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| Single Payer | | Date Created: Mar 28, 2005, 08:37 AM |
 Nice to see that someone else gets aggravated by political bumper stickers (particularly when they have a forum to write about it -- and they agree with me). Jeff Jacoby is impressing me with numerous of his essays lately. The latest one is called The Wrong Rx and it's about single-payer medicine in the US. (He saw a bumper sticker that said "Single-Payer Health Care!" on a car in front of him).
Nothing really new to me in Jacoby's essay. The issue is handled more completely in Sally Pipes' book, Miracle Cure: How to Solve America's Health Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn't the Answer. But then books are naturally more complete. Jacoby clearly gets it that single-payer is just another term for socialized medicine and therefore just another government-solution utopian illusion of the left. He does document the reality that it's been tried in numerous countries for decades and it's not better than the current US medical "system" which is troubled enough.
Jacoby does fail to point out how socialized the US system is already and to compare single-payer to the US example -- the VA hospital system. But I did pick up something. If single-payer is all about access to health care for US citizens (the left tries to claim that the poor and uninsured have no access to health care in the US) then the examples show that single-payer (government) systems actually make access worse if you define it as getting care when you want it or need it.
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