First off, Universal Healthcare/Single Payer does NOT work....if offered in the US, millions would abuse the system to the point where you would die before ever seeing a doctor. If directly compared to the UK, if such a policy were implemented right now in the US, you'd have a line of 7 MILLION ahead of you awaiting care. Can you imagine all the fat fucks and the tens of millions of depressed people signing up so they can get free drug prescriptions?
Funny how so many attempt to paint a rosy picture of the EU's and Canada's healthcare system. It is trash. If you disagree, you are misinformed, a liar, or have good financial means. Isn't it just grand that you can be taken to a bed where the guy next to you is coughing up chunks of his liver and dying?
You are misinformed.
http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-faqWon’t this result in rationing like in Canada?The U.S. already rations care. Rationing in U.S. health care is based on income: if you can afford care, you get it; if you can’t, you don’t. A recent study found that 45,000 Americans die every year because they don’t have health insurance. Many more skip treatments that their insurance company refuses to cover. That’s rationing. Other countries do not ration in this way.
If there is this much rationing, why don’t we hear about it? And if other countries ration less, why do we hear about them? The answer is that their systems are publicly accountable, and ours is not. Problems with their health care systems are aired in public; ours are not. For example, in Canada, when waits for care emerged in the 1990s, Parliament hotly debated the causes and solutions. Most provinces have also established formal reporting systems on waiting lists, with wait times for each hospital posted on the Internet. This public attention has led to recent falls in waits there.
In U.S. health care, no one is ultimately accountable for how the system works. No one takes full responsibility. Rationing in our system is carried out covertly through financial pressure, forcing millions of individuals to forgo care or to be shunted away by caregivers from services they can’t pay for. The rationing that takes place in U.S. health care is unnecessary. A number of studies (notably a General Accounting Office report in 1991 and a Congressional Budget Office report in 1993) show that there is more than enough money in our health care system to serve everyone if it were spent wisely. Administrative costs are at 31% of U.S. health spending, far higher than in other countries’ systems. These inflated costs are due to our failure to have a publicly financed, universal health care system. We spend about twice as much per person as Canada or most European nations, and still deny health care to many in need. A national health program could save enough on administration to assure access to care for all Americans, without rationing.
See also:
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2012/july/single-payer-does-not-equal-increased-wait-times
