system. “Given that a lot of people work for insurance companies, a lot of people work for HMOs. You’ve got a whole system of institutions that have been set up,” he said at a roundtable discussion with women Monday morning after a voter asked, “Why not single payer?”

“People don’t have time to wait,” Obama said. “They need relief now. So my attitude is let’s build up the system we got, let’s make it more efficient, we may be over time—as we make the system more efficient and everybody’s covered—decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.”

More: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/08/19/obama-touts-single-payer-system/