Universal Health Care in Your Local News

I've recently read a few really great op-eds, editorials and articles from local newspapers around the country on the expansion of S-CHIP that President Obama signed this week and on the need to provide affordable, universal health care to all Americans.  I've linked a number of the articles below, with some highlights from them.  If you've read an article in your local news that I've missed, please link to it in the comments and I'll update this post with it.

Fix Must Include Health Care [1], By Rev. Ted Meyers and Beverly Jean D'Errico

Padadena Star-News

"With an economic stimulus package directed at covering the additional costs for the first three to five years of any increased health coverage, with the addition of preventive care, you can see that our current economic crisis provides us with an opportunity to enhance and reform our health-care system and at the same time reorder our economic priorities."

Universal health care a necessity [2], By Eamonn Hart

The Bowdoin Orient

"Universal health care is necessary to revitalize the middle class in America. Stimulus checks are helpful, but the risk of serious illness or injury often prevents families from injecting money back into the economy, preferring instead to save it for an emergency that they fear will not be covered (if, indeed, they are fortunate enough to have health insurance)."

'Medicare-for-all' cure for health care woes [3], By Daniel P. Writ, MD

The Houston Chronicle

"The data are in. Incremental reforms, mostly mandate schemes which retain the for-profit insurance companies, have been tried in seven states over the past two decades: Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Vermont, Maine. In all of these states the reforms have failed to contain costs."

Universal health care aim of Colorado proposal [4], By Ed Sealover

Rocky Mountain News

"A plan to lay the groundwork for a Canadian-style, single-payer universal health care system in Colorado has been introduced by a group of Democrats.  House Bill 1273, sponsored by Fort Collins Rep. John Kefalas and co-sponsored by 18 legislators, would create a privately funded commission to study how a government-funded health care system could work. The goal is to have a single-payer bill to the General Assembly in 2011, he said."

Time has come for single-payer universal health care system [5], By Nick Matel

The Fort Worth News-Sentinel

"The time has come to take that long-overdue progressive step forward and implement a single-payer universal health care model in America. The time has come for our leaders to ensure that no citizen is ever again added to the list of those who have died due to a lack of health coverage, a list that adds 18,000 names each year, according to the Institute of Medicine. The administration of hope and change is in place, and therefore the question must be asked: If not finally this administration, then who? And if not now, when?"