When it comes to healthcare, is the White House listening? (And, if so, to whom?) President Obama has made a laudable promise to democratize the process of communication between the Executive branch and the American people and his administration has taken some interesting initiatives, but, here’s the point: toward what end? Over the past month, people have been encouraged to send in brief stories of their personal experience with the U.S. medical system. Many of their responses are now available at http://healthcare.barackobama.com/stories.

Read them and weep. Collectively, they tell of a country whose medical care provision is criminally inadequate, cruel, short-sighted and unfair, that pales by comparison with what is available in other developed countries where there is a national (what conservatives fearfully call a “socialized”) system and can’t even begin to compare with what exists in Cuba (more about this in a subsequent essay), a poor country, with limited resources, severely impeded by a nearly half-century-long U.S. embargo, which, as Blake Fleetwood recently wrote in The Huffington Post, “annually spends a miserly $185 per person on health care, [yet] has better infant and adult mortality rates than the US, and has a life expectancy nearly equal to ours.” There is obviously much to learn about what the Cubans have been doing in terms of medical care as a social right and, while Fleetwood’s brief piece only begins to put our own health conditions in (rather shameful) perspective, it was obviously not written with the aim of explaining the real nature of Cuba’s impressive achievement. Rant all you want about “lack of freedom” in Cuba (while pretending that the U.S., with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, doesn’t have almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners, according to Canada-based Global Research), but the fact is that Cuba’s idea of progress is based on a noble principle that is a direct descendant of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, that social provisioning should not be left up to the vagaries of a “free market” which is not at all free. For anyone interested, I would urge you to read a fascinating piece about the Cuban approach to healthcare in an article by Cliff DuRand (of the Center for Global Justice) in Z Magazine in 2007. Yes, we have a lot to learn and it might actually inform our current debate.

Such comparisons aside, however, the contributions to the “healthcare.barackobama.com/stories” site amount to nothing less than a poignant cry for a single-payer system. Not a public option. Not a market place where people can choose between private plans and a government-provided plan. No, I mean a single-payer system. A national health system. One that provides high quality, universal care, free at the point of use. After that, if anyone wants to opt out and pay more for private insurance, if they’re insane enough, let them. But, it is time for profit-driven health care to go sleep with the dinosaurs. Say good-bye to co-pays and deductibles and pre-existing conditions!

By the way, I lived in the U.K. for 12 years, during which my experience of the National Health System was never anything but positive. (And, propaganda notwithstanding, I always had the right to choose my own doctor.) So, I do not advocate a national health system for purely ideological reasons. It truly works. Our pitiful excuse for a system doesn’t.

So, the real question for today is this: having encouraged so many people to send in heart-breaking accounts of their personal experiences, why does it seem that Obama isn’t listening, that he’s so willing to compromise, to show such misplaced deference to the actors that dominate our current medical morass? Joe Biden prefaces these accounts by saying, “please read these stories [that] help us show everyone in America why fixing our broken health care system is a necessity that just can’t wait.” That’s a timid reading. Everyone, across the entire political spectrum, will agree that the current system “needs fixing.” But, why does the White House pretend that it can be fixed by a “non-solution” that appeases Republicans and conservative Democrats and that satisfies insurance and drug companies?