This graph shows how much people are willing to pay for health insurance (It seems to fit about what I’ve seen in the comments at sites advocating single payer health care system.)
I’ve just about had it with people earning 80K+ a year who “can’t afford” health insurance (another NPR interview).
Graph courtesy of NPR: Few Uninsured Willing To Pay Full Cost For Coverage
What isn’t mentioned in articles advocating a Canadian health care system in the U.S. is that the U.S. has nearly 10 times the population of Canada (304 Mil vs. 33 Mil). Managing a system of 304,000,000+ participants is a lot more difficult than managing a system of 33,000,000+ participants.
Spiffy health stats by state - including amount spent on health care per capita by state.
It is worth noting that in “Overtreated” the author discovered that where health spending was higher due to high specialists vs. general practioners the outcomes were much worse!
I like this article because it doesn’t seem slanted in either direction. Very sensible comments on health care reform from a conservative perspective from Joseph Antos, of the American Enterprise Institute.
There’s a lot to be said for Rammesh Ponnoru’s essay, “The Misguided Quest for Universal Coverage“. The big take away:
To mandate that everyone purchase health insurance, as many have suggested, would require that the government specify what constitutes adequate coverage — in other words, what health conditions an insurance policy would need to cover. Every provider group with a lobbyist, from massage therapists to fertility specialists, would want in. The result would be expensive insurance policies and costly government subsidies to help people buy them.
Sometimes not to treat is the moral choice. In A Life Worth Living: A Doctor’s Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era Dr. Martensen explores the physical, emotional, spiritial and material cost of aggressive treatments on patients they weren’t designed for.
Dr. Martensen interview on NPR. The descriptions of “Ventillator Farms” are truely harrowing.