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SEVEN
MYTHS ABOUT SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE PLANS (PART I)
PART II Numerous originators of proposed new health systems for the United States miss the boat altogether on the question of costs by putting together systems built in part on private insurance. These are the plans proposed by the incoming Obama administration, incorporating the work of Tom Daschle, the plans by Ted Kennedy, and by Max Baucus, and going back to 1993, by Hillary Clinton.. These are all essentially patchwork plans, involving considerable overhead, and actually, some of them have the additional feature of attempting to deal with the question of access by requiring people to purchase private insurance, with government assistance to help pay the premiums. The state plans that have been put together, including that of Massachusetts, are built pretty much along the same lines. The
reason for this common feature is not hard to find. The insurance
"industry" is a rather large contributor to campaign finance
in the US. This is to both major parties; in fact, of the top twenty
recipients of money from the insurance industry, ten of them are
Republicans, and ten are Democrats. The top three are the finalists
in the Presidential election, in this order: McCain, Obama, and
Clinton. Max Baucus (D-Mt) whose plan is among those mentioned above
is number nine on the list. (1) Meanwhile,
insurance company and pharmaceutical industry lobbyists are lined
up to impact whatever plan the administration comes up with, as
much as they possibly can. (2) Here
are the first three big myths about single payer insurance (out
of the seven biggest myths.) The other four are in part II By 2010, 49 million people in the US will be without health insurance, or around 16% of the population. 24.9% of the population with less than 25,000/yr income are without health insurance now. (4). Regardless of the level of income, more than half of bankruptcies are due to health care costs. And the majority of those bankruptcy cases did have insurance. 2.
Myth: Single payer is bad, because it's socialized medicine.
Actually, though, there is no necessary connection between a single-payer health plan and "socialized medicine." The British National Health Service is both single payer and socialized medicine in the sense that the government owns the hospitals, and the doctors who are in the system are government employees. On the other hand, in Canada, which as been the predominant model for single-payer proposals for the United States, most hospitals are private, non-profits and doctors have private practices. Further, the French system, which is ranked 4th in the world by the World Health Organization, is less "socialized medicine" than the United States, in that there is no Veteran's Administration. It also is not exactly a single payer system in that most people have supplemental private insurance, being that the government only pays about 70% on most claims. (5) For something more resembling "socialized medicine," try the Veterans' Health Administration in the US or the "British National Health Service hospital trusts and health systems that operate in other countries as diverse as Finland, Spain, Israel and Cuba." All of these have medical personnel who are public employees. Not that it necessarily makes for 'socialized medicine" either, but it is a step closer. Meanwhile, it's worth asking whether doctors in the US working for HMOs aren't in fact under controls similar to what is so feared in socialized medicine. There, I'm thinking largely of a personal care physician who has made one too many referrals to specialists for his patients and is called on the carpet for doing so. 3.
Myth - Single payer would be too expensive. The California Nurses Association has indicated that a recent study came to an important conclusion: "On Jan. 28, a coalition of advocacy groups representing 15,000 doctors and more than 50,000 nurses, met at the Capitol to present a new study asserting that the Conyers' bill, called the National Health Insurance Act (HR 676), could create 2.6 million new jobs and would cost far less than the private insurance currently paid for by individuals and employers." (8) The association goes on to say that only Congressional Quarterly covered the event. Of course, it is certainly the case that single-payer insurance is very rarely discussed in the media, and the reason for that might well be, as they charge, that it's at the behest of the insurance companies. Part II (1)
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