Universal, single-payer health care (definitely NOT the industry plan) will free up hundreds of millions of dollars currently used unproductively to fund competing private health bureaucracies, their duplication of efforts, mass confusion, profits, coverage exclusions, payment dodges and legal entanglements. Universal, single-payer health care will relieve American employers of the unreasonable and unconscionable requirement to be the provider of good health for their employees, and free them to focus their human and financial resources on becoming better global competitors.
That's the crux of the issue. Insurance is supposed to be about shared risk. But the game among private insurers is to accept risk only from those who are at the least risk, and shun those who are at the greatest risk. So long as the game is competition among private employers and their private insurers, and the incentives for both are to shun risk, you can bet that those most at risk will have no coverage, or, if they do, their coverage will disappear as soon as those chronic symptoms take over their lives. Soon they, too, will be on Medicaid.
The only fair, equitable, practical and affordable health care system entails universal risk sharing, which results in a single-payer system.
Exactly.
You know, as I think about this, doesn't this sound like a kind of moral hazard that benefits health insurance companies?
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