“A government monopoly would deny Americans their freedom to choose”
Robert E. Moffit
The United States already has insurance and health-care systems in place covering about 90 percent of our population. Most Americans are highly satisfied with their employment-based health insurance, private health insurance and existing Medicare program, which covers senior and disabled citizens. Americans are likely to oppose the destruction of all of this through the implemention of a singlepayer system.
If health care is a right, how do you exercise that right? And, ultimately, who’s going to pay for it? A good number of those currently uninsured in the U.S. are not here legally. Should American citizens subsidize them? No other single-payer country provides for that.
A government monopoly on universal health care would deny Americans their personal freedom to choose the coverage and care that they think is best for them. The kind of singlepayer systems currently being discussed in the U.S. are far more authoritarian than the systems you find in Europe. If the proposed government program does not provide what a patient really wants or needs, there is no option to buy an alternative private plan or to enter into a private agreement with a medical specialist of their choice.
Funding health care is a major issue for people in the U.S. Our analysts estimate that a single-payer universal program would require a tax of 21.2 percent on earnings, which would affect roughly two-thirds of American households and three-quarters of the American population. Most serious econometric analysis indicates that Americans would be paying more for their health care under the proposed single-payer system than they do today.
Health care is already too expensive in the U.S. Under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, premiums increased by 125 percent between 2013 and 2018. The consequence is that working middle-class people either pay extraordinary premiums or drop out of the insurance market altogether. It was a regulatory mistake on the part of the federal government. We don’t want another with a single-payer system.