Clara Lynham, WCDB member, sent this post to us via email:

Is Universal Healthcare really Impossible in the United States?

Time and time again, American people are told that universal health care does not work. Pointing to health care systems in the UK and Germany, politicians have described them as “Orwellian” and ineffectual that result in long waiting lists and a system of health rationing.

However, in its present form, the American system of health care cannot continue. Swathes of our society, often some of the poorest and most needy, lack basic Medicare support, while the insurance system results in America having some of the most expensive healthcare in the western world. Rather than dispelling universal healthcare out of hand, perhaps we should be looking at the various different healthcare systems and figure out what aspects are actually worth integrating into our own health reforms.

Universal healthcare

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about universal healthcare that have arisen since the Obama administration first mooted its reforms. While nearly every other industrialized nation in the world has some form of universal health care system, not all universal health care systems are the same.

When it comes to criticism of healthcare universality, fingers tend to point to one nation: the UK. Britain has perhaps the most socialized health care system in the world. The British government directly employs all doctors, nurses and surgeons. Health care is free for everybody at the point of need, but of course, it has several drawbacks. Firstly, the UK taxpayer has to pick up the cost of this healthcare for all policy, resulting in higher income taxes than in the US. Secondly, heath provision in the UK is far from perfect; waiting lists are long for some treatments, and medicines widely available in the United States, are deemed too expensive for the British National Health Service. However, even in this most universal of systems, not all healthcare is free. In Britain, patients have to pay prescription charges for medicines, and treatments such as eye tests and dental care have to be paid for either privately or under a partly subsidized scheme.

The French way

There are far better examples of universal health care systems around the world. Ones that combine both public and private sector money, where insurance and universality coexist. The system in France, for instance, takes the best aspects of the insurance model, and combines it with a universal health care system that ensures everybody gets life saving and essential treatment, but also makes citizens take some responsibility for their own health.

In France, the government provides a basic insurance and patients have the option to supplement it with additional insurance. This not only means that keeping healthy is taken seriously by the French, who have far lower levels of obesity than in the United States, but also it means all essential and life saving treatments are universally available to everybody.

Controlling costs

In France, doctors and hospitals work in the private sector, but as the government picks up the bills, profits and costs are strictly controlled, and all administration is taken care of by the state, which results in far lower health care costs than in the United States, and this is perhaps key to successful health care reform in America.

Health care costs are already crippling America. Not only do 50 million Americans lack basic cover, resulting in an estimated 18,000 avoidable deaths each year, but also medical costs result in hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies as companies struggle to meet employee’s healthcare costs. Even large companies such as Toyota are moving operations out of America because of the high cost of providing employee health insurance.

The reason for such high costs is the fragmented nature of the health care system. The combination of health maintenance organizations (HMOs), insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and government programs, result in 15% of every dollar spent on healthcare going into administration. While at the same time, CEOs for large health companies receive million dollar salaries, and pharmaceutical companies receive profits far greater in percentage than virtually any other industry.

While America may not be able to stomach the National Health Service Model of the United Kingdom, it can look to the French method of controlling the costs of health provision. By taking bureaucracy out of the hands of the private sector, the insurance system can be made fairer, cheaper and therefore more widely available, resulting in a private health care system that has all the advantages of universality but none of the political drawbacks.