To be honest, I don't know enough about how good health care works to even pretend to offer a good solution, but I do know things need to change somehow. The U.S. system as it is just doesn't work well enough. That coupled with the rising costs of medicines creates a very difficult situation for some people. For example, one of my grandmother's many monthly prescriptions is a $100 bottle of eyedrops, and that seems outrageous to me. Without these eyedrops, she would go blind. But how many people really can afford that, along with other meds, insurance, etc.? And health costs are only a fraction of the budget people need from month to month.
I don't think we can or should simply switch over to a free universal health care. For one, I think it would be much too hard to implement. How can we go from a system that's been in place for decades to one so completely different? It would require a great deal of time and certainly some trial and error. Second, offering free health care would place a great burden on taxpayers, and that burden would be unfairly distributed.
I didn't have insurance when I lived in Switzerland because I was only there for 6 months, but their health care system is supposed to be one of the best in the world. Everyone is required to have health insurance, and once you have it, you're guaranteed to have great care. It's very expensive, though, and there are some subsidies, but people have to pay out of pocket. It works for them, but Switzerland is so small, and they have a much lower poverty level than we do. It's really the only other health care system I have a little experience with, but I don't think it would succeed here. What would succeed and be the best for everyone? I just don't know.
We already have a single payer system in the U.S. called Medicare. It has worked great for seniors since 1965. My thought has been that we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Since we have Medicare, why not start to include everybody, maybe next year allow people at age 55 to pay the Medicare premiums and get coverage, the year after lower it to age 45 and continue until everyone is covered. It would change the way of paying for health care and instead of employers paying the premium for insurance to private companies they could, a, pay that premium in the form of a tax or, b, increase salaries by what they have been paying for health insurance for their employees and the employees would pay the tax for health care. Other countries provide better care for half the price that we do because with a single payer system they have more control over costs.
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