How to Use Nationalized Health Care Systems

Nationalized health care or public health insurance ("single payer") is currently a hotly debated topic that has not yet materialized in America. A Congressional battle is at hand to determine whether U.S. citizens will be able to "opt in" to public health care--or what some have called "socialized" medicine. The following steps show how such a program can be used once it is fully activated.

Things You'll Need

• A good doctor and/or medical support system A state congressperson who supports universal comprehensive single-payer health care reform

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Instructions

Who Pays and Who Benefits

• 1

  Opt in by dropping the premiums on your private coverage and exchanging it for the less-expensive taxing mechanism of public coverage. The reason it will be less expensive is because private coverage and premiums are based on your individual age, health, other stipulations and actuarial conditions, but the "tax premium" would be based on shared expenses with millions of others who all contribute to the program. These premiums would not be dependent on anything other than your fair share of the cost, and they would not go up or down or risk cancellation with changes to your health. The single-payer health insurance system will use tax revenue from individuals and employers--much the same as Social Security does now.

• 2

  Opt out of government-owned health care facilities, which constitute "socialized medicine" much like the way the Veterans Administration and military hospitals work now. Single payer is a financing mechanism that focuses on health rather than the profit margins that privatized health care systems must achieve in order to maintain marketability and high revenues. Taxes are already used to support Medicare, Medicaid and indigent health care services. So the focus would be on moving the money that doesn't cover everyone into a pot where everyone is covered, with little additional expense to taxpayers. Care should be provided by privately owned hospitals and clinics, and individuals are allowed to choose their own providers without having to be "pre-approved." Physicians are compensated on a fee-for-service basis or paid straight salaries and have far less paperwork to turn in in order to be remitted for their services. HMOs (health maintenance organizations) would then become non-profit and be able to focus on true health care rather than exchanging quality of care for pricing. There would be less incentive for unnecessary in-patient and out-patient procedures and "over-medicating" patients because those steps would no longer be critical in order to "make money," therefore leading the medical communities to work on less costly preventative medicine; i.e., there will no longer be profit in sickness and death, but in health and shorter recovery times and in keeping people well.

• 3

  Speak with your local Congressional partners about a single-payer utility that covers all medically necessary services, such as primary care and prevention, prescription drugs, long-term care, mental health, substance abuse treatment, dental services and vision care. Also talk about making sure those services are based on need rather than on ability to pay. Health care coverage should not be based upon employee status, but upon the need for medical and ancillary services. Also, the government would have more power to procure medications in bulk, which are far less costly than what we pay per prescription now.

• 4

  Learn the benefits of universal comprehensive coverage and resist the urge to categorically point for point compare single-payer health insurance in America to other nations such as Canada, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Cuba, Sweden and Taiwan. Though these are models in which administrative overhead is at 3 percent to 4 percent rather than the 70 percent to 80 percent we pay now, the American version would not look exactly the same because the various "general publics" do not all work the same in these nations that have experienced success with single-payer universal coverage.

• 5

  Understand that the incremental health care reforms have been the root cause of more people being without routine health care coverage through the years. If the current Medicare, Medicaid and indigent health care programs are transitioned into universal coverage and those who opt in to public coverage no longer have to pay for private premiums, the overall effect is that the under-insured and non-insured cease to exist. This action lowers the costs, the higher of them being administrative (paperwork) and marketing (advertising and sales ploys), and thus increases the overall benefit for an entire healthier population, which in turn drives costs down. Costs are also driven down in terms of employee absences, production levels and stress factors caused by rising costs and the burdens of caring for sick or disabled children, parents, spouses, selves or others.