The California legislature is considering a serious single payer system that jpmassar did a great job of summarizing here:
Getting Real: Healthcare 4 All - An Analysis of SB562, CA's Single Payer Healthcare Legislation
Single Payer proposals like the one proposed for California fix a significant market distortion: all business owners spend lots of time and money trying to figure out and manage very complex healthcare landscape for their employees.
They shouldn’t have to do that! Dealing with healthcare dilutes their focus from building their business and serving their customers. And it’s inefficient — every business is solving essentially the same problem over and over again.
Level Playing Field for Our Businesses
Consider the disadvantage this burden creates for businesses that have international competitors. Their competitors are are usually free of this considerable financial and administrative burden.
JOBS: Make it Easier and Cheaper to Hire People
From jobs perspective, the single payer approach lowers the barriers to hiring more employees. Single payer solutions eliminate the need for companies to justify the added cost of each a new employee’s healthcare needs. Let’s face reality both employed and unemployed folks need healthcare. Disentangling healthcare from employment makes a lot of sense.
This “cost-of-healthcare-per-employee” consideration also works against older job seekers. Although technically, employers do not discriminate on the basis of age, the reality is that hiring older employees can be considerably more costly due to their higher healthcare costs. To pretend that is not a factor when making a hiring decision is simply naive.
This invisible factor also works against job seekers that happen to have a few kids. So the current system makes it harder to get employed if you are older or have a family to support! Single payer fixes that.
Don’t Force Businesses to Get in their Employees’ Personal Business
The single payer approach also frees employers from the awkward position of being in in the middle of the very personal healthcare decisions of their employees.
But Isn’t This More Big Government?
I think the “big-government=bad” objection is the biggest instinctual objection to single payer for most conservatives, Republicans, and Libertarians.
First, as JPMASSER’s article points out, it’s already big government:
Guess how much money spent on health care is public money already? According to analysis done by proponents, 70% of all California health care spending is already funded by public money.
Not quite sure if that 70% figure is reliable, certainly it’s a surprisingly high number, worth understanding in more detail at some point. But there is no question that there are some radical efficiencies you get when you insure 100% of a population:
- No more need to screen out ‘bad risks’, (aka “pre-existing conditions”)
- No need to manage individual medical bills
- No need to determine individual health insurance premiums
- No need to collect individual premiums
- Knowing the status of a patient’s insurance coverage is trivial
- etc. etc.
The reality is that there are some things that are a ‘natural monopolies’, and are not best served by a pure free-market. Examples include: national defense, police, prisons, water, gas, and electricity, fire departments, etc. In some cases, these can be publicly regulated private enterprises, in other cases, it makes more sense for the government to provide the service.
Health care insurance really falls into this category of a natural monopoly, for the same reasons we have fire departments and police departments, and national defense. These American institutions are there to create a safer community for all citizens, not just those that can afford the services, and they do a great job of it!
Just as with the military, police, or firemen, there are opportunities for abuse of a publicly funded system, but we have shown we can do it, and we do it pretty darn well already in the case of Medicare and Social Security.
(Editorial Note: I think the “big-government-is-always-bad” objection probably one of the hardest objections to address effectively. I’d be interested in better ways to explain my view, or provide other perspectives on how to address this objection, speaking to the values and perspectives, and language of those likely to have these objections.)
The Bottom Line
Single payer is a excellent approach to fixing a major market distortion, and unleashing more entrepreneurial energy that businesses can redirect towards creating value for their customers, and this approach will make them more competitive in the world market.
Pro-business, pro-jobs Republicans should love single payer it’s a much better solution than the massively inefficient employer-burdening health care system we have right now. And besides, all the other cool kids have it already.
(I originally posted this as a comment to JPMASSAR’s article, but it needed some editing and I was interested in getting some input on my perspective.)