Vermont makes it into the kickass blue state category today for passing a bill creating near-universal health coverage. Once again, blue states showing how it's done. I especially liked this quote.

Advocates said Catamount Health would go further than the universal health care plan approved in Massachusetts earlier this spring. That is because the plan is designed to provide better care for people with chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease or cancer and head off serious complications.

It is designed "so we pay for the blood work and not the amputation," said House Health Care Committee chairman Rep. John Tracy, a Democrat.

Especially in regards to my "US Healthcare is the Worst in the World" post, this is exactly what should be provided to the citizens of every state in the union.

The best thing is, all those stupid arguments the libertarians use to try to avoid a single-payer or government subsidized system will be proven to be bunk. Between Massachusetts and Vermont we should be able to show that universal healthcare not only works, but can give a (blue) state a comparative advantage (as long as that state isn't Tennessee which ran their universal healthcare program into the ground).

After all, if the state subsidized health care it's actually a boon for small business (and large businesses too). This is one of the issues that's hurting Americas ability to compete with other countries worldwide. Other nations are well on their way towards nationalizing medical care, which it is clear, costs less and provides better healthcare. Americans get some of the poorest care in the industrialized world (we are ranked 37th in the world behind every other industrialized nation except Turkey I think), as a result our health is worse (even when you control for race, poverty, and other risk factors), and at the same time we pay the most for care. We have to stop listening to these fearmongers who say stupid shit like you won't ever be able to get MRIs on demand if we nationalize health care. So fucking what. It's more important that people receive preventative care, vaccines, check-ups, medicines for chronic diseases, and screening than it is for them to get an MRI on demand. Besides, it's not like nationalization will make all the machines we do have disappear, we're always going to have better access because we invented the damn things and spread them all over the country already.

Good health care is cheap, simple and preventative. It means you provide routine screening and basic medical checkups to everybody, before they get sick. When they do get sick you use time-tested generic medications, and don't immediately send everyone to an MRI. It should be possible to provide this to American citizens at half the expense we currently forward to the insurance companies that are busy ass-raping the nation.