Mr. Forster, according to a 2011 CIA study the U.S. 3rd world health outcomes are due to a lack of access to health care. Not obesity,not smoking, not a lack of exercise...ACCESS. When you have 50 million people without insurance and another 50 million with basically worthless insurance and it turns out that last year 115 million Americans did not go for health care because of cost, this is an access problem, not an over use of services problem.

Mr Forster, Medicare covers those over 65, the most expensive people in the country! If it covered everyone the per capita cost would be much less. Note that the rest of the Westernized world covers everyone. And as far as efficiency goes, Medicare's overhead is a tenth of private insurers'. No one in the Medicare bureaucracy makes millions of dollars from patients' premiums. The encumbering politics are driven by the insurance company lobby.

http://pnhpcalifornia.org

Mr. Forster states above that he believes that Medicare is inefficient administratively- actually stating that it is "the most costly/inefficient run health plan per capita in the western world." Strong statement, but not true at all. America may well have the most inefficient overall system in the world, and Medicare is not empowered by Congress to do much in terms of managing costs much), but administratively, the program is quite efficient. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has found that administrative costs under the public Medicare plan are less than 2 percent of expenditures, compared with approximately 11 percent of spending by private plans under Medicare Advantage. This is a near perfect “apples to apples” comparison of administrative costs, because the public Medicare plan and Medicare Advantage plans are operating under similar rules and treating the same population. The Heritage put out some bogus reports, that have been clearly refuted.

AB 1000 was written by the pharmaceutical lobby to get some very high-priced drugs reimbursed. Shame on you Mr. Perea.

http://www.healthcareshopper.com

We already have a "pilot" model for single payer in America, it is called Medicare and is the most costly/inefficient run healthplan per capita in the Westerized world (both administrative and actual care costs). Just intuition makes you think a single payer is cheaper? Patients and care givers are the drivers of our exhorbitant costs and a single bureaucratic process will not change that culture. We also have a very sick (heavy disease burden) culture compared to other more "efficient" national plans. Know the drivers of cost before blindly politically experimenting with the health of our country. Ideology should not play a role. How about designing real solutions unincombered by politics?

Interesting how the single payer bill passed the Senate last time, and the time before that, and made it to Schwarzenegger's desk more than once. Those four abstaining Democrats... how did they vote last time? Perhaps they are doing Mr. Brown a favor so he doesn't take any heat???!