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Single-Payer System Analysis

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Health insurance in this country can trace its early origins back to 1847, when the plans were offered that provided disability compensation to participants, then, beginning in the 1930’s, insurance became more focused on financing the costs due to illness (U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2016). Unlike countries that have a single national program to fund medical services for their citizens, the United States currently relies on a multi-payer system to finance health care (Gusamano & Rodwin, n.d., p.55). Utilizing this multi-payer system certainly has implications within many areas of this nation’s health care delivery and its favorable impact over a single payer system for three of these; quality of care, timely access to treatment, and …show more content…

According to one source, the disincentive of lower pay resulting from a single-payer source would dissuade many qualified people from making the arduous commitment necessary to become physicians (Book, 2009). The loss of this country’s potentially best and brightest future doctors would be an unfortunate aside in the quest for obtaining quality medical care. Further, lower profits would likely result in less investment into the latest medical technologies (Book, 2009), making it more difficult to receive the best and most advanced quality care available. In a comparison of the U.S. multi-payer system to Canada’s single-payer system on a technological front, the U.S. had one MRI per 130,800 citizens to Canada’s one per 572,000 and the U.S. had one CT scanner per 73,000 people, opposed to Canada’s one per 123,500 in 1997 (Ridic, Gleason, & Ridic, 2012). This emphasizes a possible negative direction that state-of-the-art quality care may take in this country in the face of single-payer financial …show more content…

The multi-payer insurance system in the U.S. derives its revenue from both private and public sources, while a single-payer system is predominately financed through tax revenues managed by the government (Gusamano & Rodwin, n.d., p. 55). Therefore, single-payer systems are more subject to governmental environment changes, especially when tax cuts or health care policy change become the focus of a particular political agenda, and thus, may fall victim to the prevailing political ideology (Reinhardt, 2007). Democrats often favor the prospect of a single-payer system while republicans oppose it and work to deconstruct efforts in developing this entity (Sparer & Thompson, n.d., p.32-33). This may predispose a single-payer system to be undone through the partiality of this country’s governing majority (Reinhardt, 2007). This eventuality would leave the country with a health care conundrum. Thus, a multi-payer system that incorporates a provision for universal coverage makes the most

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