The New York Times recently published a great editorial praising the Massachusetts health care reform model.
"The state's experience so far suggests that it is more than possible to insure almost all citizens and stay within planned budgets. ... Three years after the program began, 97 percent of Massachusetts residents have health insurance -- by far the highest rate in the nation. That has been achieved without huge increases in state spending."
Read the full editorial.
One small point. The issue of taxes and the funding of health care. Why do we Democrats fall into the trap the Republicans have created for us? No one questions that public education is funded by tax revenues, local, State, and Federal. Nor do we complain about taxes paying for building and maintaining roads. The Republicans are smart, though being smart is not always being ethical: taxes and social programs has long been their clever, and insidious, pairing strategy--fight the development of social programs by starving them through the erosion of the taxes that pay for them. This has been a cruel strategy and it has been largely successful. It is high time that this propaganda campaign be challenged and exposed for what it is. We Democrats have been manipulated, along with the majority of the electorate, to believe that there is some logic to this gross distortion. Nothing about health-care, merits its being put in the category of gambling or vacationing or movie-going. The fact that right-wing commentators consider health-care to be an "industry," is amoral at best. Democrats should not follow suit.