Single-Payer: Answers and Facts About Health Care For All

What Is Single-Payer?

There's a great deal of incorrect information out there about health care reform. It's time to set the record straight--and if you want more information, you can always dig deeper.

Single-payer isn't socialized medicine...

it's socialized insurance. What's the difference? Socialized medicine is the system in the UK--the government owns the hospitals, employs the doctors. Socialzed insurance is the system in Canada--the government pays the hospitals, and pays the dotors--but hospitals and doctors are still part of the private sector. Everyone cares who their doctor is, but do you really care who pays your doctor?

Single-payer isn't government bureacracy...

it's actually government efficiency. Sure, some parts of the government are inefficient. Some waste your time. (But so do HMOs and other corporations that keep you on hold for hours.) In fact, the Medicare system is much more efficient than any HMO. About 4 cents of every dollar goes to administration in Medicare, but it's anywhere from 10 to 30 cents of every dollar in HMOs (average: 11 cents.)

Single-payer is health care rationing...

but it's a different type of rationing. Right now, we ration care by ability to pay: if you have insurance, you get health care, if you don't have insurance, you generally don't get health care. Single-payer rations care by health care need. There would be no more "pre-existing conditions," no more hassles to see a doctor.

Single-payer isn't free care...

but it's certainly less expensive. Money would come from employers and employees, but most of the money is already in the system--it's just currently going to HMOs instead of to a single-payer organization. Studies by the Congressional Budget Office, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the Lewin Group, Boston University, and numerous other reports have done the math and come to the conclusion that single-payer would save enough money to cover the cost of insuring all the 45 million uninsured in the United States today.

Next: How would single-payer affect me?