Single payer: is there anything it can't do?

Americans are a litigious people. We love to sue each other. We’re so eager to take our neighbors to court that, sometimes, we’ll file suit even when we don’t have a case. Doctors and hospitals are prime targets of the lawsuit industry. Hey, they cut people open on purpose at hospitals. It’s their job. Mistakes – real and imagined – can happen.

Some of us think this is driving up the cost of health care. Every lawsuit against a doctor or hospital means cost – legal fees, time lost, etc. A lost case or a settlement means the defendant has to pay the damages, or, more likely, the defendant’s insurance has to pay. Both defendant and insurance have to make a profit. Thus, the cost of lawsuits is reflected in the cost of health care. So. Tort reform. Lawsuit reform. Bringing some sanity to the legal system. Making it harder to pursue frivolous cases. Putting limits on punitive damages. Given the unrelenting wailing and gnashing of teeth over the state of American health care today, these are all legitimate ideas.

But the Tomah Journal takes it even farther. Instead of just reforming the legal system, they opine, let’s remove it from the equation entirely: "There’s a better approach: Join the rest of the industrialized world and establish single-payer universal health care. Billions of dollars worth of lawsuits would suddenly evaporate if lawyers could no longer haggle over million-dollar medical bills." That’s an interesting suggestion. Or, at least, an original one. They’re right: make it a single-payer system, and suddenly there’s nobody to sue. Your insurance company doesn’t have to pick up the tab for somebody else’s mistake.

Sure, there’d still be pain and suffering. Lost wages. That sort of thing. I’m sure the government would take steps to protect itself from lawsuits. Heck, they already do. When it’s the government being sued, suddenly limits on damage awards are in the public interest.

I’ll do the Journal one better: let’s nationalize all industry in the country. Because if government owns industry, “billions of dollars” of product liability lawsuits would “suddenly evaporate,” too. Anyone who’s been following the story of Walter Reed Army Medical Center – the veterans’ hospital that is treating its patients worse than the Marines at Gitmo treat their prisoners – knows just how well the government handles big things like health care. If that’s not enough, consider Great Britain’s National Health Service – an actual example of nationalized health care. Childbirth mortality has grown by 21% over the past three years.

"Record numbers of women are being harmed or dying as a direct result of childbirth in what doctors are labelling a "crisis" in maternity care.

…

The UK now has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in Europe, with 13 deaths per 100,000. Britain ranks below countries including Poland and Hungary, and is above Bulgaria, Bosnia, Belarus, Romania, Armenia and Albania."

And the Tomah Journal may want to read this part (emphasis added):

"The scale of the maltreatment has led to soaring medical negligence claims from mothers. The bill to the NHS has hit 1 billion pounds for the past five years. Two-thirds of the 100 largest payouts by NHS trusts for medical negligence are now to women who have suffered traumatic childbirth experiences…"

Yep, sounds like socialized, nationalized, single-payer health care is just the answer we need.

Nobody claims our system of delivering health care is perfect. It’s not. But expecting government to make the imperfect perfect is like expecting Randy Moss to make the Packers a playoff team. You’re just exchanging one set of problems for another. Over time, our government will expand on the services covered by a nationalized health care plan. Little by little by little, every time another tragic tale of an uncovered illness or injury emerged, the program will get that much bigger.

And as more and more people realize they can go to the doctor as much as they want for free, they’ll start doing just that. Which means more bills piling up for the single payer – government – us - to pay. Which leads to government trying to contain costs. Which leads to…well, read that story in The Independent again. It all leads to that.


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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

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