Portside

The insinuation that Medicare for All would somehow leave people currently insured under a private company behind elevates a popular right-wing talking point used to dissuade Americans against single-payer health care.

While your staff has not shared with us the details of the current draft, we understand from colleagues in other single-payer advocacy groups that it mandates copayments for medical services for most Americans and proposes a four-year delay before the implementation of the single-payer reform.

Both parties aren't addressing our health care needs — now is the time for socialists to lead a national Medicare for All campaign.

Trumpcare is barbaric. Now is the time to redouble the fight for truly universal health care.

Is Healthy California economically viable? According to research I conducted with three colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the answer is yes.

Reader Comments: Impeachment, Not McCarthyism - Differing Reader Views; Who Were Trump Voters; Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution and the Working Families Party; United Front, Popular Front Lessons; Why Corbyn Won; Healthcare for All God's Children; California Single-Payer; A Message to Our Community on 50 Years of Occupation; Resources: When Black Women Succeed, All Women Succeed; Iran 1953: State Department Finally Releases Updated Official History of Mosaddeq Coup; more..

A legislative analysis had estimated the cost of the proposed system to be $400 billion annually, but a study released by the nurses Wednesday estimates the yearly cost would be $331 billion as of 2017. The estimate was made by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in a study partly financed by the nurses association.

Reader Comments: Peoples Climate March and a Defense of Science; Korea; Danger of Nuclear War; Marine Le Pen is a Fascist, Not a Populist; Hawaii IS a State - Understand Jeff Sessions; GOP Health Plan - A Disaster; Attraction of Single-Payer; Airline Abuse, Profits and Deregulation; Fascism Today - Portside readers exchange views; Resources; Announcements-MAY DAY; Trump and the Left; Labor Film Festival; Left Forum; Oscar López Rivera is Coming to New York; and more...

Single payer would simplify all of this by largely cutting out the insurance and pharmaceutical companies and untethering coverage from your job. The losers are those middlemen, like private insurance companies, that make the current system so frustrating to navigate and politically fraught. Also, much to the dismay of the wealthiest households, their taxes would increase the most of any group.

Single-payer health care has always been a goal of the Left. But Democrats have turned it into a punching bag.