Excerpt: [Question]: If single payer faces the serious political obstacles that come from calling for wiping out the private health insurance system, are there incremental things that can be done to take us in that direction? Woolhandler: The only incremental thing that one can do that makes any sense at all would be placing all hospital care into a single payer system as a first step, and then later placing other types of care into a single payer system. That's what happened in Saskatchewan. They initially enacted a single payer system that covered all the hospitals and then a few years later enacted a single payer system that covered everything. That will work, because if you do the whole sector at a time, you can get the administrative savings. The thing that won't work is a patch here, a patch there, because you don't get any of the administrative savings.  MORE >>