We Need Single Payer 0
In words and pictures:
In other news, Terry Gross interviews an American who lived in Europe and has first-hand experience with European health insurance. Follow the links below to listen or read the transcript:
Reid is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post — in whose pages he recently addressed five major myths about other countries’ health-care systems — and the former chief of the paper’s London and Tokyo bureaus.
A nugget from the transcript:
If you’re an employed person sharing your health insurance premium with your employer, you live in Germany. That’s the Bismarck model that was invented in Germany and used in many countries.
If you’re a senior and you buy Medicare insurance from the government and go to private doctors, you live in Canada. That’s the Canadian model. As a matter of fact, the Canadian health care system is called Medicare, and when Lyndon Johnson provided it for our seniors in 1965 he borrowed both the model and the name from Canada.
And if you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who can’t get health insurance, well, you live in Malawi or Madagascar or Mali or something, because if you can pay for health insurance you get it, or maybe you can line up at the free hospital sometime.
