On March 5, the new Democratic White House held a much-touted health care summit in Washington, D.C., The meeting was supposed to solicit input on solutions for the growing health care crisis confronting the United States. Before the meeting, Obama called on his millions of supporters to hold house meetings and provide input at the grassroots level. Yet, the 150 health care summit attendees consisted almost exclusively of elite lobbyists representing multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical, insurance and hospital corporations, as well as high-ranking Democrat and Republican politicians. Their principal task: to derail the growing public demand for a universal single-payer health care system. Several recent polls have indicated that more than 60 percent of Americans now support a single-payer solution to the health care crisis. Yet, single-payer health care was deliberately kept off the table at the summit. When the White House was directly asked if the president supported single payer, spokesperson Robert Gibbs said, “The President doesn’t believe that’s the best way to achieve the goal of cutting costs and increasing access.” Advocates of single-payer health care were initially outraged to find that no single-payer supporter had been invited. When single-payer supporters threatened to picket the White House, the administration invited three well-known advocates. Despite spending more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, the United States lags behind other countries in providing health care. Even the capitalist countries of Western Europe and Canada provide universal health care to their citizens at a lower cost with better results. In socialist Cuba, the health care system has achieved a lower rate of infant mortality despite a severe U.S. imposed blockade. All people there are entitled to free comprehensive health care. Conversely, the for-profit system is grotesquely inefficient. The U.S. health care system is dominated by multi-billion-dollar insurance, pharmaceutical and other health care companies which, in their drive for ever higher profits, impose ever escalating health care premiums and ever decreasing coverage. According to the National Coalition on Health Care website, 46 million people in the United States have no insurance whatsoever. Fifty percent of all U.S. bankruptcy filings are connected to medical expenses, while more than 1.5 million families every year lose their homes to foreclosures related to medical costs. Yet the only workable solution is one that remains off the table because it is portrayed as too costly and politically unviable—which means the pharmaceutical and other health care industry corporations will lobby to defeat it. As country after country has demonstrated, socialized medicine is the only proven way to reduce health care costs while substantially improving the quality of health care for all citizens. The U.S. government has used trillions of dollars to bail out bankers and fund wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Just a small portion of the trillions spent on killing and rescuing the rich could provide all workers and their families with the basic necessities of life.
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