Listening to Al Franken tonight broadcasting from Ashville, North Carolina, I was struck again that health care is a sleeper issue for the 2006 elections. Al's audience was lively and supportive of many of the issues he raised, but the loudest applause came when he mentioned universal health care. It surprises me that the issue of singel payer healthcare is so little mentioned by politicians (excepting Dennis Kucinich) because I think that many people support the idea. I support single payer health care and I want to tell you why.
Our current system of "health insurance", often linked to employment, collects billions of dollars considered by most insurees to be "health care expense" from healthy working individuals. Essentially, health insurance linked to the ability to work puts the health insurance industry in the position of collecting health insurance dollars from those least likely to need medical services, people who are healthy enough to be steady workers. And when those healthy, steady workers become sick and can't work, they loose their health insurance, at the very time they need it most. It's a good deal for the insurance industry.
Under a single payer system run by a non profit administrator, the dollars paid in to the system when someone was healthy and able to work would be kept in the "health care" system to fund health care costs rather than paid out as profit and dividends by insurance corporations. Imagine the increase of dollars available to pay for health care expenses if all the dollars paid into the health care system were used to cover health care expenses.
And before you get all protective of the health insurance industry remember the farrier.... we didn't abandon cars because they would put horse shoers out of work.