Single payer - over on the side table
Canada and the Recession: Angles of Deflection
By Nancy Folbre, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
The New York Times
Economix
February 19, 2009
As the economist (and fellow Economix blogger) Uwe Reinhardt explains, the single-payer Canadian health care system delivers very good results for about half the per-person cost of ours — with huge savings from reduced paperwork. Economic disparities in access to health care are significantly lower there.
President Obama promises to expand health insurance coverage in the United States with little threat or inconvenience to the private sector. But some Democrats in Congress, led by Representative John Conyers, advocate a single-payer “Medicare for All” bill strongly influenced by the Canadian model.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/canada-angles-of-deflection/?hp
And…
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek
February 7, 2009
(Canada’s) health-care system is cheaper than America’s by far (accounting for 9.7 percent of GDP, versus 15.2 percent here), and yet does better on all major indexes. Life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, versus 78 in the United States; “healthy life expectancy” is 72 years, versus 69. American car companies have moved so many jobs to Canada to take advantage of lower health-care costs that since 2004, Ontario and not Michigan has been North America’s largest car-producing region.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/183670
And…
This Won’t Hurt a Bit
by Jonathan Cohn
The New Republic
February 18, 2009
Advocates of single-payer systems complain frequently that the mainstream political debate doesn’t give their idea the attention it deserves. They are right. Public insurance programs enjoy huge economies of scale; they don’t fritter away money on profits or efforts to skim healthier patients from the population. When it comes to billing, they tend to be a lot simpler than, say, a system with dozens of competing insurance plans. All insurance systems require providers to file a lot of paperwork; single-payer systems, though, require just one set. The centralized power of single-payer systems also gives them unparalleled sway over not just the amount of money they pay but how they dole it out; with that kind of leverage, they can push the medical system toward making key improvements in quality.
In an ideal world, then, single-payer would almost certainly be the best option. But is it politically feasible? Single-payer advocates like to point out that Representative John Conyers has a single-payer bill in Congress with close to 100 co-sponsors. But many of those co-sponsors have signed on because, until now, it has been a cheap, meaningless way to win points with liberal interest groups.
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4d41ab07-8c25-4b22-81d2-02b4d149afe2
And…
How the U.S. measures up to Canada’s health care system
Interview of Uwe Reinhardt
Worldfocus
January 28, 2009
We have a Canadian health plan in America. It’s called Medicare. It works. Don’t tell me Medicare doesn’t work. Tell that to the elderly. One way to test it is to say “Let’s take it away.”
You have to, in the end, cover people. And if you, the private health insurance agency, are not able to do it, we can do it. The government can do it. And we’ll discover this more and more.
http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/01/28/how-the-us-measures-up-to-canadas-health-care-system/3783/
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
The good news is that individuals from the media and from the policy community are acknowledging, on the side, that single payer would cover everyone, would improve health outcomes, and would cost less than the other current proposals for reform. Today’s quotes are only a few examples of a multitude of such comments. Single payer has not been removed from the national dialogue on reform.
The bad news is that all too often these are only side comments as the discussion then moves forward with the need to support “feasible” approaches that do not cover everyone, waste tremendous resources, and cost far more than would a publicly-administered and publicly-financed system.
Are we such automatons that we need to set aside facts about an approach that would benefit all of us, and reflexly accept deficient, perverse policies that would benefit the private insurance industry? Why is gifting our funds to the private insurance industry feasible, while spending those funds on health care that people need is not?
As Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, we’re entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts. Let’s dump the opinions and craft reform based on the actual facts. Seriously!