Special Issue: Exploring the Concept of Single Payer

[slipslidingaway]

Maybe this article will become available to non-subscribers...a single-payer system should be part of the discussions.

Most doctors support national health insurance, new study shows
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2008/march/most_doctors_support.php

"Reflecting a shift in thinking over the past five years among U.S. physicians, a new study shows a solid majority of doctors — 59 percent — now supports national health insurance..."


http://jhppl.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/34/4/453

Single Payers, Multiple Systems: The Scope and Limits of Subnational Variation under a Federal Health Policy Framework
By Carolyn Hughes Tuohy, University of Toronto
Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law
August 2009

"Neither Obama nor any other major contender for the presidency in 2008 proposed a universal single-payer (”Medicare for All”) model. The Obama proposal for a new public plan, to be offered in parallel with regulated private plans through a National Health Insurance Exchange modeled on the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), would indeed represent a distinctive American hybrid, but it would not be a single-payer system. By definition, a government plan is not “single payer” if it competes with other insurers in offering comprehensive coverage. This is not merely a definitional issue, however: it has critically important implications for the economic and political dynamics of the system. Economically, competition between public and private insurers raises potentially crippling problems of risk selection requiring a regulatory framework that has so far eluded even those European jurisdictions with much longer experience with the regulation of social and private insurance. Politically, such a competitive framework renders the arena much more pluralistic and volatile — and effective regulation therefore much more difficult — than does a pure single-payer model with its central axis of profession-state accommodation..."


JHPPL: Exploring the Concept of Single Payer

http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/08/26/jhppl-exploring-the-concept-of-single-payer/

"This entry is from Dr. McCanne's Quote of the Day, a daily health policy update on the single-payer health care reform movement. The QotD is archived on PNHP's website.

Today’s message is in honor of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy who told us,

“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”


"The fact that the entire August issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law is devoted to exploring single payer certainly indicates that the concept has not died within the policy community.

Although a majority (but by no means all) of the political community dismisses single payer as not being politically feasible, much of the policy community accepts it as a feasible policy approach that would bring affordable health care to everyone. Even those opposed based on ideology understand clearly the feasibility of single payer from the policy perspective. Otherwise why would the opponents of reform keep insisting that policies that improve our health care financing would inevitably lead to a single payer system?"