GOP Health Bill—How We Got Into This Mess

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President Johnson is shown signing Medicare into law in 1965 with former President Truman, seated right, looking on. Photo courtesy of New America Media

By Paul Kleyman, New America Media

Amid all of the scoreboard coverage of the Republicans’ American Health Care Act—they have the Senate votes, they don’t have the votes, how many millions will be stranded without insurance—few lines of type have delved beneath the partisan debates as sharply as Christy Ford Chapin did in her New York Times op-ed June 19, headlined, “How Did Health Care Get to Be Such a Mess?.”

“The problem with American health care is not the care. It’s the insurance,” Chapin begins. Her essay comes on the eve of the GOP’s promised release of its secretive overhaul of American health care. But, while almost everyone agrees that health care in the United States is broken, neither the national media nor political leadership have added much to the public’s understanding of how basically flawed the system is, how it was destined to become so costly, while healing so few compared with health care outcomes in any other advanced economy.

Read the complete story at New America Media.

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