Page One

To the Editor: 

Polls show that the majority of Americans want medical care equally available to all through adoption of a single-payer "Canadian System". 

Long overdue is call for adoption of an analogous single-payer public education system. The Supreme Court's unreasonable green light for school voucher plans--assertedly to open equal educational opportunity to the children of poor families by at least partially paying with public funds for flight from inferior public schools--will tragically diminish the money available to those public school districts most in need. As vouchers produce a domino-effect collapse of public school districts, Bush-league over-priced private academies will proliferate, as occurred all too often under the post-WWII GI Bill of Rights. Our answer should be speedy adoption of a single-payer K-12 equal-expenditure-per-pupil nationwide public school system totally financed by steeply graduated federal income taxes in the upper brackets, with initial extra expenditures to rehabilitate ramshackle schools in poor neighborhoods. 

Judith Segard Hunt 

Berkeley