vanden Heuvel:    I consider healthcare right, a right, and I was interested in one of the last debates between John McCain and Barack Obama.  When he said healthcare is a right, people responded very affirmatively to that.  I think we need to make sure that every American is insured, and it’s not just a moral commitment, it’s a practical commitment.  Part of what we’re seeing with the decline of the auto industry is because those auto executives weren’t on the barricades a few years ago, fighting for universal healthcare.  They are burdened with healthcare debt, which European countries, Canadian auto companies around the world aren’t bearing.  So, I would fight for Medicare for all.  Some of the colleagues talk about single pair.  I find the term a little bit process oriented, one that many Americans may not latch on to.  Medicare for all, my husband’s on Medicare.  Every American, I would believe, has a family member who has had some experience with Medicare, a system that works, and push aside all these people who babble on about the entitlement crisis.  This is a wealthy country.  We can find a way to ensure that every American is insured, for moral and, you know, for moral reasons and others and, within that, we need to take out the for-profit piece of it.  [My sense of] what will happen in Washington, and it’s a beginning, is that you will have a plan which offers a private plan, to those who are still in one, as well as a public plan.  So, it’s a beginning of a Medicare system.

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Katrina vanden Heuvel on Universal Healthcare

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation

Katrina vanden Heuvel says it is completely feasible to extend the right of health care to all Americans.

| In Health & Medicine

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