Don't kid yourself. Even the friendly audience at Delawareliberal knows that John Kowalko and Earl Jaques have not introduced HB 392 (Single-payer health care) in a serious attempt to get it passed this year.
El Somnabulo portrays it as "essentially a ’shot across the bow’ for next year," but the comment by Democratic nominee for Health Insurance Commissioner, Mitch Crane, is more instructive. Mitch immediately jumps on the idea of endorsing single-payer healthcare, a move that is of course completely unrelated to his election campaign, right?
Sure, any moment now they will be re-assuring us that this is all about principle and not about creating an election issue out of a bill that is actually at least five years old.
That's right. Virtually the same bill, Dr. Floyd McDowell's old single-payer plan that was SB 177 back in 2007 is back yet again. (At the time this blog had just started and nobody was really reading it yet, I dissected that bill.)
It's the same bill, down to the same Delaware Health Security Authority that McDowell proposed.
At a quick read I cannot even see where it has been materially changed from the original edition.
So this is not new, and it was not terribly popular except with a few folks the first time around.
Here's how Liberalgeek of Delawareliberal himself dismissed the idea about six months ago, in his preliminary obituary for Occupy Delaware:
What this is all about is what it is always all about . . . election year posturing.
El Somnabulo portrays it as "essentially a ’shot across the bow’ for next year," but the comment by Democratic nominee for Health Insurance Commissioner, Mitch Crane, is more instructive. Mitch immediately jumps on the idea of endorsing single-payer healthcare, a move that is of course completely unrelated to his election campaign, right?
Sure, any moment now they will be re-assuring us that this is all about principle and not about creating an election issue out of a bill that is actually at least five years old.
That's right. Virtually the same bill, Dr. Floyd McDowell's old single-payer plan that was SB 177 back in 2007 is back yet again. (At the time this blog had just started and nobody was really reading it yet, I dissected that bill.)
It's the same bill, down to the same Delaware Health Security Authority that McDowell proposed.
At a quick read I cannot even see where it has been materially changed from the original edition.
So this is not new, and it was not terribly popular except with a few folks the first time around.
Here's how Liberalgeek of Delawareliberal himself dismissed the idea about six months ago, in his preliminary obituary for Occupy Delaware:
Delaware has a number of these helpful oldsters that want to grind the same old axes that they have been grinding for decades. One of them has even been on several radio stations in the past week presenting their “demands”. I haven’t heard the demands, but I’ll gander a few guesses about what they are, Implementing Floyd McDowell’s single payer plan, satellite news access for everyone and the freeing of all Palestinian prisoners. I’m sure she has others, but I really can’t stand to listen to her spout off any more, and neither can anyone else.So while Mitch Crane is posturing, and Kowalko/Jaques are preening, let's be realistic and admit that they haven't done anything particularly new or daring, and don't even seem to have bothered to do anything more than cut and paste something that somebody else wrote and never managed to build a consensus for . . . a long time ago.
What this is all about is what it is always all about . . . election year posturing.
Comments
Would you agree that every Delaware resident having single-payer health care is preferable to some Delaware residents not having any health care of any kind?
delacrat
Honest answer (leaving the funding mechanism aside for the moment): I'd have to know whether the system compromised or reduced the quality of care to those who already have care now or not. (Did that make grammatical sense, I'm tired).
In other words, it is a cost benefit analysis. Show me the metric and I'll give you a straight answer.