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Myth Busting Health Care, Part One:  Universal Single Payer Healthcare Explored.
Which developed country is the ONLY one that does not have some form of healthcare for all its citizens?  You got it, the United States.   Canada, Britain, Germany, Japan, Finland, Switzerland, Taiwan, etc…etc…all have different forms of universal heathcare, but all citizens are covered.  That’s what’s known as Universal Healthcare.  We  have 46 million  of our citizens uninsured.  This number continues to grow as average families are priced out of insurance.  Insurance in populous states runs $15,000-$20,000 a year for a family of four.

Which country spends more per person for healthcare on average ($6,280) than the average of any other developed country ($2,307)? Ta Da!  It’s the United States while being 28th in life expectancy. Which country’s citizens pay 30 billion a year to the pharmaceutical companies for research and development and end up with the highest prices for drugs that they paid for? You guessed it.  And who gets to keep the patent on the drugs?  Not the citizens.  What a scam!

So what is meant by single payer healthcare? Single payer is just that, a payment system.
You can go to your own doctors and your own hospitals that are privately and, ideally, non-profit, but there is only one entity that pays the bills, the government. It’s like Germany has.  No, it’s not socialized medicine like the insurance companies would have you think.  That’s where the government owns the hospitals and pays the doctors like in Britain.  We have socialized (public) medicine here too.  It’s called the Veteran’s Administration.  We also have an example of a single payer system.  It’s called Medicare with an overhead of 2% compared to private insurers who had an average overhead of 15% and as high as 25%.  What you’re paying for is fancy boardrooms, expensive CEO’s salaries (the head of United Health received a 1.78 billion salary and bonus last year), vacations for their executives, a whole lot of advertising and giving bonuses to employees for denying you treatments. 

I can hear some of you say, “I don’t want a bureaucrat handling my insurance”.  But who would
you rather have handle your insurance claims; a bureaucrat in government  who needs to make his boss look good to the voters or a bureaucrat in a for-profit private insurance company whose primary function is to deny you your benefits to make a profit for his boss?

Health care is a right, not a privilege for the wealthy. It shouldn’t be “a Cadillac plan for the wealthy and mopeds for the rest of us.”  Employer based insurance was a U.S. invention and it’s time has passed.  It doesn’t make much sense anymore.  Workers need portable insurance.  They shouldn’t work in jobs just for the insurance and companies shouldn’t hire workers based on whether they are potential health risks or not.  What’s the sense of being an American if we don’t have the basic right of health that other developed nations have?  This is just common sense and our elected representatives must make it a moral imperative.

Medical bills cause over half of the bankruptcies in the U.S. These were middle class families that had so-called insurance when their health problems started.  Some will say we can’t afford it? Don’t believe them. Taiwan switched from our system to Canada’s and they had no increase in spending.  We can’t afford not to.







 

    

 

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