Doctors David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler are the two leading lights of the single payer movement. As such, they have been harshly critical of Obamneycare.

Most recently, Woolhandler appeared on Democracy Now on January 9 and said “at this point, it’s pretty clear the American people got a good look at Obamacare and said – this is not a solution, this is not working.”

“And many of them do in fact support the idea of a single-payer Medicare for all. And that’s what we need to be pushing right now.”

“Well, we need to be saying that we need to go beyond the Affordable Care Act to a single-payer system,” Woolhandler said. “Merely trying to defend the Affordable Care Act at this point is not going to work. The American people have seen it for three years and rejected it. And, you know, 20 million people got insurance, and that’s great, but there were 280 million people who saw no improvements in their healthcare. They still can’t afford healthcare despite having private insurance, because of the co-payments and the deductibles in those narrow networks. So we need to go to a system that fixes the healthcare system for everyone. And that’s what’s politically possible right now. Defending the Affordable Care Act looks like defending the status quo in healthcare, and that’s not acceptable to most American voters.”

And Woolhandler pointed out that Obamneycare is a creation of the Republicans.

“A lot of the structures of Obamacare were in fact structures first proposed by Republicans,” Woolhandler said. “They were first implemented in Massachusetts under Romneycare in 2006, first proposed by then-President Nixon and actually fully fleshed out by The Heritage Foundation. So, the very structure of Obamacare was a Republican idea. So I think the Republican replacement will at least structurally look like Obamacare, just be a much meaner – leaner, meaner, rebranded form of the Obamacare legislation.”

That’s why it came as a bit of a shock that Himmelstein and Woolhandler penned an opinion piece for the Washington Post today titled “Repealing the Affordable Care Act will Kill More than 43,000 People Annually” defending Obamneycare and not mentioning single payer.

It just didn’t make sense.

And of course, it wasn’t true.

Woolhandler and Himmelstein did state their preference for single payer in their original submission to the Post.

It’s just that it got cut out by the editors.

Without permission.

And without explanation.