The political left in the United States has advocated for a single-payer health-care delivery system for decades. To label this single-payer system, progressives have used various euphemistic terms such as “Medicare for all,” “universal health care,” and a “public option” in the Afforda ble Care Act exchanges. Regardless of what it is called, the ultimate health-care-delivery system would be run by government bureaucrats who would make medical decisions based on politics and budgets. A recent commentary in The Park Record advocated specifically for a universal public option to allow patients to buy into the Medicare program. The argument is that a public option is a government health insurance plan that would simply compete with private insurance. Theoretically, competition will create more choices for patients. While it’s easy to say a public option will only compete with private health insurance plans, the reality is quite different. It is impossible to compete with the government, which has the ability to tax and the ability to run a budget deficit, unlike private companies. Researchers estimated that funding a federal public option in the original ACA exchanges would have added an $800 billion deficit over 10 years. To remain budget-neutral, taxes would have needed to be raised significantly. So the cost of a public option would be astronomical, but what about the idea of more patient choices through competition? We only need to look at what happened with health insurance competition after Medicare became law. There was a vibrant private insurance market for seniors in 1966 when Medicare started. Within a few years, that market for seniors was gone. Private companies found that they could not compete financially with a massive government program like Medicare. Consequently, Medicare is now essentially a government-run, single-payer health-care system, without competition. The fundamental problem with any single-payer health-care system is that demand far outweighs supply. This mismatch leads to various forms of rationing of medical care. Canada is the poster child for universal health care. Last year, the wait time from seeing a primary care provider to receiving specialty treatment in Canada was 30 weeks on average. Age and budgetary constraints are two other methods of rationing care. To control costs, increase choice and maintain and improve quality, patients must be allowed to control their own health-care dollars and make their own health-care decisions. A single-payer system would move policy in the other direction. It would further entrench the inefficient and costly government management of health-care delivery for Americans. Enacting meaningful reform and achieving lower cost requires that policymakers show respect for patients and allow them to be in charge of their own health care through initiatives such as: Provider price transparency; changes in the tax code and less dependence on employer-sponsored coverage; insurance reform; eliminating mandates; meaningful reform to Medicare, Medicaid, and ACA programs; streamlining government drug approval; using subsidized high-risk pools to serve people with pre-existing conditions. No government bureaucrat is more concerned about a person’s health than that person is. Patients, as health-care consumers, should be allowed to be informed about, to review the prices of, and to gain access to the best health-care services available in a fair, open and free marketplace. As the real-world example of Canada shows, a single-payer system does none of these things. Back to the original issue — a public option may not be “Medicare for all,” but it clearly is another huge step toward a total government-controlled, single-payer health-care system. Roger Stark, MD, FACS, is a senior fellow at the Washington Policy Center, Center for Health Care, and a visiting fellow at the Mountain States Policy Center. He lives in Heber City. The post Single-payer can go by many names appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less