by Marcia Angell, M.D.
distributed by Huffington Post and Common Dreams
(Marcia Angell, M. D., is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.)
The House health reform bill finally passed after one of Congress's longer, less enlightening debates. Two stalwarts of the single-payer movement split their votes; John Conyers voted for it; Dennis Kucinich against. Kucinich was right.
The House bill is not a "government takeover." I wish it were. Instead, it enshrines and subsidizes the "takeover" by the investor-owned insurance industry that occurred after the failure of the Clinton reform effort in 1994. The bill has a few good but marginal provisions (expansion of Medicaid, for example).
To read more click Health Care Reform?