A Cloward-Piven Strategy for Single Payer?

By Chris Maisano

With yesterday's passage in the House of the Obama administration's health care reform bill, it would seem at first glance that the movement for national, single-payer health insurance has been seriously derailed. After all, if all of the hype and adulation surrounding the bill's passage is to be believed, the fight for universal health care is basically over, except for necessary technical tweaks that will "fix" and "improve" the bill in the coming years.

However, there are many serious flaws in the bill that will put single payer back on the political agenda sooner than we may think. The indispensable and indefatigable folks at Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) cataloged many of them in a press release earlier today, but they only briefly touch on an issue that I think could potentially be a central aspect of single-payer strategy in the coming years: Medicaid and the fiscal crisis of the states.

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