With all the fireworks over health care in the Democratic primaries, John McCain has managed to stay under the radar on our national healthcare nightmare.

McCain's health care views should be considered in the context of the tanking economy.

Household mortgage and consumer debt now add...

Behind the escalating debate on the health care between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on individual mandate -- she's for it, he's against it -- is a critical policy battle that not only cuts across health care reform but also the neo-liberal privatization dreams, the home mortgage crisis, and...

Before the leading Democratic candidates come to California for the upcoming super Tuesday primary February 5 and spend a lot of time talking about their health plans, they might want to cast a look at the demise of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's much ballyhooed healthcare bill.

Despite a year of fawning...

As the scorecard in Iowa is tallied, add insurance companies to the loser camp along with the disgraceful, rhetorical sham that forcing individuals to buy insurance is universal healthcare.

Individual mandate, the policy wonk lingo for requiring the uninsured to purchase private insurance premiums, was the key talking point of...

Christmas came one week early for California insurers Monday.

In a present gift wrapped by the California Assembly with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Santa, Assembly members passed a bill mislabeled as healthcare reform that will guarantee not health care but millions of new customers for the insurance industry, with California...

If Dick Cheney were anyone else, he'd probably be dead by now. That's the headline of an ad we - the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee - ran in ten Iowa newspapers this week.

Imagine if you had the Vice President's health history. Four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery,...

Apparently taking their leadership from Karl Rove who warned that the Republican candidates must focus on healthcare because the issue is "on the mind of a lot of swing voters," the Republican candidates for president have now latched on to healthcare.

But in the true spirit of their mentor Rove,...

The pundits might have it right on this one. Hillary Clinton did learn a lesson from her 1994 fiasco on healthcare reform. Unfortunately for most of us who don't have an Inc. after our name or a private jet to cart us around, it was the wrong lesson.

In the...

Those presidential candidates who continue to tip toe on the critical issues facing voters ought to take a close look at poll results in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.

The poll shows again how far the voters are ahead of the cautious politicians, especially on such essential matters as overhaul of...

"Who are we?" asks Michael Moore mid-way through his brilliant new film, "SiCKO." "Is this what we've become?"

Moore has issued a ringing challenge to all of us, and tens of thousands are about to answer the bell. When "SiCKO" opens Friday, nurses in red scrubs, doctors and healthcare activists,...

The first misconception in the health care debate is the portrait of all of us as "consumers" of health care.

If we are ever going to build a genuinely humane society, we need to discard the notions of consumerism when it comes to the most basic factor of...

Perhaps the exponents of expediency just haven't met the rescue heroes of September 11 still plagued by debilitating respiratory illnesses, but unable to get the healthcare they need in the country they volunteered to help in our hour of despair.

Or the machinist and his newspaper editor wife who...

So much for the overblown rhetoric about shared responsibility in healthcare reform.

Apparently the Massachusetts officials who enacted the law that has been hyped from coast to coast as the model for other state and national plans believe that only low and middle income individuals and families should...

Listening to the purveyors of conventional wisdom, you might think only an incremental approach on healthcare reform is possible.

The most comprehensive reform, HR 676 in Congress, (and its state versions, such as SB 840 in California), providing guaranteed healthcare as an expanded and improved Medicare for all, is not...

Maybe Al Gore should make a movie about the slow death of our nation's public health system. If this was a terror alert, the arrow would be on red.

In the past 30 years, the number of public hospitals in America has fallen by 30%. Public hospitals and...

In his latest campaign, John Edwards has taken promising steps in an effort to burnish his credentials as an "economic populist" - as the New York Times put it - from his opening announcement in New Orleans' devastated 9th Ward to his regular visits to picket lines to...

Arnold Schwarzenegger tells the San Francisco Chronicle today the inspiration for his healthcare proposals: "I come from a country, Austria, where everyone is insured." Why not move, then, to the kind of single-payer health system that Austria and every other industrialized nation enjoys?

Look at what Austria has to...

As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recovers from his fractured leg, he has access to the finest medical care California has to offer, as he should. But don't all Californians deserve the same degree of medical attention and health care security?

In a few days, the governor is expected to unveil a...