Single Payer
Our country has the most expensive health care system in the world, yet we were ranked 37th by the World Health Organization in 2000. The United States spends at least 40% more per capita on health care than any other industrialized country with universal health care.
Health care should be a right for all, and we need to support a Single-Payer system as the most efficient and effective way to get there. A Single-Payer system would eliminate the for-profit insurance companies, lower the cost of health care in the United States by as much as one third, and would remove the financial burden on businesses suffering from the recent economic meltdown - replacing employee-based health care benefits.
Federal studies by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting office show that single payer universal health care would save 100 to 200 Billion dollars per year despite covering all the uninsured and increasing health care benefits.
According to the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus, a single-payer system is:
An approach to health care financing with only one source of money for paying health care providers. The scope may be national (the Canadian System), statewide, or community-based. The payer may be a governmental unit or other entity such as an insurance company. The proposed advantages include administrative simplicity for patients and providers, and resulting significant savings in overhead costs.
But Single-Payer has been barred from the public debate because of the influence of insurance, HMO’s, and pharmaceutical lobbies through campaign contributions, ‘astroturf’ (false grassroots) operations, and dishonest advertising. Democratic and Republican politicians are swimming in campaign donations from the insurance industry, receiving over $46 million in insurance money in 2008.
The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee access to health care as a right of citizenship. 28 industrialized nations have single payer universal health care systems. The United States ranks poorly relative to other industrialized nations in health care despite having the best-trained health care providers and the best medical infrastructure of any industrialized nation.
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