Nearly 46 million Americans have no health insurance, and another 25 million are underinsured. That’s more than one out of every five people living in the United States, and that number is growing by fourteen thousand people every day.
Here’s a quick breakdown on our current system, the proposed public option, and the single-payer and socialized systems that are not being proposed but are often yelled about.
We are the only country where employers are expected to pay for health care. If your employer does not offer health insurance, then you have to buy it yourself, assuming that you can afford the premiums and have not gotten sick in a way that could be considered a “pre-existing condition.”
As a result employer-rationed system, America spends more money to cover less people than any other industrialized nation in the world. Some argue that this is due in part to frivolous lawsuits. Others argue that it’s due to high costs to compensate for the uninsured who do not pay for their treatment. The bigger issue is that private health insurance companies do not provide any health-related service yet they absorb about a third of the premiums paid for marketing costs, operational costs, and of course, profit.
President Obama's core plan is a list of reforms to our current private system designed to make health insurance easier to obtain and keep, regardless of one's employment status. It outlaws the current policy of discrimination based on age, gender, and health history known as "pre-existing conditions." It restructires tax incentives and establishes an exchange where individuals and small businesses can buy plans at more affordable rates. You can read a more complete summary of the Obama plan here. A majority of Americans, including Doctors, support these reforms.
The public option is basically the same system as above, but with the addition of a government-run insurance plan that will compete with private insurance companies. After an initial government investment to set it up, the plan would run at-cost, neither generating a profit nor requiring a government subsidy. People who cannot afford this plan would have to get government vouchers to pay their premium. This is a compromise that allows our current system to continue while providing many of the advantages of a single-payer system.
Critics of the public option often say that it is a socialized system that will take away individual’s choice in health care. Another common yet contradictory argument is that a public plan would provide too good of a service at too low of a price for private health insurance companies to compete against. This is only really a problem for health insurance companies.
Under a single payer system the government acts as an insurance plan, covering all it’s citizens. Private doctors provide care, and the plan is funded through taxes. Medicare is an example of a single-payer system, but it only applies to older Americans. (Ask an older American or a doctor what they think of Medicare.) Denmark, Sweden and Taiwan are some of the countries that have single-payer systems for all their citizens.
The true meaning of socialized medicine is when a government is not only takes responsibility for the health care of it’s citizens, but it also operates the facilities and employees the personnel that provide the care. England’s National Health Service (NHS) is the most popular example of socialized medicine at work. Town Hall crazies have an irrational fear of socialized medicine, but most European countries operate under this model or a hybrid of the Socialized and Single-Payer model.
