IN THE NEWS

August 1, 2017

The Morning Call

By Richard Master

With all due respect to President Trump, he is wrong about the single-payer model of health insurance.

Single payer — centralized public financing of a continued privately operated health system — will not "bankrupt the United States." In fact, the opposite is true.

Single payer is the only internationally proven strategy to transition the U.S. out of its current crisis of runaway health care costs to economic sustainability, where overall system cost growth is consistent with overall economic growth and inflation.

At one-sixth of our economy and over 25 percent of the federal budget, health care will continue to be a focus in Congress until real progress is made and the angst of the American people about the system is resolved. It is clear to most Americans that runaway health care costs translate into flat wages and also a deterioration of real disposable income that drags down our 70 percent consumer-driven economy.

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Harvard Business Review

July 18, 2017

by Sandro Galea

Ironically, as congressional Republicans have been trying to replace the Affordable Care Act, the ACA’s popularity is at an all-time high, and the majority of Americans now believe that it is the federal government’s responsibility to provide health care for all Americans. This shift in sentiment suggests that a single-payer system — a “Medicare for all” — may soon be a politically viable solution to America’s health care woes.

This system has long been an aspiration of the far left, yet even the right now seems to acknowledge its growing likelihood. Following his decision not to support the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), the Senate Republican leadership’s latest attempt to replace the ACA, Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, warned in a statement: “[I]f we leave the federal government in control of everyday health care decisions, it is more likely that our health care system will devolve into a single-payer system, which would require a massive federal spending increase.” (The BCRA, which failed in the Senate, would have kept the basic contours of the ACA but greatly reduced its ability to provide care.)

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San Francisco Business Times

June 29, 2017

By Dan Geiger and Eric Leenson

What is Warren Buffett’s biggest worry about American competitiveness? The cost of health care. As he put it: “Our businesses [pay] far more for health care — a tax by another name — than those in other countries.” His partner Charlie Munger said, “The whole system is cockamamie ... I think we should have single-payer medicine eventually.” Buffett agrees.

A staggering 18 percent of U.S. GDP is spent on health care. Per capita health care costs are almost double that of the next highest country. American companies spend on average 15 percent of payroll for health benefits. Cockamamie indeed!

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Canada's affordable, efficient and widely popular single-payer system saves millions for U.S. corporations

DAVE LINDORFF

Salon

President Donald Trump has been pushing hard, along with Republicans in Congress, to eliminate former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. But as he and leaders of the Senate and House struggle to come up with some alternative health care law, they might ask themselves why large companies like General Motors, Ford and Chrysler (now Fiat Chrysler) over recent decades have shifted roughly half their car and truck production — and the jobs that go with them — across the Detroit River into Canada.

Here’s one big reason they did it: Canada’s government-run single-payer health system, known as Medicare — to be clear, not the same Medicare as the American health care system for senior citizens — lowers those auto companies’ health care costs from more than $15,000 per worker in the United States to just a few thousand dollars in Canada, with all Canadian taxpayers, not just employees and their employers, picking up the tab.

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