Second opinion.

• Author: Knoll, Erwin
• Position: Health care reform - Editorial

My weekly radio program, Second Opinion, which is aired by some forty listener-sponsored and community stations around the country (as well as eight in Canada and a Costa Rica-based short-wave station, Radio for Peace International) doesn't usually make news. It isn't that kind of show.

My guests have included such leading activists, writers, scholars, and artists as Frances Moore Lappe, Daniel Ellsberg, Barbara Ehrenreich, Christopher Hitchens, June Jordan, Holly Near, Lewis Lapham, Si Kahn, and Marge Piercy. These are interesting people, and they often have important things to say - but their remarks are rarely the stuff of front-page headlines, and they hardly ever make the TV news.

But one recent interview was an exception. Early in October, as I interviewed Senator Paul Wellstone about President Clinton's health-care reform plan, it occurred to me that the Minnesota Democrat was, indeed, making news.

Wellstone (who, incidentally, wrote for The Progressive long before he entertained ambitions of running for the U.S. Senate) is one of the few Democrats in Washington, D.C., to speak out volubly for a significantly stronger health-care program than the one Clinton has proposed. Like The Progressive, he favors a single-payer plan of the Canadian type - a plan that would get the insurance industry out of the health-care business.

"The President's proposal," Wellstone said on Second Opinion, "moves in the right direction with the focus at least on universal coverage and a comprehensive package of benefits, although it's not there yet. Single-payer meets these criteria better. Under a single-payer system, we would go after the administrative bloat; we would control costs where they should be controlled, and we would have a comprehensive package of benefits that really meets the needs of the people."

Wellstone, who is sponsoring a bill that would put a single-payer program into effect, explained why the Canadian plan had received such short shrift in the Capital.

"The noose gets drawn tightly here in Washington," he said. "It's that old issue of money and politics and power. Senators kept telling me when I first came here, |The single-payer bill you're introducing is the most desirable, Paul, but "the groups" won't accept it.'

"Three things happened:

"First, the pattern of power in Washington - if you will, the definition of what's realistic here-precluded single-payer, given the opposition of some powerful big-ticket interest groups.

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