In the 1990s, Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler did something her colleagues at Harvard called “crazy:” she decided to work with a senator named Bernie Sanders on healthcare reform. Dr. Woolhandler had already founded an advocacy group called Physicians for a National Health Program, which declared the for-profit healthcare system broken and proposed one solution: single-payer national health insurance. (Or, as Sanders calls it, Medicare for all.) 

Dr. Woolhandler, now a distinguished professor at Hunter College, says this solution is more urgent than ever. Our healthcare costs are soaring and people are only getting sicker. Today we ask Dr. Woolhandler: how did we get here, why is a single-payer system the only answer, and how can it be feasibly implemented?

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