I am a lifelong advocate of a national health plan that would provide universal health care, something that all other industrialized countries have. Americans did not seem to want it.
Among the many pushbacks I would receive through the years is, “The [inept] United States government cannot handle anything as large as a national health plan.” This was something that Americans “knew,” because unbelievably Richard Nixon succeeded in getting that outrageous drumbeat widely accepted during the time the United States was audaciously putting a man on the moon.
Following the statement about the inabilities of the federal government I would get a question, “Do you want something like the Canadian system?” This question is based on years of hearing the exaggerations about long waits to get care in Canada.
I would respond to these concerns by telling skeptics, “Yes, I would be extremely pleased if the U. S. would adopt a Canadian-styled system. I would continue with, “The U.S. already has a national health plan for some of its citizens that is larger than the Canadian system.” In other words, there are more people on Medicare in the United States than there are people in Canada.
Medicare is one of the largest health insurance programs in the world. Unfortunately, it is limited mostly to people who are 65 or older. Further, in 2010 there were many more people without medical insurance in the United States than people living in Canada.
Fortunately, the tide has turned in the last few years. Now the majority of Americans are beginning to see medical care as a right and want a plan that guarantees access for all citizens. I am convinced that the increasingly favorable attitudes toward a national health plan is the result of many public discussions about it over the last decade or so. Democrats, led by Bernie Sanders, have pushed the idea of medical care for all, a practice they have not done well for other issues.
But we have another problem to overcome—perceptions of cost. Many if not most Americans believe that a national health plan would be too costly.
Experts agree that a national health plan would be less expensive than our current system, not more expensive. Let’s assume for the sake of comparison that the cost of the actual medical care is the same regardless of who is paying for it. That leaves us to compare the other expenses, the administrative costs, including billing and insurance-related activities. For Medicare, the administrative costs are only 2 percent. Thus, the government can run an extensive plan and do so efficiently. Traditional Medicare administrative costs are about 2 percent of the program’s expenditures, while the overhead of private health insurance companies before the Affordable Care Act was much higher, at around 12 to 14 percent.
Even with a tax increase to fund a national health care program, the vast majority of Americans would pay less for health care than they do today, since premiums, co-pays, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket costs would be eliminated. They would pay more in taxes, but less in the combination of taxes and medical insurance and medical fees. Now we need to push these facts.
