For a second there, I though it said "single PRAYER," like pray for your own health, we're not doing anything about it.

That's great news!

The article itself is interesting too, for getting a sense of the range of opinions:

"We will not be lecturing people on what's right and wrong," said Dr. Pellegrino, a spry 88-year-old widely recognized as a father of bioethics and the founding editor of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.

Health system reform is "a black hole -- once you get in it, you never get out," said Gilbert Meilaender, PhD, professor of Christian ethics at Valparaiso University in Indiana. "The more we try to fully elaborate all the principles that might be involved in reforming the health care system, the more hopeless and black hole-ish things get."

Thanks a lot, Prof. Meilaender, for your lousy contribution to the public discourse. My knee-jerk reaction--blame Christianity--is unfair, given the number of churches that have endorsed single payer.

OTOH:

Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH, argued that the single-payer model prevails around the world in countries that provide better access to care at lower cost than the U.S. system. "I think single payer is the only morally acceptable reform choice, because it's the only effective one on the table," said Dr. Woolhandler, a primary care doctor who co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program in 1986. "If we're concerned about the 18,000 deaths a year due to uninsurance, then we are morally obligated to go with a plan that has been shown to work."

Other panelists were reluctant to declare their proposals morally superior [oh, snap! Mr. reporter], and there was no apparent consensus among council members about which proposal would best improve access to care.

The AMA itself is still not on our side, but there are some implications to unpack from this:

At its June Annual Meeting, the AMA House of Delegates adopted policy seeking to replace the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance with tax credits and an exemption for health insurance spending from state and federal payroll taxes. Expanding coverage for the uninsured also tops the AMA's legislative agenda.

The AMA has long been split from corporate interests on health issues; this helps us. We can see here that the split continues: corporate interest groups are opposed to changing the "favorable tax treatment of employer-sponsored coverage", including the tax deduction; the AMA wants to replace the deduction with tax credits, presumably to decouple health insurance from employment to some degree. (Someone correct me please if this is wrong.)

and those most need healthcare assistance.

How will Obama, with his seeming magic hand of the market advisers, react to this?