Physicians for a National Health Program

By replacing our crazy-quilt, inefficient system of private health insurers with a streamlined, publicly financed single-payer program, we would reap enormous savings.

Whenever you debate a medical treatment or procedure, you have to weigh the benefits versus the harms. If the benefits outweigh the harms, it's probably a good idea. And such is the case with this bill.

Democratic leaders have short-circuited the reform "debate" and permitted the process to be hijacked by health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

At the New Albany meeting, people were polite and even relaxed enough to chuckle whenever someone spoke with dry Indiana wit. Yet Hill silenced would-be hecklers by saying "Let me answer that before you interrupt, please!"

Hill could not represent a southern Indiana consensus view, because there was none; whatever he chose to do, it would cost him votes.

Corporate socialism remains at the center of our "uniquely American" failed, fragmented, U.S. health insurance model that emulates the Wall Street norm of privatized profit and socialized risk.