Pennsylvania: First Single-Payer Health Care State?

“It wasn’t LBJ who brought civil rights to the United States. It was organized people being persistent in their demands. It was not Woodrow Wilson who gave women the right to vote. It was women demanding the right to vote that gave them the right to vote. And it will not be President Obama that gives us single payer health care. It will be us that gives us single payer health care.”

In the midst of the current push for health care reform on the national level, Pennsylvania now has a shot at becoming the first state to approve a single-payer system of health care that will provide health insurance for all its residents. PA Governor Edward Rendell has publicly promised to sign a bill mandating a single-payer health care system if it passes the legislature and gets to his desk. He is the first governor in the country who has made that promise.

While the United States is clearly in need of a better health care system, seeing as how over 40 million people here are uninsured and our infant-mortality rate is pretty bad compared to how much we spend on health care, the sad fact is that the current federal bills being proposed by Congress and the Senate that have the best shot at passing are not going to get everyone insured. Even worse, they are going to require everyone to buy insurance from the insurance companies, essentially handing over millions of new customers to the corporations.

While these bills aren’t completely terrible and do include some much needed reforms (like requiring the insurance companies to not reject people with pre-existing health conditions), the best solution, both ethically and economically, is a single-payer system. It’s a simple system that keeps costs down while insuring everyone.

What seems to get lost in these political debates is the fact that we are talking about people’s lives here. While the politicians and health industry people debate the issue, there’s blood on their hands, as people are dying everyday from not having access to health care and medicine.

Congressman John Conyers has introduced a bill currently that would create a single-payer system on the national level, HR 676, but this bill has been introduced every year since 2003 and has never passed.

Instead, it looks like individual states have a better shot at passing this type of legislation, and the people of Pennsylvania seem pretty fired up. California has passed single-payer legislation twice in the last several years, but both times the bills were vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, so the fact that the PA Gov has pledged to sign the legislation into law if it passes is huge. Good luck to them.