Single-Payer Summer

Want to beat the astroturf hooligans on health care reform? Ignore the stupid town halls on the worthless compromise the congressional weasels are trying to sell.

Demand single-payer.

Fuck the public option. Fuck community rating. Fuck cost controls. Fuck individual mandates. Fuck open access rules.

Fuck Waxman and Schumer and Obama.

Single Payer. Now.

John Nichols in The Nation explains how demanding single payer in August is the only way to get strong reform in September.

How should serious supporters of healthcare reform spend the month of August?

Not by getting trapped in the narrow "debate" between "party of no" Republicans who favor no reform at all, and Blue Dog Democrats, whose "reform" is to make a bad system worse.

And not by campaigning for "buzz words – "public option," "employer mandates" – or whatever President Obama or Speaker Pelosi happen to favor this week. There will be plenty of advertising and organizing to that end, including a $15 million expenditure by the AFL-CIO.

Americans who want to tip the debate in the most progressive direction should take advantage an opening provided at the last minute during negotiations to get a bill approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

And they should do so by advocating even more aggressively for single-payer health care.

SNIP

Campaigning for single-payer in August – by demanding that members of the House agree to support such a plan when it comes up for a vote, and by urging senators to schedule and support a similar vote in their chamber – is the best way to assure that whatever reform ultimately comes will err on the side of Americans who need healthcare rather than insurance companies that would deny them that care.

SNIP

The worst mistake that progressives could make in August would be to put their time and energy into getting members of Congress to agree to back a barely-acceptable compromise that could end up being unacceptable by the time the lobbyists and their political handmaidens finish with it.

Better to get representatives and senators to commit to back single-payer bills. That does not prevent them from ultimately agreeing to compromise measures. But it gets them to begin on the side of real reform, and lessens the likelihood that the eventual deals will be as bad as the schemes that the Blue Dogs tried to impose before the break.

Perhaps just as importantly, a strong vote for single-payer will remind the Obama administration that the president was right when he said six years ago that single-payer was the right response to the mess that private insurers and their allies have made of our healthcare system.

Groups that back single-payer are gearing up for August activism.

Keep track of the most important advocacy on the healthcare issue by following the work of Physicians for a Natonal Health Program at www.pnhp.org, and the California Nurses Association at http://www.pdamerica.org.

Only if Americans who favor real reform make this "Single-Payer Summer" will we have anything worth considering in the fall.

Read the whole thing.