How can we pay for health care? No, the real question should be "how do we pay so much for health care and get so little?" We pay roughly twice as much for health care as other developed countries but have lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality.
The constant question surrounding the health care debate is "Can we afford health care reform?" That's the wrong question. Health care statistics are widely available and they consistently show that although we spend roughly twice as much on health care as other developed countries we actually manage to get worse reults.
Let's take two key statistics: Life expectancy and infant mortality. According to the CIA Word Factbook the US ranks 46th among entities surveyed (29th among UN member countries). We're four places behind Bosnia. Our infant mortality rate isn't much better. We rank just behind Cuba. That's not the world's best health care system.
Meanwhile we spend 15% of our GDP on health care, more than any other developed nation. According to the Council of Foriegn Relations we spend 83% more per capita does than Canada does.
Elsewhere in the world, healthcare systems are much less reliant on private sector support—and much less expensive. For example, the U.S. system costs 83 percent more per capita than the Canadian system, where public funds collected through taxes pay for up to 70 percent of healthcare coverage. A number of East Asian systems also enjoy high quality of care for a much lower cost. An article in Cambridge University’s Journal of Social Policy looks at what it calls the "remarkable" performance of healthcare systems in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, where the authors argue the legacy of British colonialism has encouraged a strong state role in the healthcare system.
So we are not only spending more, we're getting less. Some people point out that we have lots of immigrants which hurts our statitstics, but that doesn't account for the disparity between the cost and the benefits. Others make the point that we are world leaders in health care research, technology and innovation. This is true but it doesn't really matter unless you are very, very sick or have a rare condition and even then you need to be insured.
Another problem is that our broken health care system amounts to a triple tax on businesses. Again I quote from the Council of Foreign Relations
By and large, companies do not argue against the employer-based insurance model. Rather, they contend that a wasteful public-private system is pushing costs much higher than they should be. Jeffrey Rideout, a medical doctor and the head of the Internet Business Solutions Group at Cisco Systems’ Healthcare Practice, says the amount businesses pay for employee insurance is just one element of their total healthcare costs. Rideout says businesses incur a "triple tax." First, they pay for insurance programs through health benefits. Second, he says, businesses indirectly subsidize Medicare and Medicaid, the federally supported programs for primarily poor and elderly Americans. Businesses pay higher insurance premiums to make up for the fact that Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements often do not match the total costs hospitals incur treating these patients, a "hidden tax" confronted in a health care proposal (PDF) recently laid out by California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Third, Rideout says, businesses also subsidize the strain on the system wrought by the cost of treating America’s uninsured, again through higher insurance premiums.
So we not only pay more to die earlier, but the costs get tacked on to every american car that we don't buy. The result is that we lose our jobs and our health insurance along with it.
I'm not a health care economist, but I have done some research. It seems to me that the basic problem is that our system's greatest failing is in the cheapest kind of care - primary care. The uninsured in our system don't go to regular check-ups and so by the time they see a doctor they are really sick and need expensive care, many times from emergency rooms. By that time, the condition is less treatable, costs more and we pay for it through higher premiums.
A universal health care system with a strong emphasis on primary care would not only make us healthier, but would be cheaper in the long run and make our business more competitive