The battle over comprehensive healthcare reform in this country is about to get big, and it’s about to get ugly. Problem is, it’s also one of the more complicated subjects out there, which makes it hard to rally the public behind anything other than the idea that the system is broken.

Socialized medicine? Single payer? Public option? The Senate HELP Committee? Anyone want to take to the streets and chant one of those phrases?

Anyone able to define them all simply, quickly, and without an endless web search?

Enter Ezra Klein, who from his new perch at the Washington Post has been doing a running series of blog posts called Health Care Reform for Beginners. It’s all there: the Congressional Budget Office, the employer tax exclusion, the many flavors of the public plan. Get in there. How else will you know what to take to the streets about?

Eli Sanders was The Stranger's associate editor. His book, "While the City Slept," was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He once did this and once won...

6 replies on “Health Care Reform for Beginners”

  1. The reality is they’re decided what it looks like this week – if you want to discuss the good and bad parts of the various options, at this point all you have left is either to insist on a single payer national health care plan as a default option – or let them give you things you don’t want.

    Letters to the editor, postcards to the president and house/senate, use the online email comment forms, but the discussion is actually mostly over.

  2. Thanks Eli! That was very useful. It’s nice that each of his posts are relatively small and not overwhelming. I feel like I’m more informed already!

    And Will in Seattle: If you’d read the posts Eli links to, you’d know that the phrase “a single payer national health care plan as a default option” doesn’t make sense. “Single payer” means there ARE no options, default or otherwise. We’re definitely not going to get a single-payer system. (That would mean putting all private insurance companies out of business.) What lefties should be fighting for is the public health care option: cheap (tax payer subsidized) health care that is available to everyone regardless of your ability to pay, regardless of your health status. Having a public option will force private insurance companies to provide cheaper better coverage in order to compete. –Just like having the publicly subsidized U.S. Postal Service forces UPS and FedEx to compete by offering better (and cheaper than it otherwise would be) services.

  4. @2 – no, there are many forms – single payer only means that one bill is presented from a provider network, hospital, or care facility to a single payer – it can then be distributed onwards.

    The single payer can act as a gatekeeper and/or negotiator, but it’s not a requirement.

    Different countries have different forms of it. From the consumer viewpoint it all means if you have the default national plan they have to treat you and you know it – and all providers usually have to provide at least some basic services under the plans (or at least hospitals).

  5. Actually it’s not complicated at all: Drop the age restriction on Medicare–then SNAP!–everyone has insurance like in every other developed country, the end.

    Hospitals and doctors are already all trained to accept it, and people could begin paying the low medicare premiums instead of the insanely high private insurance premiums.

    It’s the private, for-profit, “healthcare” = industry that owns Congress and falsely presents the situation as “too complex to solve.”

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