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| epicurean said: The problem with american health care isn't the lack of care for everyone, it's cost. Costs are ridiculous here due to malpractice insurance and regulations (as well as the insurance companies themselves). Implementing universal healthcare likely wouldn't help unless those costs can go down. Though if you could get costs to go down, more people could afford (better) insurance. I wish our govt would stop battling over the universal issue and first figure out how to bring costs down. If its with universal coverage, I'm all for it, but as of now none of the proposals address it. |
This is quite right. One thing to consider though is that "universal healthcare" is an end result rather than any particular system. All it means is that (almost) all people in a country have access to a "basic level"of health-care, and therefore the definition of "basic" determines whether a system is "universal" or not. Technically, all people have access to health-care, regardless of whether they can pay for it or not, in the United States, as they can't be denied urgent or emergency care by hospitals. This of course is inefficient, but according to a minimalistic definition of "basic healthcare" the United States already has "universal healthcare."
One important thing we shoul all consider is that how other countries achieve "universal healthcare" can vary significantly. For example, in Switzerland the government forced people to buy private insurance like in the ACA. The difference was that if somebody refused to buy insurance, the government would buy it for them and if the person could afford it, the government would charge them the premiums. This is a very different means of achieving "universal healthcare" than, say, nationalizing the health-care industry like they did in the National Healthcare System of the United Kingdom in the early 1950's.
Everybody wants to sell us (Americans) on the idea of their particular health-care system, when really we should be looking for a system that works for us. Right now, as you noted, the priority should be on reducing the costs for the 10% or so of Americans who don't want to or can't purchase private insurance. One way to do this is to introduce competition across state lines. Another is to allow drug imports from abroad. Another is tort reform so that doctors don't have to pay huge malpractice insurance fees. Another is to lighten licensing requirements of doctors so more people can become doctors. Another is to somehow obtain price visibiity for certain procedures so that they are charged equally regardless of who is paying for it, and who is providing it. So on and so forth. Real reform would require a number of these things.
