What Are the Benefits of Universal Health Coverage?

In the United States, health care services are both expensive and inadequate. While the U.S. spends far more than European countries on health care per capita -- more than $8,000 yearly on average -- there remains roughly 50 million uninsured in any given year according to Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). Those who advocate some form of national health insurance stress the continued increase in cost as well as the lack of access for many Americans. They claim that things are getting worse, not better.

Single Payer

• One of the more important groups fighting for national health care is PNHP. Open only to doctors, this group advocates a single payer system over all. One of its major arguments is that the present health care system is dominated by waste and bureaucratic coordination of doctors and hospitals with insurance firms. The overhead of the private insurance scheme presently in place is immensely expensive, and the group claims that if a single payer institution was passed in America, the savings in paperwork would be about $400 billion.

Market

• Writing in the "International Journal of Health Services," economist John Geyman holds that the free market has failed relative to health care. This is because the for-profit system is tilted toward both the healthy and the well off. A single-payer national insurance program would rectify this market failure, and any tax increases to finance it would likely be less expensive than the present system, averaging about $10,000 in insurance costs per year per family according to PNHP. Geyman and others argue that a single-payer system would be cheaper and easier for the average person to use. According to Geyman, the market for health is far from free, but is dominated by three, well-connected firms whose lobbyists spent $60 million in the first half of 1998 alone to promote their interests.

Health and Longevity

• Geyman also reports that there is a tight correlation between the chronically uninsured and healthy lives. In other words, those, regardless of background, who are chronically uninsured are those people who are likely to develop serious health problems later in life. It is because they have no insurance that symptoms of serious ailments get ignored. Since about 80 percent of the uninsured are working people, those working individuals at the lower end of the pay scale are penalized with disease and other problems due to lack of care.

Employment and Costs

• According to Drs. Leonard Rodberg and Don McCanne, the changing nature of employment in America is making the present system obsolete. Since much employment is temporary, seasonal, without benefits or freelance, many otherwise economically viable people are going without health insurance. Managed care at the present time is already rationing care, which means people are getting less care for more money. Importantly, these two doctors argue that a single-payer system will mean that the budget for the system and the areas of cost increase would be public and debatable. In short, making costs a "public" issue would mean that areas of increase can be dealt with effectively rather than going to advertising, shareholder profits, unnecessary bureaucracy and lobbying costs.