Some straight talk about health care from a candidate I wish I could vote for, but I can't

From the Wall Street Journal

February 25, 2008, 12:38 pm
Nader on Health Care: Single Payer is the Way to Go
Posted by Sarah Rubenstein
For all of their talk about universal health care, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton look pretty conservative on the issue, compared with yes-he’s-running-again-for-president Ralph Nader.

In announcing his 2008 bid for the White House on “Meet the Press” yesterday, Nader said: “All, all the candidates — McCain, Obama and Clinton — are against single-payer health insurance, full Medicare for all. I’m for it, as well as millions of Americans and 59% of physicians in a forthcoming poll this April.”

Nader’s campaign Web site is scant on details so far, but he’s talked plenty about the issue. In an interview with “Democracy Now!” last July, for instance, Nader said if he had it his way, health care in the U.S. would “look like full Medicare for everybody, whereby the government is the payer.”

He added, “In Western countries, the outcomes in terms of infant mortality, in terms of life expectancy, in terms of lower levels of anxiety — they don’t have to worry about losing their life savings for a tragic illness — are all better than the United States system.” His single-payer idea contrasts with Clinton’s and Obama’s plans, which wouldn’t be funded solely by the government.

Here’s Nader’s relevant press release from his 2000 run for the White House, in which he says “massive savings” from creating a single-payer, government-funded system would pay for universal coverage. “Under the current system, hundreds of billions of dollars a year go into insurance company overhead, unnecessary and fraudulent billing and administrative costs for health-care providers, and huge profits and high salaries at large HMOs and other health-care companies.”

In this video, Nader receives lots of cheers from a crowd as he talks about universal health care. In case more money is needed to fund such a program, he says, it could come from “the fat cats on Wall Street who buy millions of shares and hundreds of thousands of options every day, and trillions of dollars of transcations every week — they don’t pay any sales tax.”