Single payer vs. Universal healthcare?

Simplepleasures · Jan 20, 2007

Typed from pdf on website.
Top 10 Reasons For Enacting a Single Payer Healthcare System
Top 10 Reasons For Enacting a Single Payer Healthcare System
1. Everybody in, nobody out. Universal means access to healthcare for everyone, period.
2. Portability. Even if you are unemployed, or lose or change your job, your health coverage goes with you.
3. Uniform benefits. No Cadillac plans for the wealthy and Moped plans for everyone else, with high deductibles, limited services, caps on payments for care, and no protection in the event of a catastrophe. One level of comprehensive care no matter what size your wallet.
4. Prevention. By removing financial roadblocks, a single payer system encourages preventive care that lowers an individual's ultimate cost and pain and suffering when problems are neglected, and societal cost in the over utilization of emergency rooms or the spread of communicable diseases.
5. Choice of physician. Most private plans restrict what doctors, other caregivers, or hospital you can use. Under a single payer system, patients have a choice, and the provider is assured a fair reimbursement.
6. Ending insurance industry interference with care. Caregivers and patients regain the autonomy to make decisions on what's best for a patient's health, not what's dictated by the billing department or the bean counters. No denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions or cancellation of policies for "unreported" minor health problems.
7. Reducing administrative waste. One third of every health care dollar in California goes for paperwork, such as denying care, and profits, compared to about 3% under Medicare,a single-payer, universal system.
8. Cost savings. A single payer system would produce the savings needed to cover everyone, largely by using existing resources without the waste. Taiwan, shifting from a U.S. healthcare model, adopted a single-payer system in 1995, boosting health coverage from 57% to 97% with little if any increase in overall healthcare spending.
9. Common sense budgeting. The public system sets fair reimbursements applied equally to all providers while assuring all comprehensive and appropriate health care is delivered, and uses its clout to negotiate volume discounts for prescription drugs and medical equipment.
10. Public oversight. The public sets the policies and administers the system, not high priced CEOs meeting in secret and making decisions based on what inflates their compensation packages or stock wealth or company profits.
www.nnoc.net
http://www.calnurses.org/

I am unemployed by no choice of my own, could not afford COBRA, who can?Am going to a free clinic because I no longer have a penny to my name, have been tenativly diagnosed by orthpod to have inflammatory arthritis, asked to be reffered to a rhuematologist, not possible through the free clinic due to cost constraints, yet every week my hands are visably changing.Would not even do the nessessary bloodwork! I am desperatly awaiting approval from Social Security Disability. Sad that after working 29 years in this industry as a nurse I now cant get decent heathcare.

pickledpepperRN · Jan 20, 2007

I am unemployed by no choice of my own, could not afford COBRA, who can?Am going to a free clinic because I no longer have a penny to my name, have been tenativly diagnosed by orthpod to have inflammatory arthritis, asked to be reffered to a rhuematologist, not possible through the free clinic due to cost constraints, yet every week my hands are visably changing.Would not even do the nessessary bloodwork! I am desperatly awaiting approval from Social Security Disability. Sad that after working 29 years in this industry as a nurse I now cant get decent heathcare.

More than sad it is morally wrong. This is the richest country. I don't think the question should be "Should everyone have a single standard of high quality healthcare?"

The question should be "HOW?"

If treated you could be working and lessening the nursing shortage. Why is this how we treat unfortunate people?

HM2VikingRN, RN · Jan 20, 2007

And Ingelein is not alone. This speaks directly to the social and economic benefits of having a Social insurance scheme.