Supreme Court Decision Highlights Need For Single-Payer

I have never believed that Obamacare solved all of the problems plaguing our broken heal care system. It fixed some things, and is certainly a big improvement over what we had before it was passed, but it did not insure that all Americans would be covered with health insurance, it left health care decisions in the hands of private insurance companies, and it didn't do nearly enough to control the costs of health care in this country (which pays per capita several times as much as any other developed nation).

And the recent Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court shows another glaring deficiency in Obamacare -- that it left health care insurance decisions up to employers rather than individual citizens, and allows those employers to use religion as an excuse to deny coverage of certain kinds to their employees. The first kind of coverage being denied is contraception for women, but as the chart above shows that could easily bloom into many other kinds of coverage denial.

The quality of  a person's health care insurance should not be at the mercy of the company they work for. All Americans deserve the same basic and decent level of coverage, regardless of whether their employer is a religious bigot or not.

The sad part is that it did not have to be this way. President Obama chose to champion a plan devised by Senate Republicans in the hope that they would appreciate their own plan being chosen, and climb on board the effort to reform the health care system. It was a vain hope. He did not realize the depth of racial hatred and animus the Republicans had for him -- a hatred so absolute that they would vote against their own plan.

There is a solution though -- a solution that would not only solve the problems I mentioned above, but would take health care insurance decisions out of the hands of employers. That solution is to fix our health care system the same way that many other developed nations have chosen -- to go to a single-payer government-run health insurance system (something like Medicare, only covering all American citizens).

We need to take our anger over the Hobby Lobby decision and the decision that allowed Republican state governments to refuse to expand Medicaid, and channel it into a renewed effort to establish a single-payer health insurance system in the United States. It is the only solution that makes sense, and hopefully now the American people will start to realize that.