Ryan Cooper comments at The Week:
ObamaCare plays to precisely the opposite of America’s strengths. Instead of being a simple,
straightforward program to hand out insurance coverage — the policy equivalent of a honking great axe — it’s got complex regulations, fiddly quasi-market structures, and mandates everywhere you look — the policy equivalent of the repair box from Toy Story 2. It should be no surprise that many of those regulations do not completely fix the problems they were intended to address, or are effectively ignored. We need simpler, bigger, blunter tools, and single-payer fits the bill.
While it is in many ways true that markets are extraordinarily ill-suited to delivering health care, for many of the same reasons they are ill-suited to delivering essential utilities like potable water and reliable electricity, Obamacare was never claimed to be ideal. It was merely the best deal that could be had at the time, with opponents doing everything they could to make it as unwieldy and ineffective as possible. That’s why Democrats are calling for improvements, to keep what works and fix what doesn’t. Of course, single payer has many reasons to recommend it — one big one being that lowest costs require large pools of insured people, and nothing is larger than a pool that includes everyone. But given existing public views and the long-standing “do-nothing” mentality of the Republican-controlled House, single-payer will be a long battle, despite the current chaos in the GOP and the potential opportunities it presents.
We could have states start a movemnt to create single payer and then drag along the Congress.
I have testified about such a plan several times in Missouri.
http://dangerousintersection.org/2009/02/02/states-don%E2%80%99t-have-to-wait-for-stimulus-payments/