health insurance

Health care reform: We need a public health insurance option and that’s not socialized medicine

(EXAMINER) - Health care reform: To paraphrase and revise a popular campaign slogan - it’s the fee for service system stupid - so we need a public health insurance option, and that’s not socialized medicine.

At the risk of beating the issue to death, here goes another column on health care reform. It is an important enough issue for us to keep at it. Health care spending in the United States is on an unsustainable track. If left unchecked it will eventually lead to us having to address it in a crisis situation when it is far less likely for us to come up with an efficient and socially just solution.

No one knows what the best and most complete solution to the problem is, but there are two things that need to be done.

We need to make health insurance coverage as near universal as possible. Every economically advanced nation has managed to do this except the United States. It is time we join them.

And we need to cut the rate of growth of health care spending to gradually bring it down to the rate of our growth in national income, so that health care spending does not continue to make us feel poorer and poorer. We wouldn’t have this problem if health care spending were treated like any other expenditure, where we leave it up to the individual to pay for health care out of pocket and to decide how much to spend. But health care is different and we have long ago since decided that health care spending will be collectivized, either through health insurance programs and/or government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

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