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by Congressman Dennis Kucinich
Washington, Oct 28, 2009
Kucinich: Will We Stand for the People or the Insurance Companies?
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement about the health care debate in America:
“Providing health care to all Americans is the moral responsibility of our government, consistent with the Preamble in the Constitution. Yet we are being told that it is not possible to have the kind of single payer health system which every industrialized democracy in the world has.
“We compromised on single payer by backing a public option, and now we are being asked to compromise the public option with negotiated rates. In conference, we will likely be asked to compromise negotiated rates with a trigger. In each and every step of the health care debate, the insurance companies have won. If they get hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxpayer subsidies, they get to raise their premiums, and increase their co pays and deductibles, while the public is forced to pay for private insurance, then the insurance companies win big.
“If this is the best we can do, then it is time to ask ourselves whether the two-party system is truly capable of representing the American people or whether the system has been so compromised by special interests that we can’t even protect the health of our own people. This is a moment of truth for the Democratic Party. Will we stand for the people or the insurance companies?”
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Dennis Kucinich: Is the 2-Party System truly capable of representing the American people?
electdennis
October 28, 2009
unavailable
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Healthcare Is a Human Right
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The two-party system isn’t capable of representing the American people, but a 3- (or more-) party system is even worse.
Under any conceivable polling system implemented with paper ballots, you end up with one or more of the following problems:
1) The third party never gets enough votes.
2) Party A pushes the third party as an alternative to party B, splitting the vote.
3) Tactical voting.
Instant run-off, you name it, it has serious flaws.
There are polling systems that do a lot better, although even they cannot break Arrow’s paradox. They are systems that embody Condorcet’s criteria, such as pair-wise comparison. They are the most representative polling systems possible when 3 or more parties are involved. The problem is that computers would have to be used, and we (rightly) don’t trust them and probably never can.
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