single payer

After months of insisting that single-payer health care receive at least a vote on the House floor, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) has decided not to offer the provision at all, according to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Here’s Waxman’s statement on the decision:

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) was none too happy when House leaders stripped his single-payer provision from their $894 billion health reform proposal. Today, he’s urging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to reinstate it.
“Like many other important reforms included in the underlying bill, the Kucinich amendment is the object of attack by the insurance industry,” Kucinich [...]

In July, single-payer health care advocates won a prominent victory when the House Education and Labor Committee approved legislation empowering states to adopt Medicare-style health care systems. The 25 panel supporters were a rare mash of liberal Democrats who support the policy and conservative Republicans with a history of advocating for states rights.
Neither group will [...]

Unlike the Republicans, who adopted the strong conservative position of resisting almost every Democratic reform proposal from the start, Democratic leaders ruled out the liberal single-payer proposal early in the debate.

That’s the argument made by David Himmelstein, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, who told The New York Times over the weekend that no other proposal being debated on Capitol Hill would rein in the estimated 900,000 medical bankruptcies expected to hit patients in the United [...]

Here’s Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who’s leading the lonely congressional push for single-payer health care, telling MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Thursday that, without an emphatic push from President Obama next week, the public option is dead.
If he stands up Wednesday and says, “To the country and to my colleagues in Congress, we are going to have [...]

Federally sponsored single-payer health care might be off the table as Congress debates its health reform strategy this summer, but if some House lawmakers get their way, there would be nothing to prevent states from offering that model.
The House Education & Labor Committee voted today in favor of an amendment, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Kucinich [...]

In his most forceful comments on health care reform since he arrived at the White House, President Obama today made his case for including a government-backed insurance plan as part of the Democrats’ health reform strategy this year. However, appearing in Chicago before members of the American Medical Association, the nation’s largest doctors’ group, the [...]

Wendy Norris of TWI’s sister site, The Colorado Independent, caught up with former Vermont governor, presidential candidate and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean at a health care reform event in Denver on Wednesday. During an interview before his speech, Dean had this to say about a so-called mandatory “public option” — a government-run health [...]

I talked briefly with Rick Scott, the chairman (and major funder) of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, after he gave a short talk at the Heritage Foundation about his group’s efforts to create a grassroots movement against nationalized health care. After asking him about the reception he was getting for Republicans, I wanted to know whether [...]