Can a story be hidden in the Sunday New York Times?  Well, George Bush's latest tax increase was.  Robert Pear writes:

Budget documents show that Mr. Bush will propose a similar surcharge on premiums for Medicare's new prescription drug benefit. In addition, the president will ask Congress to "eliminate annual indexing of income thresholds," so that more people would eventually have to pay the higher premiums.

Bush last month proposed a tax on employer healthcare benefits; this month he is proposing a tax of Medicare prescription drug benefits, and moving to eventually extent the tax on Medicare from just upper-income individuals to those with middle-incomes.

There may or may not be arguments for indexing benefits--but not like this.  Bush is proposing to cut $100 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over the next 5 years.  These are among the most popular federal programs, and Americans say they want them expanded not contracted.  

Before Bush leaves office he apparently has a goal of gutting America's public health system AND of undermining the universal appeal of Medicare.  This fits with an ideologiy dedicated to protecting profits for insuers and other private drug companies at all expense.  The first casualty?  Public hospitals in big cities. Who needs emergency rooms, anyway?

As noted around the Web, John Edwards became the first major Presidential candidate to announce the details of his healthcare plan--and they are hugely disappointing for SinglePayer advocates.  Edwards' plan appears to cut and paste whole portions of the plan recently proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger: "pay or play" mandates for employers (meaning cover your employees or pay up), "individual mandates" (requiring individuals to buy health insurance), some more money to Medicaid and children's programs, some tax changes, and some regulations on insurance companies.  

The only thing new here is his proposal for "Health Markets," which appear to be non-profit brokers that will allow individuals to purchase either a new basic Medicare plan or a private plan.  What's the upshot of this?:

A professor at Cornell's Weill Medical College who also supports single-payer insurance, Oliver Fein, said having a government plan compete with privately-run insurers could lead to significant problems. "The private insurance companies are likely to cherry pick in that setting to try to get healthy people to enroll with them and leave the really sick in the single-payer or government program," he said.."

Strangely enough, here's how The Raleigh News & Observier covered it:

Over time, Edwards said, this system might evolve into a single-payer approach if businesses and individuals prefer the government program.

If Dr. Fein's analysis is correct, though, the Medicare programs will be saddled with worse cases and have to offer higher rates as a result.  If so, this would hurt the drive for SinglePayer healthcare, while protecting the profits of the big insurance corporations that are giving us so much grief.  We have the plan from Mr. Edwards--now we await the explanation.

Elsewhere, David Broder suggests that the next President will preside over major changes in the healthcare sector, and notes that:

Both the Massachusetts and California plans step away from the 65-year-old pattern of tying health insurance to the place of employment, a historical oddity now visibly failing in this far more mobile society. Instead, these plans require every individual to purchase health insurance, with subsidies as needed to be financed by government, business and, in Schwarzenegger's plan, hospitals and doctors.

In California, Schwarzenegger plans to make insurance affordable for everyone...just don't have eye or dental problems, okay? Massachusetts might get around this problem with barebones "buy or die" plans, Medicaid is getting squeezed out, and
drug companies are reneging on their promise to assist needy seniors with their drug needs.

And finally, why aren't we further along in our drive for universal healthcare with a single standard of coverage, asksNNOC/CNA executive director Rose Ann DeMoro in a Florida Sun-Sentinal op-ed:

The 20 largest HMOs in the U.S., for example, made $10.8 billion in profits in 2005, and UnitedHealth Group alone just posted $1.2 billion in profits for the last quarter of 2006. Drug companies make even more; the world's 13 biggest reported $62 billion in profits in 2004.

Health care corporations have effectively used their economic clout to block real reform both in Washington and in state capitols, becoming the largest spenders on lobbying and setting up a parade of people who rotate back and forth from administration posts and congressional offices to the corporate boardrooms.

If you want to join the fight for single-payer healthcare, sign up with SinglePayer.com, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can share your story about surviving the healthcare industry here, and start contacting media here.