I watched President Obama’s health care speech last night, Wednesday, September 9th,  and it was about what I expected. There was no mention at all of a plan that would really mean universal and affordable health care coverage. The idea of a single payer plan where you could choose you health care provider and the government would negotiate how much they would pay to the hospital, doctor, dentist, etc. was totally absent in Obama’s discussion.

Obama did mention that he favored a public option where people who did not have health care coverage and maybe small businesses could pay a monthly fee to the government and in return would have their health care covered.  Even here Obama mentioned that he was willing to compromise further on this idea  and that the plan would have to be self-supporting.  Insurance companies are likely to increase their profits as more people will be required to have coverage and  the public plan will be limited. The subsidies to low and moderate income are likely to be quite low meaning that health care will still be unaffordable for many people.

Obama excluded abortions from his proposals and excluded any money going to undocumented immigrants.  Both of these are things we need to fight for.

The behavior of many of the Republicans was reprehensible, it looked like the white citizens councils of the 1960’s–overwhelmingly white and male and reactionary.

On a more hopeful note on Tuesday, September 8th, I joined the Mad as Hell Doctors Tour which was a caravan of mainly doctors that started in Portland, went to Seattle and will caravan to D.C. demanding Single Payer Health Care. The main group sponsoring the caravan is Physicians for a National Health Plan. (Check out their excellent web-site). At a very exciting town hall meeting that   these two group organized, a group of very persuasive doctors talked about how the for profit health system prevented them and other health care providers form carrying out their mission of curing people.

Single Payer makes so much sense. Doug Henwood in the latest issue of Left Business Observer examines why the capitalist class, the corporate elite, so strongly opposes single payer. He argues that the big health insurance companies are  only a small part of Corporate America and not very significantly interlocked with them. They should not have the power by themselves to stop single payer.  He concludes that major corporations in other sectors fear the loss of profits that would occur to the large health insures like Aetna,  Humana, etc might happen to them next and thus oppose it.  Henwood also adds that if  workers had good health care independent of their jobs they would be less afraid to lose their jobs and more willing to fight for better working conditions and wages which could reduce profits. To these reasons i would  add that the insurance companies and the pharmaceuticals are fighting against it with all their energy and power and the rest of the elite does not want to oppose them.

We need to build a grass roots movement to fight for single payer health care. The next meeting of the newly formed Olympians for Single Payer Action is Tuesday, September 15th at 7 P.M at the Olympia Center, downtown.