In Favor of Single Payer Health Care
The American health care system is broken. On this much, almost everybody can agree. Costs are spiralling out of control, health outcomes are among the worst of all developed countries, and nobody can agree on what will make it better. One of the reasons for this disagreement is that different stakeholders fail to agree on what the purpose of the health care system should be. If the purpose is to be a for-profit industry, well, then the industry needs to be set up to earn profits. But the view taken in most parts of the world is that health care serves a greater purpose. Whether this is to provide a high standard of living for people in a country for its own sake, or because healthy populace is better for the economy, such finer points can be debated. But what cannot be debated is that each and every one of us wants to live longer, healthier lives, we want our friends and families to live longer and healthier lives, and the economy benefits from healthier workers. If we can all agree on those three things, then maybe we can start to think of how to design a health care system that will deliver them. That’s what single payer does.

The Physicians for a National Health Program (2019) describes single payer as a “Medicare for all” type of system in which a public agency organizes health care financing but the delivery of care remains largely in private hands, as opposed to a universal health care model like exists in Canada or the UK. The reason single payer makes more sense in America is because the delivery of health care is largely set up for private enterprise, and a shift towards nationalizing care would be jarring; a shift towards single payer simply replaces private insurance with public insurance.

Most single payer systems deliver health care at a lower cost, and higher effectiveness, than the current system in the United States. They do so by eliminating profits from the system, reducing administrative costs, and imposing cost controls, such as price caps...…are challenges that must be overcome. But since when did we become a nation of cowards, afraid to embrace change, and shying away from challenges because doing the right thing is too hard? That is not who we are as a nation.

The political winds are shifting. We now see multiple high-profile politicians discussing single payer health care. Their views are painted as radical. But those views are not considered radical anywhere else in the world. If conservatives in Canada, the UK and other countries with similar lifestyles to our own accept and embrace single payer, what’s to stop us from doing so here at home? What do we have to fear? Better care? Lower costs? Seems to me that we are afraid of nothing more than our own shadows. We can be better, America. We can embrace a model of single payer that works better than any other country in the world, combining the best in care delivery that we have to offer, with a system that ensures all Americans have access to that high quality of care.…