5 reasons Americans can’t have universal healthcare
#5 is the main reason
1. We can’t allow the government to decide which procedures and treatments are covered
Because for-profit companies have always been so generous and responsive in the past.
I’m kidding, of course. They want your premiums and deductibles and they don’t want to pay anything out. They want to exclude the very sick and the elderly because they are expensive to treat. They only want to ensure people who don’t need it.
In the USA, the government is elected. It’s a democracy. If the government health care isn’t working to our liking, we can pressure our representatives to change it. You aren’t going to be able to do that with Aetna or Blue Cross.
2. Doctors will flee the horrors of single payer subsidized healthcare
There will be doctors who go to the private healthcare market. And there will always be a private healthcare market that caters to the rich. The rich always get anything they want. The non-rich 99% just want their flu shot, their diabetes treated and their bones set.
There are approximately a million doctors in the US. There are about 350 million people. One percent is 3,500,000 people. Divide all those rich people among a million doctors and they get 3.5 patients each. If you want to keep up the payments on your BMW you’re going to need more patients than that.
In Germany and Switzerland, there are still plenty of doctors who are willing to take the government’s dime. In fact, so many that wait times to see a doctor in other countries are either comparable to or less than the US. Of course, in the US, if you don’t have health insurance, your wait time may be whatever remains of the rest of your life.
3. But … much higher taxes!
Yes, that is true. But you will save money on insurance premiums and deductibles. Some countries have modest co-pays and others do not. Again, being a democracy, we’ll figure out which way we want it.
In Switzerland (the European model I think will work best for the US) the cost of health care nationally is 11% of GDP. In the US it is 17%. We already pay more for health care than any other country in the world and we still have people sitting around waiting to die.
One of the many (very many) reasons that health care is so expensive in the US is because it is so fragmented. National health insurance plans like Medicare are cheaper than private health insurance by simple virtue of the fact that there is no advertising and billing is greatly streamlined. Medicaid is even cheaper to manage than Medicare.
The bigger the risk pool the less you pay. Single payer health insurance like they have in France and Germany turns the entire country into a single risk pool.
Another reason we pay so much is manufacturers of medicines and medical devices and equipment get to set their own prices. There are no market forces of any kind preventing them from charging whatever number they make up. The insurance companies don’t care, they just pass the cost on to the policy holder or the government.
4. But I don’t need health insurance!
Yes, you do. You may be young and healthy NOW, but that will not always be the case. If you remain alive, it is 100% certain that someday you will be old and sick. Tomorrow you could have a massive car wreck and be in desperate need of care. Next year you could be diagnosed with type II diabetes or just get a rash that doesn’t go away. You won’t have to wait to get old before you trip over the cat and break your ankle.
If you are young and healthy and have no insurance you are either risking the possibility of burying yourself in debt or making somebody else pay for it. Maybe you can bankrupt your parents! That’s the ticket!
5. Single-payer will piss off rich people
I’m aware the Republican Party platform only has three planks. 1. Minorities are disgusting, 2. Government must control your uterus, and the most important plank: 3. Keep rich people happy at all costs. (Please don’t bother with Tu quoque.)
Yes, the wealthy insurance companies, drug, device and equipment manufacturers will fight any change in our system with wolverine ferocity. They’ve been bleeding the country dry for decades and they don’t intend to stop any time soon. They have thousands of lobbyists to tackle (and threaten) legislators and billions to spend on disinformation campaigns.
Their main line of argument is that single-payer would be so expensive that it would bankrupt the country. Ignore the fact that Canada and the UK pay about 9% of GDP for their health insurance and cover everyone. In the US we are being bilked out of billions and thousands of people still die every year because they can’t afford to see a doctor or fill their prescriptions.
So where does that leave us?
We pay almost twice as much for health care than any other developed country. Billions of dollars have been spent to convince Americans that universal health care would be more expensive than what we have now. For some reason we are supposed to believe that we can’t run a health care system better than the French.
Where does that leave us? In a hole. Which, for some people, is a grave.
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