You may be interested in a couple recent pieces I've done:

RECENT WRITINGS
"Racine: Haunted City" in the July, 2007 issue of The Progressive.
I reflect on family history, the state of my hometown, once a hothouse of working people standing up for their rights, and now, thanks to deindustrialization and globalization, a city where the factories are being emptied out and the jails being filled up.

"Welcome to the Sicko world" July 3 FightingBob.com.
"Michael Moore's "Sicko" doesn't have an unforgettable shower scene like Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," but nonetheless, private insurers and drug companies are running out of the theatres screaming in terror.
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"Sicko" has touched an unbelievably responsive chord among Americans distraught over their health system: it's expensive (twice any other nation's per-capita cost), provides 37th-place quality, carries a 31% bureaucratic overhead burden, leaves out some 47 million uninsured, and is dominated by for-profit insurers, not caring medical professionals. In city after city, audiences erupt in applause and standing ovations at the conclusion of Michael Moore's film.

But public opinion doesn't seem to register with our elected representatives, who often seem to operate as though held tightly on a leash by their big campaign contributors. Along with tens of millions in campaign contributions, there are four healthcare lobbyists for each of our 535 members of Congress.
Only people power can overcome this money power. Along with fighting for the Healthy Wisconsin legislation that will lower costs and rein in the insurers' abuses, here's some sources for ideas on what you can do:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/what-can-i-do/
http://www.calnurse.org/sicko/
http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/checkup/

A Yugo-quality system at Cadillac prices: blogger Michael Rosen at midcoast describes our health system very precisely.

In Wisconsin, we are particularly hard-hit: Expansion Management--a publication aimed at the Corporate Masters of the Universe who decide which plant stays open and which new one opens up--lists Wisconsin as tied for 3rd highest insurance premiums.

This represents  a deadly blow to Wisconsin's economic competitiveness. As retired CEO and Republican Jack Lohman put it, "Free-market medicine is killing our free-market businesses."

Yet the prospect of fundamental reform like the Healthy Wisconsin plan that passed the State Senate sends shivers down the spines of the private insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. The private insurance companies would be rendered largely irrelevant in Wisconsin under this plan, and if they choose to enter the market at all, they will be tightly regulated.

Similarly, the major drug companies know that a plan like Healthy Wisconsin will lead to the government using its bargaining power to negotiate fair prices for drugs for Wisconsin citizens. So the cries of outrage from politicians like Mike Huebsch, who are sponsored by the campaign donations of the health insurance-drug-medical complex, are quite predictable.

But it is disappointing to see some Democrats, mostly at the national level, fighting to keep insurance companies deeply involved in our healthcare. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden is one of the worst offenders. At the state level, we have State Rep. Robert Ziegelbauer bizarrely declaring, "This really is an ideological battle going on in our society. Do we want Soviet-style central planning, or do we trust individuals to make their own health care decisions. It's really that simple."(Manitowoc Herald-Times, 3/6/07)

What Wyden and Ziegelbauer don't grasp are the following points:
a) The private insurance industry has swallowed healthcare, like a giant Anaconda snake devouring smaller prey. The Anaconda must get fed before anything reaches further into the system, hence the astronomical bureaucratic costs and dismal outcomes of US healthcare. If anyone is issuing Soviet-style dictates to doctors and patients, it is the private insurers seeking the maximum profit.
b) The single-payer model championed in Michael Moore's new movie "Sicko" has been a great success in diverse societies, from Canada to France to Taiwan. At half the cost, citizens of these societies are permitted to see their doctor more often, remain in the hospital until they recover enough to go home, and are generally far more healthy.
c) In a single-payer system like Canada or France's, doctors remain in private practice and hospitals remain in the hands of private non-profits. There is no government takeover of healthcare; the big change is the elimination of the parasitic and utterly useless insurance industry.
d) Contrary to what defenders of the status quo claim (and even some reformers like SEIU PResident Andy Stern, Ron Pollack of Families USA and Prof. Jacob Hacker), Americans are ready to embrace the single-payer alternative. Here's what Business Week concluded 5/16/05 in reviewing its poll results:"67% of all Americans think it's a good idea to guarantee healthcare for all US citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27% dissenting." More recently, the Medical Society of Minnesota surveyed its membership, with the results released in March, 2007. An overwhelming 64% of Minnesota doctors preferred enactment of a single-payer system.

