Any serious look at healthcare in the US will reveal that single payer may be the way to go but getting there will be impossible in the present climate. The best solution is to keep Obamacare and apply incremental changes such as enlarging the age group that qualifies for Medicare. The absolutely suicidal choice would be to support Trumpcare which is guaranteed to be no solution at all.

Trumpcare

Trumpcare would be an unmitigated disaster, plunging millions immediately into a complete nether-world nightmare of uncertainty. It would plunge tens of millions into a situation where attaining insurance at all is impossible.

And it would discount the lives of almost one in ten Americans who are poor and whose political power is nonexistent.

Benign genocide

I coined a term some years ago to describe the American attitude toward the fate of the world's weakest and most vulnerable. These are people who probably have among them the next superstar or genius or mega-entrepreneur among them, but who will die by the wayside because we allow infant mortality to proceed apace.

Rwanda was genocide. The loss of many millions more to simple neglect and failure to accept responsibility is a compound of thoughtlessness, selfishness, and exclusion that amounts to benign genocide.

Overbilling

If my humanitarian argument resonates with you, you may find grist for your mill in the above NY Times op-ed, published today.

The GOP Trumpcare hawkers will cry out for a free market as the solution to health care. Health care is the one thing that requires transcending selfishness and a profit motive. We are finding that overbilling is rife today. We can regulate that and bring the greed-mongers to heel. Trumpcare would make overbilling essentially legal.

Krugman

Ordinarily, Paul Krugman is a dependable source of liberal ideas. His column today is essentially a down-the-middle truth fest. He explains how Obamacare does three major things that are necessary and how if you remove any of these legs, the entire thing collapses. He offers the best argument I have seen for the fundamental bankruptcy of the GOP approach.

The best arguments for improving healthcare are ones that build on Obamacare.

The worst are ones that accept the destructive premises of Donald Trump. We can start with lowering the age at which we can get into Medicare. We can continue by working to prepare a day when all Americans will have medical care as a matter of right.
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