 So finally, we have some good news to report on here on the Humanist Report. So Medicare for All just received a gigantic endorsement, arguably the most important endorsement it could possibly receive. This is something that we need to legitimize our fight for Medicare for All, and we got it at a great time when we have a candidate who is running, who could win, who actually is pushing for Medicare for All. So as Common Dreams writer John Keely reports, the fight for Medicare for All received a two-handed boost from tens of thousands of doctors on Monday when the American College of Physicians, in a move described as a sea change for the medical professions, officially endorsed a single-payer system among only one of two possible ways to improve the nation's healthcare woes. Representing 159,000 doctors of internal medicine nationwide, the ACP is the largest medical specialty society and second-largest physician group in the country overall after the American Medical Association. The ACP delivered its case in a 43-page position paper titled, Envisioning a Better U.S. Healthcare System for All, Coverage and Cost of Care, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on Monday. According to the paper, quote, although the United States leads the world in healthcare spending, it fares far worse than its peers on coverage and most dimensions of value. Cost and coverage are intertwined. Many Americans cannot afford health insurance and even those with insurance face substantial cost-related barriers to care. Employer-sponsored insurance is less prevalent and more expensive than in the past and in response deductibles have grown and benefits have been cut. The long-term solvency of U.S. public insurance programs is a perennial concern. The United States spends far more on healthcare administration than peer countries. Administrative barriers divert time from patient care and fresh rate patients, clinicians and policy makers. Major changes are needed to a system that costs too much, leaves too many behind and delivers too little. So this is absolutely phenomenal and Bernie Sanders almost immediately tweeted about this, welcoming their support here. And this isn't, you know, what I would call a full-throated endorsement, even though they're very explicitly saying they support Medicare for all. They also, you know, suggest that a public option would be a nice incremental step. Although keep in mind, this is, you know, the analysis of physicians, not policymakers, and how this would actually look in practice. Because there is a response to this paper by other physicians who say, actually a public option isn't a good bet for anyone because in the end, that's not actually going to give us the cost benefits that actually a single-payer system would. Quote, while the ACP in its backing of a single-payer approach also co-endorsed the more incremental step of creating a federally-administered public option as a pathway to universal coverage, doctors Steffi Woolhander and David Hemmelstein, co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program, argue the latter would be an inferior avenue if the aim is to cover everyone while reducing overall costs. According to an op-ed by Woolhander and Hemmelstein, also published in the annals alongside the ACP's new position paper, quote, achieving universal coverage would be costlier under the public choice model the ACP co-endorses along with single-payer. Unlike a public-private mix of coverage that the public option would represent, the pair write a single-payer Medicare for all would allow hospitals and doctors to save billions on billing-related costs each year, and those savings could be repurposed to expand care to millions for less cost than the status quo. Now, to expand on that, the reason why it's better for us when it comes to cost to not do a public option and just do single-payer is because think about this. The reason why administrative costs are so high is because hospitals have to figure out who to bill. Right? But if you just have one option, the government being the sole insurer for everybody, it's easy. You don't have to figure out who to bill. You bill the United States government. You bill Medicare, right? But with a public option, you still have public and private in play, and you have to figure out who to bill. Therefore, you don't get all of these benefits, you know, the reduction in administrative costs that all still remains in place. So the long-term solution really is Medicare for all, period, full stop. And one of the individuals who's part of Physicians for a National Health Program is Adam Gaffney. And he helped craft Pramila Jayapal's version of Medicare for all in the house, and he made it so that way it gets rid of private insurance, basically, and it's free of the point of service and comprehensive. That really is the best way. So I'm glad that the ACP endorsed this. I wish that they wouldn't have also signaled support for incremental approaches, although as a physician, you have to understand that their goal is just to simply expand coverage as fast as possible. And from a legislative standpoint, they probably think that it would be easier to just quickly pass a public option and then move on, but understand that anything that would possibly cut into the profits of these private insurance companies will be met with a lot of resistance. So there's no point in wasting time trying to fight for a public option when you're going to have to fight just as hard for that as you would for a Medicare for all system, legislatively speaking. And the problem with the public option is that it's basically doomed to fail, which is what a lot of physicians are now coming out and saying, like Adam Gaffney and Himmelstein and whatnot. Because think about this, if you have a public option system and you have a really substantial share of, you know, private offerings in place, what are they going to do? They're going to disingenuously market cheaper skinnier plans to young people. And that's going to push everyone who's sick onto the public system while healthy people will just buy private insurance and then the public option will be overburdened and underfunded as a result. And it could possibly fail. And if it fails, then everyone, Republicans, corporate Democrats, are going to point to that failure as evidence that government-run healthcare doesn't work when that's not what we want anyway. So at the end of the day, understand that this endorsement is absolutely massive with the caveat that they also think that a public option might be a good idea. But this is, you know, the analysis from the perspective of people who are experts in healthcare, not policy, but when you have people like Adam Gaffney and Dr. Himmelstein doing both, I think that we really are moving the Overton window. When you have all of these doctors, thousands, basically saying, yeah, we support Medicare for all, we support a public option too, but the story is Medicare for all. That's what they're kind of really rolling with for now as their predominant policy. It really goes to show you that all the effort that we are making, it's working, right? There's so many flaws in our healthcare system and in spite of the media's attempts and politicians' attempts in both parties to crush support for Medicare for all that we've built, we have never had this much momentum. I want you to realize that. We've never, ever had this much momentum and we've talked about a universal healthcare type of system for more than a century in this country. So if we're going to get it, it's going to be what our generation accomplishes. If we let our foot off the gas when we have this much momentum, I truly believe we will never get a single pair Medicare for all type system. So this is just another boost and more reason why we have to move to Medicare for all because doctors are prescribing it. I love this graphic by the way. And this comes at a perfect time when we just so happen to have a politician who has a record of advocating for Medicare for all. This is great news.