Miriam Raftery, editor of the East County Magazine, provided a report earlier this week from an appearance at a San Diego bookstore by Howard Dean. The former Vermont governor, presidential candidate, and DNC chair, who is a physician, is on a book tour promoting Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Refom.
While Dean was ridiculed on the stump in 2004 as an out of control lefty, he has always been a New England moderate, and has never proposed anything faintly resembling socialized medicine. But Dean does believe, as he put it:
“The free market just doesn’t work in medicine. You can’t be an informed consumer. I never saw someone with severe chest pain jump off the table and say, ‘Doctor, I’m going to the cheaper guy down the street.'”
Dean also doesn’t favor compromising on a public option, because “the public option is the compromise.” He advocates opening up Medicare so that those under 65 can buy in, while allowing anyone who chooses to keep their private insurance.
“Americans ought to be able to decide for themselves: Is private health insurance really health insurance? Or is it simply an extension of the things that have been happening on Wall Street over the past five to ten years, in which private corporations find yet new and ingenious ways of taking money from ordinary citizens without giving them the services they’ve paid for?”
Here’s another choice bit from Raftery’s account, which offers a good precis of Dean’s book as well as his talk in San Diego.
Dean noted that public healthcare in Europe was established not by liberals, but was in fact championed by conservative statesman Winston Churchill. “Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion,” Churchill once stated. “Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.”
