The proposal unveiled on July 14 by House Democratic Party committee leaders is already under attack by the Right, and most commentators believe it will be changed to make it less progressive once it has to be meshed with whatever (if anything) comes out of the Senate.

Unfortunately, the plan itself is inadequate and for precisely the reasons that a Single Payer Plan makes most sense.
Any plan that relies on a mix between private insurance companies and a “public option” will face the reality that the costs of such a plan will dramatically raise overall costs for health care and require some source of revenue to pay for it, and so the debate will be about “raising taxes.”

Sure, liberals and progressives can and should yell about the fact that no such concerns are ever raised when the militarists decide on invading another country (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and who knows what’s next). The assumption that we can always afford that is there. Ditto, when it comes to giving interest-free loans of trillions of dollars to the banks. All good points, but they won’t really undermine the point of the Right that this is in fact going to cost more money and it has to come from somewhere, and people are scared of raising taxes at a time when their own economic futures seem uncertain. That’s what gives the Republican-Centrist Democrats their power to undermine the health care plan.

The Single Payer plan, on the other hand, doesn’t face this kind of objection. The Single Payer plan eliminates the role of the insurance companies altogether. As a result the administrative overhead for running health care diminishes from its current level of approximately 16% to 4% of the total cost. Why? Because the program no longer has to seek huge profits. It would be even stronger if a Single Payer plan were coupled with a mandatory price control mechanism for pharmaceuticals, including a plan for the United States to run its own pharmaceuticals if the existing ones decided to move out of the country in protest.

Even greater savings would be possible if the plan included a 100% payment for all tuition and family living expenses for anyone going through medical, dental, nursing, and psychotherapy training, internships and residencies, with the catch that they subsequently would work for government-set salaries that were not higher than four times the average median income of the rest of the population — a plan which, along with expanding medical schools or creating new ones,would greatly reduce the costs of reimbursing future doctors. Doctors receiving that kind of aid would no longer be able to convince themselves that they had a “right” to more pay since they had “sacrificed so much” to get their training. And the medical profession as a whole would improve if some of those entering the field to become rich went to Wall Street instead.

The huge savings that single-payer would entail are “off the table” according to inside-the-Beltway experts. Yet unless ordinary citizens demand that it be revived, all the pressure on the Democrats’ version will come from the Center-Right coalition, and so a plan that has some virtues will likely find many of its best features gutted in order to appease the health care profiteers.