(1) Universal Healthcare (not Socialized Medicine)

Healthcare is a fundamental human right that must be provided if our American guarantee of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is to have any meaning.

Health care and health insurance costs have risen MANY times faster than the rate of inflation. More than 50 million Americans either do not have health insurance or have policies that fail to adequately cover them or their families. Moreover, our current private system incentivizes the denial of care in favor of reducing costs. In my opinion its a travesty that America, the most dominant nation on the face of the planet, has a healthcare system that lags far behind that of every other large developed nation in terms of both quality and efficiency.

Healthcare is a fundamental human right that must be provided if our American guarantee of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is to have any meaning.

To be clear, I want to point out that there is a vast difference between Single-Payer Universal Health Care (which I advocate) and socialized medicine (which I am firmly against). Please help me combat our right wing friends who are trying to "scare" people into believing they are the same.

Single-Payer Universal Health Care is nothing more than private, for profit healthcare businesses, just like we have now, providing services to everyone who is an American citizen and being guaranteed payment for such services from tax revenues collected each year. People will still choose their own doctors and health care will be managed and coordinated solely by doctors and patients (which is actually better than we have now). This is nothing more than a giant group insurance pool where risk and costs are spread among our entire population, services are paid for out of tax revenues, and exceptions to coverage and denials of benefits will become a barbaric thing of the past. Socialized medicine on the other hand is a fundamentally different system wherein the government owns the means of providing services both in terms of facilities and employees and controls and coordinates treatment.