By Philip Klein,American Spectator
In 2003,then Illinois state senator Barack Obama described himself to an approving AFL-CIO audience as a “proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan.”Single-payer,the health care panacea for progressives,is a more academic way of describing a socialized system in which government is the sole purchaser of medical care.
At the time,Obama cautioned,“we may not get there immediately,because first we’ve got to take back the White House,and we’ve got to take back the Senate,and we’ve got to take back the House.”
Six years later,Democrats have taken over both chambers of Congress and Obama himself now resides in the White House. These days,he describes single-payer as the ideal model “if we were starting from scratch”but recognizes that too much is vested in the current system to scrap private insurance entirely.
The solution he proposed during the campaign,one which is likely to appear in some form in whatever health care proposal Democrats draw up in Congress,is to create a new government-run insurance plan.