I might as well ‘fess up. For many years, I have called our medical care “system” barbaric. Since developing this description, I have acquired substantially more education but no better words to describe the medical care situation in the United States–at least until ObamaCare—the ACA– which relieved the situation a bit. It has always seemed odd and perverse to me that a family can pay their taxes and send their kids to the local schools without charge; however, if that child became deathly ill, the family would have to pay for medical care. So, it seems the child can go to school mostly free, but the family would have to pay for her to live–in other words for their child to get the life-saving medical care they must pay out of their pocket. Thus, educating children is valued more highly than saving their lives.
Please note I am not overly dramatic. Medical care is a matter of life and death. Each year in the U.S., tens of thousands die because they do not have health insurance.
What do other countries do? They provide medical care to their citizens. Thirty-two of the thirty-three developed nations in the world have universal health care, with the United States being the lone exception. Universal health care is sometimes called universal health coverage, universal coverage, universal care, or single-payer coverage. Generally speaking, it indicates a health care system which provides health care and financial protection to ALL citizens of a particular country.
Why is it Americans do not have universal health care when so many other nations do? The two reasons I hear the most are (1) the inept federal government cannot be trusted to run such grand enterprise, and (2) it would be too costly.
Let’s look at these reasons. The myth of the inept federal government was a part of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy to win the White House by appealing to the South through criticizing the federal government. Without getting sidetracked by that argument, please consider that this was being sold at the same time the federal government was putting a man on the moon.
Proponents of the inept federal government idea often argue that the U.S. government could not properly run an extensive medical care plan like the one in Canada. Please note that Medicare is a big medical plan. For seniors, it is a universal health care plan. The U.S. government runs it, and it has more beneficiaries than the population of Canada. There are 35 million people in Canada; however, there are over 55 million people enrolled in Medicare in the U.S. Consequently, the U.S. can and does run–a large health plan.
The second argument is that a universal health care plan for the U. S. would be too costly. Let’s assume for the sake of comparison that the cost of the actual medical care is the same regardless of who is paying for it. That leaves us to compare the other expenses, the administrative costs, including billing and insurance related activities. For Medicare, the administrative costs are only 2 percent. Thus, the government can run a sizeable plan and do so efficiently. Traditional Medicare administrative costs are about 2 percent of the program’s expenditures, while the overhead of private health insurance companies before the Affordable Care Act was much higher, ranging from 12 to 14 percent.
The two main objections to universal health care I often hear are therefore bogus. The federal government can run a large health care plan. They now do so with Medicare. Also, the overall cost of universal health care is less than our current system–before or with the ACA.