CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Various Republicans are pressing the U.S. Supreme Court to rule the 2010 Affordable Care Act unconstitutional because it requires millions of "working poor" Americans to buy health insurance from commercial carriers.
Surprisingly, a crusading liberal Charleston reformer and activist has joined a Supreme Court brief demanding exactly the same thing.
Retired anesthesiologist Hedda Haning -- a leader of several social action committees and recent organizer of an Occupy the Court protest -- says it's wrong to let commercial carriers earn fat profits from America's medical system.
Instead, she says, the nation should have a government-run "single-payer" universal plan providing treatment for every citizen, as other advanced democracies do. Simply expanding Medicare to cover all ages would achieve it. That would extend coverage to 50 million left-out Americans, and save billions now wasted on the bureaucracy of competing private insurers.
We agree -- but we fear that Republicans in Congress would kill such a universal proposal, if they succeed in defeating the ACA.
Dr. Haning joined Russell Mokhiber of Berkeley Springs and others in filing a friend-of-the-court brief saying:
"The only solution to the healthcare crisis in the United States, which will both control costs and achieve comprehensive coverage for the entire population, is to adopt a national publicly-financed single-payer health insurance system."
Such a system would lift a terrible burden off U.S. businesses and employers now paying extreme costs to insure employees.
"We pay twice as much for our health care in this country as many other industrialized countries do," Haning told reporter Paul Nyden, "but we are far down the list in terms of results. Something you hear all the time is that we have the best health-care system in the world. We do not.
"Forcing uninsured Americans to buy health insurance is a very bad way to go to try to take care of everybody. The purpose of health insurance corporations is to make money. And they make money by not taking care of sick people. ... We are dealing with the corporate takeover of medicine."
Other democracies spend only half as much on medical care, yet they have better health and life expectancy. It's shameful that America, the world's richest society, can't accomplish what other nations do.
