Yesterday, while speaking to an audience in New Mexico, Barack Obama admitted that he thought it would be great if American adopted a plan for universal health care:
Barack Obama said he would consider embracing a single-payer health-care system, beloved by liberals, as his plan for broader coverage evolves over time. “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” Obama told some 1,800 people at a town-hall style meeting on the economy. A single-payer system would eliminate private insurance companies and put a Medicare-like system into place where the government pays all health-care bills with tax dollars… But Obama repeated that he rejects an immediate shift to a single-payer system. “Given that a lot of people work for insurance companies, a lot of people work for HMOs. You’ve got a whole system of institutions that have been set up,” he said at a roundtable discussion with women Monday morning after a voter asked, “Why not single payer?”
This statement shouldn’t really come as a surprise. While Obama’s health plan for the 2008 presidential campaign works with the existing private health care system, he introduced a constitutional amendment in the Illinois state legislature that would have forced the state to adopt a universal health care system by 2002. The text of the proposed amendment:
Health care is an essential safeguard of human life and dignity, and there is an obligation for the State of Illinois to ensure that every person is able to realize this fundamental right. On or before May 31, 2002, the General Assembly by law shall enact a plan for universal health care coverage that permits everyone in Illinois to obtain decent health care on a regular basis.
