Single payer healthcare, which in this Congress means the Medicare for all approach of HR 676, is the only healthcare proposal at the moment which provides universal healthcare for two reasons.

1) The other current proposals don't provide coverage for the poor and near poor, they just fine people who can't afford it.

2) Insurance companies and HMOs don't provide universal care for people who have "coverage." They routinely deny needed medical care to amp up their profits.

Single payer is the cheapest system. Not only is it cheaper than what the Congressional leadership and Obama support, it also is cheaper than the current system. Why?

Single payer eliminates the byzantine insurance company/HMO bureaucracies, enormous executive pay, and obscene profits that currently eat up so much of our healthcare dollars. Insurance companies and their HMO counterparts have managed what would seem to be impossible: creating bureaucracies even larger and less efficient than those created by the Soviet Union.

It's past time for President Obama to stop paying footsie with the lobbyists and big money donors and support real healthcare reform. Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) has an open letter asking him to do just that.

Please sign that letter!

You can also sign and contribute to PNHP if you wish.

The open letter also has some words of warning about the "public option" being pushed by center right Democrats instead of single payer.

Moreover, a “public plan option” would do little to mitigate the damage of a reform that perpetuates private insurers’ dominant role. Even a robust public option would forego 90% of the bureaucratic savings achievable under single payer. And a kinder, gentler public option would quickly fail in a health care marketplace where competition involves a race to the bottom, not the top, where insurers compete by NOT paying for care. But HHS Secretary Sebelius has made clear that any public option will be far worse than that, specifically crafted to prevent it from evolving to a single payer. This kind of public option would amount to a government-run clone of private insurance, reproducing the worst features of private plans.