On liberal "purity".

[ProSense]

29. I read it:

Health Care
In 1975, national health expenditures averaged $547 per person—an almost 40 per cent increase in four years. Inflation and recession have combined to erode the effectiveness of the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

An increasingly high proportion of health costs have been shifted back to the elderly. An increasing Republican emphasis on restricting eligibility and services is emasculating basic medical care for older citizens who cannot meet the rising costs of good health.

We need a comprehensive national health insurance system with universal and mandatory coverage. Such a national health insurance system should be financed by a combination of employer-employee shared payroll taxes and general tax revenues. Consideration should be given to developing a means of support for national health insurance that taxes all forms of economic income. We must achieve all that is practical while we strive for what is ideal, taking intelligent steps to make adequate health services a right for all our people. As resources permit, this system should not discriminate against the mentally ill.

Maximum personal interrelationships between patients and their physicians should be preserved. We should experiment with new forms of medical care delivery to mold a national health policy that will meet our needs in a fiscally responsible manner.

We must shift our emphasis in both private and public health care away from hospitalization and acute-care services to preventive medicine and the early detection of the major cripplers and killers of the American people. We further support increased federal aid to the government laboratories as well as private institutions to seek the cure to heart disease, cancer, sickle cell anemia, paralysis from spinal cord injury, drug addiction and other such afflictions.

National health insurance must also bring about a more responsive consumer-oriented system of health care delivery. Incentives must be used to increase the number of primary health care providers, and shift emphasis away from limited-application, technology-intensive programs. By reducing the barriers to primary preventive care, we can lower the need for costly hospitalization. Communities must be encouraged to avoid duplication of expensive technologies and meet the genuine needs of their populations. The development of community health centers must be resumed. We must develop new health careers, and promote a better distribution of health care professionals, including the more efficient use of paramedics. All levels of government should concern themselves with increasing the number of doctors and para-medical personnel in the field of primary health care.

A further need is the comprehensive treatment of mental illness, including the development of Community Mental Health Centers that provide comprehensive social services not only to alleviate, but to prevent mental stresses resulting from social isolation and economic dislocation. Of particular importance is improved access to the health care system by underserved population groups.

We must have national health insurance with strong built-in cost and quality controls. Rates for institutional care and physicians' services should be set in advance, prospectively. Alternative approaches to health care delivery, based on prepayment financing, should be encouraged and developed.

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As I said, a premise is not the same as a law, and now health care is the law of the land. There is actual reform in place, something tangible to be improved upon.

That's huge.