In response to popular sentiment, the private insurers, drug companies, and their allies have already showered $5 million on the presidential candidates of both parties, with the aim of maintaining a highly profitable status quo. But the prairie fire of revolt for a single-payer health system may soon be raging out of control, with the for-profit medical industries' armies of lobbyists helpless to stop it.

"Pluralistic ignorance" is an invaluable concept for understanding American politics, as Mark Buchanan suggests in a NY Times Select column May 24.

The basic idea is that a substantial number of Americans--often a big majority--are persuaded by the White House and commercial media that the progressive views they embrace are only held by a marginal minority.

Both the major parties and the Beltway media generally function as what Buchanan calls "subculture enforcers" who effectively persuade the majority that their views are far outside the mainstream. The White House--abetted by top Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, and the like-- and the corporate media all seem wrapped in a cocoon of self-ratifying myths that reinforce a unique American brand of political discourse that is both remarkably narrow and serves the interests of those in power.

Anyone who dares to puncture the cocoon, like Stephen Colbert at the White House Press Corps dinner last year, is branded as a rude pariah by the insiders. But a truth-teller like Colbert gets embraced as a hero by the general public, as evidenced by the popularity of the video footage of his gutsy in-your-face putdown of Bush.

Consider as well the divergence between acceptable elite political and media views and the perspectives of the public on some of the most critical issues. As Mark Buchanan notes, 60% of Americans want a timetable for withdrawal of US troops (who, according to a Zogby poll, favored by a 72% majority a withdrawal last year).

Washington pundits and pols favor "free trade" agreements, but a University of Maryland survey showed that even among those earning $110,000 or more, 55% believe that such deals destroy US jobs (of course, it's much higher among the general public.)

The notion of a single-payer healthcare system is widely dismissed by the Capitol Gang, but a Business Week poll in 2005 revealed 67% explicitly supporting a single-payer health system like Canada or Britain's. But thanks to the "subculture custodian" leaders of both parties(guided far more by contributors than mere voters) and leading media voices, "pluralistic ignorance reigns--at the expense of democracy and a far more humane America.

Roger Bybee, Milwaukee.

Americans' opportunities for healthcare reform come around very rarely, maybe not quite as infrequently as Haley's Comet, but only about every 15 to 20 years.

The last time around when reform was on the agenda in 1994,Bill and Hillary Clinton began by ruling out a Canadian-style "single-payer" plan that: a) represents MAXIMUM-STRENGTH reform in terms of costing roughly half of US per-person health expenditures while offering far better outcomes (life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.), covering every single citizen (as opposed to leaving 47 million Americans without insurance) and more streamlined care (more doctor visits, longer hospital stays) than the US.

The single-payer model is able to achieve these results because the huge costs imposed by the dominance of private insurers are eliminated--underwriting costs, commissions, CEO pay, huge office buildings, and enormous staffs devoted to rejecting enrollees with health problems and turning down claims for care. US administrative costs are over 31% compared with roughly 16% in Canada. b) Single-payer is relatively SIMPLE and FAMILIAR, since it is much like our own popular Medicare system in that patients choose their own doctors, doctors remain in private practice, and hospitals stay privately-owned. (However, a single-payer plan would lift doctor and hospital reimbursements to more reasonable levels than possible now. As with Medicare, a single-payer plan essentially pushes private insurers out of the driver's seat of health care.(Although during the Bush years, there has been a huge expansion of subsidies to private insurers seeking to tap healthier and wealthier Medicare patients.) In the insurers' place, each Canadian province has one non-profit entity that pays the bills and negotiates with hospitals and doctors. c) The single-payer model is HUGELY POPULAR: a Wall St. Journal poll in 1993 showed 69% support among American citizens for a Canadian-style plan. But the Clintons rapidly disqualified this alternative, as it would alienate the major campaign donors from the giants of the insurance and HMO industry. In its place, the Clintons designed a hopelessly complex Rube Goldberg machine based on the concept of "managed care." However, the smaller and medium-sized health insurance firms launched the infamous "Harry and Louise" TV ads to undermine public support for reform, since they were being cut out in favor of larger firms.

