Obama Says Single-Payer Health Care Makes Sense

clipped from blogs.wsj.com Barack Obama said he would consider embracing a single-payer health-care system sometime in the future as his plan for broader health coverage evolves, the WSJ’s Amy Chozick reports from the campaign trail. “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” Obama told some 1,800 people at a town-hall meeting on the economy in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But critics, including every Republican we can think of, cringe at the elimination of competition and deep government involvement in the private sector. “People don’t have time to wait,” Obama said. “They need relief now. So my attitude is let’s build up the system we got, let’s make it more efficient, we may be over time—as we make the system more efficient and everybody’s covered—decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.”