Most Americans would agree that access to health care is a civil right. Our
inalienable right of life isn't possible without it, and the pursuit of happiness is a lot tougher when you're sick. Most if not all would also agree that the system we have is broke. Well, if we want
everyone covered with
better care while
spending less, what kind of system do we create to fix it? The answer is Single Payer. Because our debt as a nation is so high, this is a reform we need to implement now. We are spending too much and getting too little. Joe Conason illuminates in
Salon:
Although the public share of health expenditure in the United States is much lower than any other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) country except Mexico, the public expenditure on healthcare is much higher per capita than in most OECD countries. So we pay a lot more in taxes devoted to medical care -- not including insurance premiums, co-payments, fees, and other health costs -– than taxpayers in those 27 countries that have universal coverage. Our public expenditure provides coverage only for the elderly and some of the poor (through Medicaid and the SCHIP program for children) while other countries provide universal coverage while spending less.
How much less? Nations with comparable standards of living like France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, and Japan spend roughly between half and two-thirds per capita what we spend annually. They cover everyone and their results are measurably better. And the supposed downsides of universal coverage, such as lack of access to sophisticated medical technologies, are belied in many of these countries. For instance Japan has lower per capita health expenditures than the United States (and universal coverage,) but its citizens have greater access to MRI machines, CT scanners and kidney dialysis equipment than Americans do.
It's clear that health care is one of the areas that the public sector is better than the private. It's cheaper, more effective and based on an American
study comparing the health between different races, ethnicities, and education levels, it's also more equitable. What I found most surprising is that we already have a successful model of how all this would work. "The VA hospitals represent the most successful large-scale reform in the delivery of health care that this country has seen in decades," explains Timothy Noah in
Slate. So, why is this more effective and more efficient system never brought up?
It... stems from a conviction that has seeped deep into the political culture that anything run by the federal government must be inferior to market-based alternatives. The Obama administration and Congress are utterly terrified that in crafting health care reform they will run afoul of this infantile prejudice. They will therefore move heaven and earth to avoid acknowledging the VA's pioneering use of computerized medical records, its avoidance of the justly lamented fee-for-service model (VA physicians are salaried), and the efficiencies it realizes by treating patients over the long term. The implications of this success are too terrifyingly pinko. The VA is, after all, a system in which the role of insurer, physician, and hospital are all assumed by the U.S. government.
