Should We Support Clinton’s Plan?

Health care reform is the critical political issue confronting the American left in 1994. How should we relate to the Clinton plan? Congress is not going to vote on our plan: a single-payer system that would guarantee every American all necessary health services with no out-of-pocket costs. Instead, we face a vote where the best we can get is a patchwork, uniquely American plan that recognizes the accelerating corporatization of American health care and tries to build universal access around the untested theories of managed competition. Competing health care corporations will ration care to all those who cannot afford to buy their way up the hierarchy of plans. Yet even this hodgepodge will not pass without a significant left mobi...