Doctors Call for Universal, Single-Payer Healthcare

Doctors Call for Universal, Single-Payer Healthcare -- The Journal of the American Medical Association has published a proposal, endorsed by more than 8,000 doctors, calling for an enhanced "Medicare for everyone" universal healthcare system, citing economic as well as humanitarian and service provisioning reasons...

"Currently, about 26 cents on every US health care dollar is spent on paperwork and administration. Replacing private health insurance companies with a single, government insurer like Medicare, which spends about 3 percent on administration, would save the country $200 billion dollars annually.

'The single payer system is the only one that's economically feasibly,' says Dr. Richard Brown, a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, which wrote the proposal featured in JAMA. 'And of course it's open, it doesn't exclude people because they're a bad health risk.'

Currently, the United States is the only major industrialized country that doesn't provide some kind of universal coverage, even though it spends more than 14 percent of its GNP on healthcare. According to the World Health Organization, that's more than any other in the developed world and yet it remains the only one with tens of millions of uninsured. The quality of care in the United States also fares only modestly when compared with other countries. Out of 181 rated by the WHO in 2000, the US came in 35, just two slots above Cuba."

As a self-employed person living in the state of New Jersey, where individuals can't form non-employee groups for health insurance, and as a result using an expensive HMO, the proposal sounds good to me.

And watching the rigamarole my wife had to go through managing her mother's healthcare bills in the last year of her life, the current situation is even worse for others. I couldn't picture her elderly parents wading through the paperwork that continued to come in a year after her death as her secondary insurance and Medicare kept pointing fingers at each other. With one less player in such a situation, the communication breakdowns would go away. The current situation is a farce. Even the often-denigrated "Hillary-care" couldn't have been worse than what we have today in "the world's greatest superpower."