Marcia Angell is a senior lecturer in social medicine, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
It is the only industrialized country that treats health care like a market commodity instead of a social service. Thus, health care is distributed not according to medical need but, rather, according to the ability to pay. There is a great mismatch, however, between medical need and the ability to pay. In fact, those with the greatest need are those least able to pay.
It was conservatively estimated that, in 1999, 31.0% of all health care spending in the US was for overhead, nearly twice the estimated 16.7% in Canada.
Polls have shown that about two-thirds of Americans would prefer a Canadian-style system,13 as would three-fifths of doctors.14 However, many businesses that profit from the current system, mainly the private insurance industry and for-profit health care facilities, resist any fundamental change. They in turn have inordinate influence over law-makers and many economists and health policy experts, who propagate the myth that a Canadian-style health care system is "unrealistic." In addition, many procedure-oriented specialists are quite happy with the current system. They are generally paid much more than they are in Canada, and that predisposes them to exaggerate the failings of the Canadian system and minimize those of the American system.
http://www.pnhp.org/
Physicians for a National Health Program is a non-profit research and education organization of 15,000 physicians, medical students and health professionals who support single-payer national health insurance.
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2008/092008/interview-woolhandler.html
Unhealthy Solutions: Private Insurance, High Costs and the Denial of Care
An Interview with Steffie Woolhandler
Steffie Woolhandler is a co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, a not-for-profit organization for physicians, medical students and other healthcare professionals who advocate a national health insurance program. She is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard University and co-director of the Harvard Medical School General Internal Medicine Fellowship program. Woolhandler is a co-author of Bleeding the Patient Dry: The Consequences of Corporate Healthcare (2001).
Private health insurance is a defective product. On one hand, you may lose it when you need it most — when you get sick. On the other hand, even if you are able to hold onto private insurance, the gaps in the coverage mean that you may be bankrupted anyway.
A key reason is that the private health insurance industry imposes massive administrative costs on the healthcare system. Administrative costs in U.S. healthcare are about 31 percent of total health spending. In nations with single payer national health insurance, the overhead costs are about 16.5 percent of spending. The possible administrative savings in going from a multipayer system to a single payer system are about $350 billion annually. That means that by going from the current multipayer, private insurance-dominated system to a nonprofit single-payer system, you have a built-in cost savings of about $350 billion.
If single payer faces the serious political obstacles that come from calling for wiping out the private health insurance system, are there incremental things that can be done to take us in that direction?
The only incremental thing that one can do that makes any sense at all would be placing all hospital care into a single payer system as a first step, and then later placing other types of care into a single payer system. That’s what happened in Saskatchewan. They initially enacted a single payer system that covered all the hospitals and then a few years later enacted a single payer system that covered everything.
Every industrialized country except the United States has some version of a single-payer healthcare system.
Private insurance that covers services covered by the national program would be forbidden, although private insurance would be available to insure patients for services not covered under the national program.
The leading legislative proposal for a U.S. single-payer system is H.R. 676, introduced in 2007 by Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, and co-sponsored by 91 Members of Congress.
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2008104214/dangerous-plan-health-care
http://lansing.injuryboard.com/miscellaneous/the-insurance-industry-and-the-bailout-we-gotcha-covered.aspx?googleid=249582
The Insurance Industry And The Bailout: We Gotcha Covered!
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