What is the problem with Canadian and European Style Universal Single Payer Health Care?
Back in the mid-1990s, American seniors were mobilized into action to resist a plan to reform the Medicare system – in fairly modest ways – by scare tactics and misrepresentations. That time, of course, the losers of the exchange were the Republicans, who wanted to look for ways to cut down on fraud and waste, slow the rate of payment increases, and impose some level of cost-benefit analysis into the process of decision-making for Medicare funded procedures (sound familiar?) At one point, a proposal to slow the rate of increased spending was being publicly presented as a plan to slash Medicare spending. Some movies are criticized for being derivative – this kind of argument is a second derivative. The Republicans called it “Mediscare,” and no one did it better than Clinton during the 1996 election. I vividly remember the outrage of a friend of mine, at the time a Republican Party operative in an East Coast state known for its colorful politics. He was incensed at the dishonesty, the ba
