Kyle, PNHP, as a matter of the written and verbal record--- listen to their statements and read their web site--- supports private delivery of healthcare and they make a point of stating single-payer is not socialized/public healthcare... they state this over and over again because they fear "being discredited in the eyes of the politicians" and think they remain "credible" by saying they are not for socialized healthcare.
Of course, as we have seen, the politicians, instead of listening to PNHP, had their leaders and members arrested so they didn't have any credibility with them anyways... which also says something about the state of our "democracy."
In fact, many of their own members bailed out on them when Obama included huge increases to doctors for fees for services under Medicare.
I'm not opposing PNHP; they have done a lot of good in this country. However, I think that in order to build a larger coalition, they are going to have to drop their opposition to public delivery of health services and their support for private delivery and stop saying single-payer is not socialized healthcare. We all know that single-payer is not socialized healthcare; but, progressives need to advocate for single-payer at least as a step towards socialized healthcare or as some people are more comfortable calling it: public healthcare which is the same. We are talking about something like VA and the Indian Health Service.
A Native American Indian candidate running for a state legislative House seat stated in her announcement that she wanted to see the Indian Health Service extended to everyone: check her statement out:
http://anishinaabecandidate.blogspot.com/
There is a lot more... I would encourage everyone to read this.
The fact of the matter is we had some 40 to 50 million people in this country with little or no access to healthcare and now we have like almost 40-million people unemployed and growing by the day.
Under these circumstances not even single-payer would provide all of these people with healthcare... we are talking more people than all of Canada.
With the number of wars the United States has been engaged in leaving hundreds of thousands of people needing healthcare for the rest of their lives, private delivery of healthcare services would have bankrupted the country by now, proving that socialized healthcare is the most cost effective healthcare, too--- for those so concerned about "fiscal responsibility." In one area where free-market solutions definitely do not work is in the field of healthcare; if it did, VA and the Indian Health Service would have been privatized long ago. I have yet to hear even the most die-hard proponents of free-enterprise call for privatizing VA or the Indian Health Services. Of course, for such public healthcare services to work properly they need to be adequately funded which they are not at present because the politicians are feeding the gigantic war machine, instead.
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