"Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and the even more badly botched Hillary Clinton healthcare reform effort of the early 1990s, have one thing in common (along with their aura of failure). Although derided by right-wingers as Marxist social engineering, both are enormously less ambitious, and more obsequious to the so-called free market, than the comprehensive national health insurance law proposed, within my lifetime, by a United States president. Modeled closely on programs enacted in major Western European nations, the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan, or CHIP, would have offered identical healthcare coverage to all Americans, irrespective of age or income (and with no exclusions for any reason), through three separate but interdependent programs: One for people with full-time jobs, through their employers; one for the unemployed, disabled and poor (replacing Medicaid); and an expanded version of Medicare providing full healthcare coverage for all senior citizens.
"You already know the punch line here, right?"
Andrew O'Hehir in Salon remembers Richard Nixon's health-care proposal.
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