In an op-ed about gridlock former Obama adviser Larry Summers actually said it was a good thing the United States didn’t adopt a universal single-payer health care system decades ago. From Summers’s op-ed: There were probably too few checks and balances as the United States entered the Vietnam and Iraq wars. There should have been [...]

The International Federation of Health Plans is out with their new comparative price report for 2012 and it again shows the United States radically overpays for basically every health care service relative to any other first-world country. From the report: The report looks at a wide range of procedures, treatments and drugs, but those charts are essentially [...]

M.I.T. Economist Jonathan Gruber continues to leave people radically less informed about the real health care cost issue in this country with public statements that frankly make no sense. The latest example is from a Washington Post article about Massachusetts’ attempts to control health care cost. “Cost control isn’t easy,” said M.I.T. economist Jon Gruber, [...]

American health care continues to get more expensive, but the increase is driven by us getting overcharged more for the same services and not by us utilizing more health care. This is a key finding of a new Health Care Cost Institute report on 2010 health care costs. Rising prices for care were the chief [...]

The government of Vermont continues to chug along with their multi-year plan to establish a universal health care system modeled on single payer. The most recent step is that the two chambers of the legislature have approved a new bill creating the health care exchange required by the Affordable Care Act.  From the Bennington Banner: [...]

With the Supreme Court arguing the legality of the Affordable Care Act, it is a good time to remember that almost nobody disputes that single payer, such as Medicare for All, would be undoubtedly constitutional. Even Michael Carvin, one of the lead lawyers arguing (for the non-state private opponents) that the individual mandate is unconstitutional [...]

I love a good provocative title as much as the next writer but it has to at least make some sense, which really doesn’t seem to be the case with Ezra Klein’s new article ‘Ryan May Lead to Single-Payer Health Care.’ As best as I can make sense of the rather strange logic leaps, Klein [...]

A group of fifty doctors along with the non-profits groups, Single Payer Action and Our Economy, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing that the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act should be struck down. From Single Payer Action’s blog: The doctors are challenging the government’s claim that the individual mandate is [...]

Robert J. Samuelson writes an extremely disappointing  and misleading article about health care policy in today’s Washington Post. The column starts out fine with Samuelson looking at the basic OECD data that shows America spends dramatically more on health care than any other industrialized country on earth but doesn’t get better health outcomes as a [...]

The American people prefer a bigger government that provides more health care services according to a new poll by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Only 37 percent of Americans would prefer a smaller government that provided fewer health services, while a majority, 52 percent, said they would prefer a larger government that provided more health [...]