Burlington Free Press: Sanders Pushes Single-Payer Health-Care System

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Sanders Pushes Single-Payer Health-Care System (Burlington Free Press)

Support weak on Capitol Hill

By Nicole Gaudiano, Free Press Washington Writer

Sen. Bernie Sanders has aligned himself with a health-care reform proposal that isn't getting much traction in Washington. But outside the Capital Beltway, the notion of a single-payer health-care system is gaining momentum, Sanders said.
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The Vermont independent has sponsored the Senate's only single-payer health-care bill, a plan that would rely on a single source of funding, rather than multiple private insurers, for health care. During a Wednesday news conference, he called it "incomprehensible" that such a proposal isn't part of the Senate's discussion on the issue.

Sanders favors a state-administered system funded by the federal government. He said he would continue to seek a hearing in the Senate on the single-payer approach.

Sanders said there's no question why the current health care system is "so dysfunctional."

"We have a system dominated by private health insurance companies whose goal is not to provide health care to people," he said. "In fact, it is to deny health care to people because every dollar they deny ... is a dollar more in profits that they make."

Sanders arranged a meeting among several single-payer advocates and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., a leader on the issue. But the physicians and nurses said they left without assurances that their plan would be considered.

"We will therefore need to continue to press him," said David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. "It's what our patients desperately need."

Himmelstein said the group did secure a promise from Baucus to "use the power of his office" to ensure that charges are dropped against 13 health care providers who were arrested for disrupting Finance Committee hearings last month when they protested the lack of single-payer proponents as witnesses.

"There's a conspiracy of silence within the Congress in terms of single-payer," said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association. "It's been kept off of the agenda."

A spokesman for Baucus did not return a call for comment.

President Barack Obama is seeking a Senate vote on health-care reform by August. Proposals are being drafted in the Senate Finance and Health, Education, Labor and Pension committees, of which Sanders is a member.

Another bill Sanders introduced in April would establish a pilot program, allowing five states to move forward on providing state-sponsored universal health care coverage. He said Canada went to a single-payer system after one of its provinces adopted it.

"It's going to be a grassroots effort," Sanders said. "When millions and millions of people say every American is entitled to health care as a right, and it must be comprehensive and it must be cost effective ... we're going to have a single-payer system."

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