Tuesday, December 23, 2014

U.S. Socialized Medicine Concept takes a Major Hit: Vermont Throws in the Towel on Single-Payer Health Care

Health Care: From Clinton to Obama, the left has long dreamed of imposing a single-payer health care system on the U.S. But Vermont's abrupt move last week to halt its single-payer plan suggests it can't work — and never will.
If ever there were a state in the U.S. that would enact a single-payer health care system, it would be Vermont, the left-leaning, mostly rural, demographically homogeneous state that gave us U.S. presidential candidate and ardent single-payer advocate Howard "The Scream" Dean.
A despondent Shumlin found taxes "enormous."
But that all blew up last week after Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin announced that the state's long-planned single-payer system is being abandoned. The reason: It just costs too much.
Calling his decision "the greatest disappointment in my political life," the Democrat was honest about why he took his action. "It was clear to me that the taxes required to replace health-care premiums with a publicly financed plan that would best serve Vermont are, in a word, enormous," Shumlin said.
We admire the honesty here, but it's something that market-oriented health-care advocates have been saying for decades: A single-payer system, far from being low-cost and efficient, is in fact neither.
It's one of the big reasons why nations with government-run systems are trying desperately to reintroduce market mechanisms into health care.
Ironically, perhaps, the big selling point for single-payer has always been that government can best control costs. In a sense, that's true. But only by denying care to those who need it or by rationing care to all.
Shumlin and his number crunchers ran the data and found that single-payer wouldn't work even in his tiny, low-cost, picturesque state. They originally estimated that they would have to take in about $2.2 billion in revenues to fund the plan, called Green Mountain Care.
But when the numbers got crunched, that figure shot up to $2.6 billion in needed new revenues, according to Bruce Parker at the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal blog. Total cost for the program was put at $4.3 billion.
Read the rest of the story HERE.

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