Sally C. Pipes--Single Payer is for the Birds #3922

As a former Canadian, Sally C. Pipes knows from where she speaks. Her new book The False Promise of Single--Payer Health Care artfully spells it all out. -While analysts believe a government takeover of the U.S. health care system has never looked more plausible. Support for the idea is at an all-time high, according to Gallup. Two-thirds of Democratic voters favor “single-payer” health care; even one in four Republicans is on board. But take a look at the United Kingdom's single-payer system, for instance, which is in appalling turmoil. Most would agree that it would be foolish to import that failed model. 

In The False Promise, you’ll learn:
• What “single-payer” really means;
• That if single-payer were to take hold in the U.S., private insurance coverage would be outlawed;
• That 160 million people - roughly half the population - would lose their private employer-based coverage;
• About the single-payer nightmares in the UK and Canada;
• That the supposedly “free” care offered by countries like Canada comes at an extremely high cost;
• About “illegal” private clinics in Canada where one alone performs 60,000 surgeries per year on patients who choose to pay for their own care; and
• That the Canadian single-payer system doesn’t cover dental care, vision care, long-term care, or prescription drugs as many of the current proposals in the U.S. cover.

To call this situation "universal healthcare," as single-payer defenders always do, is simply absurd. In 2017, the average wait in Canada from seeing a primary care doctor to getting treatment by a specialist was 21.2 weeks. No amount of money can fix a system in which government bureaucrats, and not markets, determine how to distribute healthcare resources.... Etc...