MB Civic

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This is an excellent piece by Mitchell in Harpers about our health care disfunction … if Obama really wants meaningingful health care reform, i worry he won’t have the juice to overcome the GOP/Dem Blue Dog coalition of corporate whores. This one passage is telling: “The benefits of single payer were at one time if not a matter of consensus then at least a topic considered worthy of discussion, at least among Democrats. “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health-care program,” Barack Obama said in 2003. “As all of us know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, we have to take back the House.” And yet as Democrats began to take all of those things back, Obama began to reconsider. In 2007, he recast the debate in terms that were more reflective than prescriptive. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he told The New Yorker, “then a single-payer system would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off.” And now that Democrats have the White House, the Senate, and the House, it is clear that a single- payer program is not a part of their agenda” – mab