Item Number Fourteen in the most recent Harper's Index (July 2009) is a pithy and tantalizing little factoid:
Minimum number of Americans whose health care is paid for by taxes: 83,000,000.
The cited source for this information is the US Census Bureau, and when I did a little hunting, I found this report, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006, published in August 2007 and prepared under the previous administration. It tries not to, but the report inadvertently makes an excellent case for publicly-funded health insurance: not only is it possible, we're already doing it.
Put another way, in 2006, according to the same report, 27 per cent of Americans had their health coverage paid by Medicare, Medicaid or the U.S. military. (A table on page 20 (Figure 7) summarizes this.)
And this percentage does not take into account state and federal employees, whose private plans are also funded by taxpayer dollars.
According to the U.S. Census department's federal figures for 2006 (for consistency's sake, I decided to look at the same year), the total non-military, full-time federal government employees (including the Dept of Homeland Security) is 2,577,610; state and local figures are 4,250,554 and 11,885,145 respectively.
In 2006, then, at least 101,713,309 Americans enjoyed taxpayer-financed health insurance. In other words, fully 34 percent of the estimated total U.S. population of 299,398,484 had publicly-funded, taxpayer-financed health insurance that year.
One of the more common arguments against publicly-financed health insurance is that it would violate the spirit of private enterprise. Some in the AMA see even a public option as akin to communism:
AMA delegates debated Tuesday whether the words "public option" should even be included in a proposal seeking to define AMA's views on health reform.
The debate at the group's annual meeting in Chicago underscores how conflicted AMA members feel about the issue of a public health insurance option.
Some liken the idea to communism. Other doctors believe AMA leaders must be willing to consider public options to play a meaningful role in President Obama's reform efforts.
Critics of single-payer plans or even the public option bristle at the idea that we have a responsibility for the health of our fellow citizens; they reject the idea that health care is a human right, rather than merely a privilege for a select few. And they absolutely despise the notion that taxpayers should bear the burden for anyone's health coverage.
It seems a moot point to me. Since either through public plans, or taxpayer-financed private plans, we as a society already manage to cover the health needs of one in three Americans, isn't it time to put that argument to bed?