Reply #30: Indeed

[eridani]

I used to have a congressperson called Jim McDermott. He was courageous enough to go to Baghdad and suffer the resulting slings and arrows of some pretty vicious assaults on his character and patriotism. He was one of the initiators of the house bill to establish Medicare for all and a good friend of one of its most vigorous co-sponsors and advocates, Dennis Kucinich. Who are you and what did you do with Jim?

8,000 doctors have advocated single payer health care in a national medical journal, and candidate Dr. Dean was not among them. The July Pew foundation survey found that 72% of the public suports repeal of the Bush tax cuts if the money were to be used for universal health care. That was 82% of self-identified Democrats and 51% of Republicans. Republicans! How mainstream is that? Yet Dean lacks the courage to to come out in favor of this eminently sensible policy that the former Jim McDermott has been supporting for many years.

I'm not impressed with Dean's Vermont performance which left 5% of its population uninsured, since I grew up with parents in that 5%. Sick enough that when they worked, they were their own employers, as no one would hire them. Of course there was no insurance, because insurance companies usually refuse to insure sick people. A program insuring kids would have been useless for us, because us rugrats were healthy--it was our PARENTS' sickness that forced us onto a household budget that was less than welfare grants after medical bills were paid. And the 95% of Vermonters who think they are covered may or may not be. With private insurance you have to get sick to find out, and 80% of them aren't going to.

Will you please untie Jim McDermott and let him out of the closet so he can endorse Dennis Kucinich, the only candidate who has actually spelled out a plan for universal health care? See http://www.kucinich.us/ and
http://www.kucinich-washington.org/