Single-payer health care in action - Indian health care's victims

How have Native Americans fared in their single-payer federal health care system

It was all uniformly, bureaucratically, depressing. Inadequate doesn't begin to describe the services offered and criminal doesn't begin to describe the results. I have walked down city streets where I literally had to step over prone and supine, hopefully just sleeping, but in some cases most probably dying, drunk Native Americans, victims of a known genetic predisposition to alcoholism, but somehow beyond the scope of the medical system put in place for them by the same federal government which now wants to assume responsibility for your health care.

At IHS headquarters in Rockville, it was eerily similar, except it was the out-stretched legs (and attitudes) of uncaring bureaucrats that provided the extended barriers to progress. And no, most of those bureaucrats weren't indifferent, racist whites; they were almost exclusively indifferent, brown and black-skinned representatives of the suppressed minority classes.

So think about that when you consider turning over responsibility for your health care to a federal bureaucracy that has been responsible for Indian health care for more than a century. I'll give good odds that Indian Health Service is an example of a nationally-managed health care program that I am sure the Obama Administration would wish you'd never heard of.

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