Poll Shows Majority of Americans Support National Health

[Karmadillo]

http://www.commondreams.org/news2003/1020-08.htm

Physicians Hail Poll Showing Majority of Americans Support National Health Insurance

CHICAGO - October 20 - Last month 10,000 physicians announced their support for single payer national health insurance; their proposal for reform appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association and received widespread media attention (www.pnhp.org).

Today the physicians' group was 'pleased but not surprised' that public support for a ''universal health insurance program, in which everyone is covered under a program like Medicare that's run by the government and financed by taxpayers" is high and rising rapidly. By a 2:1 margin (62 percent to 32 percent), an ABC News - Washington Post Poll released today found that the public favors national health insurance to the current health insurance system, in which most people get their health insurance from private employers, but some people have no insurance.

What's new about this groundswell of public support for single payer is that it includes the middle-class. "The middle-class is hurting," said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, an expert on bankruptcy in health care and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard. "Homeowners, people earning more than $50,000 a year, even a substantial number of physicians find themselves locked out from coverage."

The poll also found that 8 in 10 people think it is important to cover all the uninsured 'even if it means higher taxes'. Dr. Woolhandler noted that "Americans already pay the highest health care taxes in the world. We pay for national health care but we don't get it. We don't need more money in the system; we can save enough on paperwork (by adopting a single payer system) to cover everyone. That's been proven over and over."

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[Melsky]

1. Thanks for the article

Health insurance costs are rising at the same time profits are going up for the health insurance companies. That's so wrong!

[wakfs]

3. Indeed

I work for one. You don't even WANT to know what goes on there.
Suffice to say that Profit is Job One.

Hey, if we had a national single-payer plan guaranteed by the federal government and administered/managed by the insurance industry, wouldn't the country's employers save billions upon billions of dollars, which would inevitable go into the investment and jobs and a resultant economic boom? Why isn't anyone linking these two together?

[jonoboy]

2. BE WARNED

one of the discussions George Bush may hold with Australian PM John Howard today is the concern of US drug companies that have great difficulty accessing the Australian market.

Under the enviable Medicare system were drugs are subsidised by the government..no-one pays more than $19 for necessary drugs..any drug company must go through stringent trials and prove the worth of their product.

Any government, conservative or otherwise knows that if it fiddles with socialised Medicare in Australia it risks electoral slaughter such is it's popularity.

Most US drug companies are bitter opponents as well as being major donaters to the Bush campaign.