yesterday, he made the following comment:
"It is impossible to get everybody covered, it's impossible to get to 100 percent."
this is patently ridiculous. every other industrialized country provides some form of universal health coverage. one might argue that it's too expensive, or inefficient to have public financed health-care, but to say its impossible is really laughable, and, in many ways typically american. there are 50 counter-examples staring us in the face, yet frist can't see that because he won't look over the border. his conclusion came after looking at how states have tried to achieve universal coverage. the health care insurance system in this country is a national system. federal law even recognizes that fact as expressed in national healthcare insurance-related legislation like COBRA and HIPAA. states cannot effectively provide universal coverage because to do so would require controling costs which are the product of a national market. as the only doctor in the senate, frist is always pulling the medical expert card to trump anyone who challenges him on any healthcare related problem. this is but one example of how little credibility he really holds in that area. (besides, he's not just a doctor, but an owner of a medical facility that is dependant on the continuation of our for-profit healthcare system. his conflict-of-interest undermines any potential expertise he might have)
personally, i think universal healthcare is inevitable in this country. we're in a classic cost spiral right now. as health coverage gets more expensive, more and more people lose their healthcare as employers cut back. this reduces the pool of insured people and that further drives up costs as insurers are unable to spread the risk amount as large a group of the insured. as costs go up, more people are cut. etc. there is really no end in sight to the increasing costs. as the ranks of the uninsured swells, its members climb higher and higher up the socio-economic scale. when it was just poor people, the class with the lowest voter turnout, the problem could be shoved aside. but more and more voters are uninsured or have family members who are uninsured. eventually it will get to a point where there are just too many voters without insurance to not act.
