Who's Blocking Health Care Reform Now? Blue Dogs? Senate Dems? House Progressives? Or the White House Itself? | Black Agenda Report

Who's Blocking Health Care Reform Now? Blue Dogs? Senate Dems? House Progressives? Or the White House Itself? | Black Agenda Report: "It made Democrats unable to present a health care reform package as a job creating economic stimulus more real than anything the president has yet proposed. Adopting a single payer system, as the National Nurses Organization pointed out at the beginning of the year, would create 3.3 million new jobs. Subtracting out the 550,000 in the insurance industry who would have to find other livelihoods, a single payer health care plan would create a net surplus of 2.6 million new jobs, as many as the economy lost in all of 2007, and provide tens of billions in taxes that support the budgets of local governments. So with millions unemployed and underemployed Democrats cannot argue that their health care bill will put Americans back to work, or help fund local and state governments.

Progressives in the House, many of whom supported single payer when Bush was president, have switched to a shadowy something they call the public option. But although many of them know by now that the White House has gutted the public option from an original 120 million strong, large enough to actually force health care prices downward, to a mere 10 million, not nearly enough to compete with private insurance, congressional democrats continue to cling to this scrap of a fig leaf. It's not single payer, it's not even universal health care of any kind, they admit, but it's a big first step. They are contradicted by Obama's own HHS Secretary who declares that absolutely nothing in the public option or in the president's health insurance reform package will ever, under any circumstances lead to single payer."