Don't expect to see Quentin Young cheering the Supreme Court's ruling Thursday that the heath care reform legislation is constitutional.
Young, a longtime health-care reform advocate and former chief medical officer of John Stroger Hospital, says the legislation omits a key ingredient: "a decent health system."
"Unfortunately, the reform won't control costs but will leave 26 million people uninsured and everyone else with 'unaffordable underinsurance,' or coverage so skimpy it doesn't protect from financial ruin in the event of illness," Young writes in a letter to the editor of the Sun-Times.
Young, who now is national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program, says the only effective cure for the nation's health care woes is a single-payer health care system, something he points out that Barack Obama once supported.
"By replacing our dysfunctional, profit-seeking, private insurance industry with a streamlined single payer system we can save over $400 billion squandered annually on administrative overhead, enough to cover all 50 million of the uninsured and eliminate co-pays and deductibles for everyone else. Moreover, only a single-payer system can control costs and reduce our nation's deficit over the long term," he writes.
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Obamacare was invented by Republicans to fend off a single-payer system. The Democrats went along only because single-payer (enjoyed by all other developed nations) seemed politically unobtainable. For the GOP to oppose it now is the height of hypocrisy, It's also stupid.
@R. Franklyn
I agree that GOP behaviour is hypocritical, however arguably it is not that stupid in short term, as they will probably get some votes by their fearmongering. In long run however GOP will have to face healthcare reform so probably they are silently pleased that Obama made this reform, sparing them problems and difficulties connected with this task.