Why America Should Have a Single-Payer System
Donald Berwick, MD, helped launch the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—considered at the time to be the only health reform this country would need—when he was administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in 2010 to 2011.
But 5 years later, Dr Berwick and millions of other Americans are calling for a new round of reform that would involve much deeper changes: a single-payer system. Dr Berwick says he still supports the ACA—"It's been a step forward for the country," he says—but adds, "The ACA does not deal with problem of waste and complexity in the system."
Other single-payer advocates are less forgiving. They think that the ACA has pampered the commercial insurance industry, providing it with millions more customers and allowing it to jack up charges to levels that fewer Americans can afford.
The single payer would be the US government.
Single-payer reform would take an audacious step. It would virtually eliminate the entire commercial insurance industry—with $730 billion in revenues and a work force of 470,000—and replace it with one unified payer. A small vestige of the industry would remain to cover nonessential services, such as LASIK surgery.
Advocates often envision a single-payer system as an expansion of Medicare, or "Medicare for all." Single-payer systems in Canada, Australia, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—as well as other types of centrally run systems—have much lower per capita health spending and generally better health outcomes than the United States.[1] However, this is also true for non–single-payer systems outside of the United States. The United States simply has the highest healthcare costs, regardless of the system.
The single-payer approach has a moral argument—that everyone should have a right to healthcare—but it also has a practical argument, says James Burdick, MD, a transplant surgeon at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author of Talking About SINGLE PAYER!, which will be published later this year. "It's a more economical way to use healthcare resources," Dr Burdick says. "You could reduce expenses and still improve quality. That's a tremendous opportunity that you don't have in many other fields."
According to a 2014 study,[2] the new, streamlined system would save US healthcare $375 billion per year, owing mainly to removal of the inefficient administrative costs of multiple payers. The authors calculated that the savings would cover millions of people who are still uninsured and terminate high deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs levied by commercial insurers.
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Cite this: Leigh Page. Single-Payer System: Why It Would Save US Healthcare - Medscape - Sep 29, 2015.
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