By Dr. Jay Brock in the Washington Post.
NOTE: Dr. Brock also created “The 7 Conservative Values of Single Payer,” which you can download as a pdf and print here: Seven conservative values of sps. Join the National Call on July 10 to hear Dr. Ed Weisbart, Richard Allen and Dr. Brock speak about single payer and conservatives. – Margaret Flowers
What conservative would not like a nationwide health insurance program that covered everyone and provided coverage more cheaply, more efficiently and with less government interference than the present system? Apparently Charles Krauthammer — who while rightly scoffing at the Rube Goldberg complexity of the current system, ignored the profoundly conservative aspects of a true single-payer system.
You read that right. Conservatives should embrace the fact that a single-payer system would save hundreds of billions of dollars on administrative and other costs, enough to cover everyone, including the currently uninsured. And that rather than have 51 separate systems, plus Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, health savings accounts, and tax incentives for business — each a separate node where the government (i.e., politicians) can place its fingers on the scales — a single-payer system can be run as a semi-autonomous utility with, by comparison, minimal political interference. And that the mandate they profess to hate was the idea of the conservative Heritage Foundation, with the decidedly conservative premise that if you receive the benefits of health care, you should pay for it.
And single-payer still allows competition among providers. It saves money, involves less government interference and includes personal responsibility — a system even conservatives can love.
