Equating a single-payer system to the government’s handling of another “basic right” – education:
For a sneak preview of the result of implementing a system under the control of the federal government, let’s look at another “human right” that was implemented in American law and that began receiving federal aid a few years before Medicare was enacted: the “right” to a basic education. The results: the performance of American students is nearly the worst in the industrialized world. With SAT scores plunging so much that the test was revised to bring the scores back up, per-pupil spending by state and local governments has doubled in real dollars over the past 30 years.At the same time, there has been an increasingly intrusive presence of government in the curriculum and oppressive, costly measures designed to produce “equality.” The welfare of the children is the pretext for ever-heavier demands on the taxpayer. But the system takes on a life of its own. If there’s a conflict between the needs of public education in America and what’s best for your individual child, the system “” that is, its entrenched bureaucracy “” wins every time. Maybe you can escape, but only if you can afford to pay twice for your child’s education “” once through taxes, and once through private tuition.
There’s ample evidence indicating universal healthcare will travel that same high-cost, poor-quality road if enacted.
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{ 7 comments }
In Canada we pay less per capita and have slightly better health statistics than the US. Plus, we have more primary care physicians. We also have to deal with rationing and lack of docs in the “boonies.”
I wouldn’t really call that a disaster. But feel free to use all the random comparisons you like.
There are many good arguments against single-payer systems. There are many for them, as well.
This is neither. Equating an almost entirely state-administered public education system with a federally-administered single payer healthcare system is comparing apples and oranges. And I’m not defending government inefficiencies.
In looking at our healthcare system, there are a few facts we must face:
We spend more on healthcare than any other industrialized country in the world, yet our health outcomes in areas like life expectancy and infant mortality are no better for it (usually worse). Health costs continue to rise much faster than the rate of inflation. The price for family health insurance coverage, for example, increased 7.7 percent in 2006, bringing the average cost to $11,480 a year, and since 2000, health insurance costs have risen 87 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. It’s simply an untenable situation.
Significant reform of some kind is undeniably necessary, and getting past this kind rhetoric–ideologically, financially, or otherwise based–will be crucial in those efforts.
While your viewpoint against single-payer systems is not an invalid one, you would surely benefit from reading some of the academic health policy literature on the other side of the arguement so that you can better distinguish between well-founded arguements and those of those of the aforementioned type.
The results: the performance of American students is nearly the worst in the industrialized world.
But doesn’t the rest of industrialized world have universal education?
Also, I am not sure you can equate one with the other. Take an extreme example like the old Soviet Union. Their free health care had lots of problems and was for the most part way below the level of industrialized nations, but their public education system was excellent, at least parts of it that weren’t politicized.
I am not sure how I feel about a single-payer system – there are advantages and disadvantages, but I agree with the previous poster that comparing it to education is like comparing apples and oranges.
We spend alot per capita and other countries have better health statistics, but guess what universal healthcare will help neither. The reason being we are bar none the most obese society in the world. One in three americans are obese. Take that and that we are the laziest people on the planet as well with the least amount of exercise and its no wonder our stats are bad. Hell if you figure into it how poor the health of the average american is we are doing excellent to be even close to any country. I wouldn’t trade what I have in the U.S. for anything. I wouldn’t trade places with anyone in any country if I was sick. Comparing U.S. patients to Canadian and European patients is like comparing apples to oranges
What a laughable article. The US has the worst education system compared to what? That’s right, countries with a high degree of government involvement in the education system. Finland is considered to have the best education system in the world, and you don’t get any more “socialist” than that. Get over the anti-government paranoia and dogma, take a look around the world and start observing the fact that other countries do many things better than we do, and act accordingly.
Our medical system sucks. Period. It is the third leading cause of death and the number one cause of bankruptcies in our country.People are paying out the nose for crappy care. As for fat Americans, when we have the American Diabetes Association telling parents they shouldn’t deprive their diabetic kids of sugar–just give them more insulin–it is unlikely our wonderful medical profession will be leading the way in tackling that problem. Hey, why get people to cut the carbs when you can have them undergo dangerous surgeries for mega$$$.
“yet our health outcomes in areas like life expectancy and infant mortality are no better for it (usually worse).”
You cannot gauge a healthcare system with the health of a nation. There are many factors influencing life expectancy and infant mortality beyond what type of healthcare system you are in (obesity, smoking, crack babies, low birth weight babies, poor diet, alcohol consumption, poor genetics, etc). I think some would argue that Washington, DC has some of the best physicians and hospitals in the world. Why is it then that the infant mortality in DC is twice the national average? If you want to gauge the clinical success of a healthcare system you need to look at disease specific outcomes.
“The price for family health insurance coverage, for example, increased 7.7 percent in 2006, bringing the average cost to $11,480 a year,…”
Now this is troubling. The cure for this is to make health insurance mandatory and offer a barebones HDHP without all the BS that are mandated by state legislatures into the current health plans (like chiropractic care, IVF in NY, massage, etc). If this is done, the 46 million uninsured would be covered without ever raising taxes. The 1/3 of the uninsured that can’t pay for the HDHP but don’t meet the cutoff for Medicaid would receive a sliding scale voucher, the other third that can pay but decided not to get insurance would pay for the lowcost HDHP, and the final third that would be signed up for Medicaid by force. There it is the uninsured problem solved.
Hey Kevin,
As another primary care provider, let me offer a few points. First, what you are talking about is single payer universal healthcare. We HAVE universal healthcare now–it is just funded by employers, the government, out of pocket payments, written off care, etc. etc. As far as the concept of single payer heatlhcare–at its simplest, it is a privately administered, publically funded healthcare system i.e Medicare. Medicare has problems because of gross underfunding, which would not happed if we had a DEDICATED funding source even remotely approximating the $2 Trillion we are spending now, and most economic assessments have suggested huge savings with a single payer system. What the fear that most docs have is that the government will tell us how to practice. Please tell your readers that every insurer today tells you how to practice, but it is based on how they can make the most money for themselves. We as practitioners need to be the first in line to say 46 million people who have no access to affordable, quality, accessible healthcare is not acceptable. That we as physicians and hospitals deserve to be paid for our services, just like every other sector in our society, and that the richest country in the world stating that we are unable to do what every other industrialized nation has ALREADY done should be a source of shame to all of us.
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