By STEVEN JONAS MD, MPH - 07.30.15

At about the time that the Clinton Health Plan was introduced to the Congress in the fall of 1993, through the American Public Health Association I was recruited to be a “Designated Speaker for the Clinton Health Plan.”  Of course, as a left-winger I had been a “Single-Payer” supporter for many years.  Some of my friends and colleagues on the health care field were outraged that I would do such a thing.  But my position was a simple one.  While the CHP was highly complex and hardly perfect, the intent of the Act was to get most U.S. covered by some kind of health insurance in a fairly highly regulated system.  A simple, government-run, single-payer system, it wasn’t, but: for millions of U.S. citizens it was far better than what they had (too often, nothing). 

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By STEVEN JONAS MD, MPH  - June 25, 2015

The Charleston Massacre means many things.  Most importantly it means that the Doctrine of White Supremacy that drove the Institution of Slavery, and drove what became the Confederate States of America to secession from the Union, is still alive and quite well, in the citizenry at large.  (The seemingly increasing succession of white cop/black victim murders of course has been raising the poisonous topic in the public consciousness in the past year or two; see my column “Ferguson Worked as Intended.”)  But now here it is, writ large, in the person of a violent, young, openly and proudly defiant, white supremacist.  Interestingly enough, Roof not only reflects the sentiments of the native US white supremacy movement, but of its international relatives as well.  (The Southern Poverty Law Center is a very important source of information of right-wing hate/potential terror organizations in the United States.)

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