Actually, speaking as someone who sees what things cost on a daily basis, it really isn't possible to pay for the best possible care for everyone. Nor do I know of any other nation that does that. What is possible is to pay for adequate care for everyone, and there are nations doing that, depending on how you define adequate. The most common problem I've seen in most countries with national health services is the amount of time you have to wait for services that are necessary but not urgent. This can mean that what would have been an elective procedure instead becomes an emergency situation. (Not that we don't also have that problem in this country.)
My own proposal is even simpler. Lock a group of doctors representing all specialties in a room until they come up with the single most important health care benefit to provide to everyone. Now lock a similar group of economists, accountants, and financial analysts in a room until they decide how much it would cost to provide that care to everyone you intend to cover. (Not getting into the citizen versus non-citizen thing at this point.) Okay, everybody gets that. How much money is left in the national budget? Lock the doctors up again, and make them find the second most important health benefit. Repeat until we run out of money. Whatever's left over would be the province of the insurance companies.
Think this wouldn't work? Think again. We did something like it years ago in Massachusetts. It was spearheaded by the doctors in the state. All their professional groups got togther, surveyed their members, and agreed on a set of Relative Value Units that ranked medical services across specialties based on a combination of factors. Then they all agreed to accept a certain payment per relative value unit. It worked. Health care costs, while not cheap, were a lot more affordable than they are today. What happened to this system? The federal government decided it constituted price fixing, and outlawed it.
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Date: 2007-03-14 10:52 pm (UTC)My own proposal is even simpler. Lock a group of doctors representing all specialties in a room until they come up with the single most important health care benefit to provide to everyone. Now lock a similar group of economists, accountants, and financial analysts in a room until they decide how much it would cost to provide that care to everyone you intend to cover. (Not getting into the citizen versus non-citizen thing at this point.) Okay, everybody gets that. How much money is left in the national budget? Lock the doctors up again, and make them find the second most important health benefit. Repeat until we run out of money. Whatever's left over would be the province of the insurance companies.
Think this wouldn't work? Think again. We did something like it years ago in Massachusetts. It was spearheaded by the doctors in the state. All their professional groups got togther, surveyed their members, and agreed on a set of Relative Value Units that ranked medical services across specialties based on a combination of factors. Then they all agreed to accept a certain payment per relative value unit. It worked. Health care costs, while not cheap, were a lot more affordable than they are today. What happened to this system? The federal government decided it constituted price fixing, and outlawed it.