We can expand Medicare to everyone without raising taxes on the middle class by creating a national network of genuinely nonprofit clinics and member-owned health plans. This will cut HMOs out of the deal, reduce administrative overhead, and convert the system from greed to generosity.

National health insurance was pioneered in the United States 120 years ago by fraternal benefit societies — the funny-handshake people — whose members built hospitals, orphanages, old folks’ homes and, for pennies per week, received sickness and death benefits. Their genuinely nonprofit systems, serving one third of American households, could have merged to national scale but were gradually outlawed by corporate lobbyists.

Canada’s national health plan began with the 1947 co-op model created by a Saskatchewan farm town of 15,000. In 1997 I started the Ithaca Health Alliance in the same spirit. We covered members for 12 categories of common emergency for $100/YEAR, then started our own free clinic.

My book “Health Democracy,” based on that successful co-op, explains how: http://www.paulglover.org/books.html