Meanwhile, consumers were not particularly enthused about a plan so complicated and so heavily based on Health Maintenance Organizations, which are widely seen as intruding into patients' choice of doctors and doctors' decisions on care (like demanding "drive-through deliveries" and other too-brief hospital stays. So the "HillaryCare" plan managed to arouse the opposition of part of the insurance industry and utterly failed to ignite much enthusiasm among the millions who were seeking both decent coverage and relief from their private insurance bureaucracies. Further, top Republican strategies like William Kristol recognized that passage of meaningful health reform would help rebuild the Democratic base created by the New Deal, the GI Bill, civil rights legislation, and Medicare. Real healthcare reform would be a landmark achievement that would generate enormous support for the Democrats, so the Republicans resisted the tiniest changes.

WINNING THROUGH SURRENDER After waiting some 13 years for another shot at reform,some reformers are so eager to get anything with a "reform" label passed that they are willing to overlook the basic flaws with any plan that keeps private insurers running our healthcare system. Unfortunately, one of those reformers is Dr. Atul Gawande, a columnist for the NY Times who has written movingly in the past on the burdens imposed by private insurers. But in his May 31 column, Dr. Gawande cites the chief barrier to reform not as the upcoming propaganda assaults of the health-insurance and pharmaceutical industries and their allies, but the danger that reformers will not simply surrender to these forces. "If we as consumers, health professionals and business people sit on our hands, unwilling to compromise and defend change, we will be doomed to our sliding global competitiveness and self-defeating [health] system."
But Dr. Gawande fails to recognize several key realities:
1) AMERICANS WANT SINGLE-PAYER US citizens--and that now includes doctors--want maximum-strength reform, not tinkering that leaves the insurers in charge. Polling by Business Week in 2005 showed "67% of all Americans think it's a good idea to guarantee healthcare for all US citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27% dissenting." Remarkably, the incursions of insurers into health decisions and intensifying commercial pressures have also galvanized doctors. The result has been an increasing openness to a universal single-payer healthcare plan along the lines of Canada's, where doctors and hospitals remain private but the insurance function is "socialized." Polls of Massachusetts and Minnesota both showed a stunning 64% of doctors favoring a single-payer approac want a single-payer system.
2)SURRENDER WILL "DOOM US," TOO: Unless we take on the insurance and drug industries, the system will not fundamentally change. Costs will remain out of control, eating more and more of our GNP (now at about 16%). US products will become more and more uncompetitive unless employers keep dumping more and more costs on to workers, or cutting off insurance entirely.And that means that efforts to establish universal care will eventually be undermined (probably sooner rather than later)
3) SOMETHING WORTH FIGHTING FOR: The insurance and drug industries have billions in profits to hire legions of lobbyists, clever PR people to invent false attacks on single-payer, and of course tons of money to give as legal "payoffs" to congressional and presidential candidates in exchange for hoped-for inaction on healthcare. The only way that organized money can possibly be defeated is with organized people. And the people will not get organized and get mobilized unless they see a clear and dramatic shift from the status quo. Giving in to the insurers and drug industries, as Dr. Gawande prescribes, is actuallythe surest way to guarantee that real health reform remains a distant dream.