CAN UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE WORK IN AMERICA?
Jeanne Schulte Scott, director of government relations for the National Data Corporation (a nationwide medical billing service), feels as though nationalized health care is not only attainable but easy to accomplish. She feels that the process of cost shifting -- increasing revenues from some payers to offset uncompensated care costs and net payments from other payments -- can lead to the coverage of uninsured Americans. Her reasoning is simple: by combining managed care's price cutting strategies with Medicare and Medicaid payment changes, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has only widened. The U.S. voluntary health system, she argues, costs three times as much as a nationalized health insurance program would (Scott, pages 32-33, 1999).A single-payer health insurance program would minimize administrative costs as well. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) would influence health care companies to upgrade their systems to be as up-to-date as possible and with a uniform system, technology would be top notch. Universal health care, in her opinion, is easily ascertainable by combining costs now and redistributing the wealth equally (Scott, pages 32-33, 1999).
For all that tax money, we would buy surprisingly little health care. The one common characteristic of all national health care systems is a shortage of services. For example, in Great Britain, a country with a population of only 55 million, more than 800,000 patients were waiting for surgery at one time in 1992. As shown before, surgeons in Canada report that, for heart patients, the danger of dying on the waiting list now exceeds the danger of dying on the operating table. Sometimes the rationing of care is even worse: care is denied to the elderly or patients whose prognosis is poor. In Britain, kidney dialysis is generally denied patients over the age of 55. At least 1,500 Britons die each year because of lack of dialysis. The medical care that nationalized health systems have is not the most technologically advanced, either. In Canada, modern technology is practically unavailable. Nontraditional physicians such as chiropractors also do not make out well under a universal system (Tanner, page 2, 1992). ns are vehemently against a nationalized health system. Michael Tanner of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation is one of those people. In universal health coverage, he argued, every person
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Approximate Word count = 809
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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