Healthcare, least to most
Ezra Klein writes in the Washington Post:
If you crudely ordered America's different health-care systems from least government control to most, it would look something like this: individual insurance market, employer-based insurance market, Medicare, Veterans Health Administration (Medicare is single-payer, but VA is actually socialized medicine, where the government owns the hospitals and employs the doctors).
If you ordered America's different health systems worst-functioning to best, it would look like this: individual insurance market, employer-based insurance market, Medicare, Veterans Health Administration.
That symmetry should get more attention in the health-care discussion than it does.
That's a nice way to sum it up. The evidence that public healthcare works better is in our faces and undeniable. Healthcare is simply not a part of life that can be left up to a free market. The most radical proposals of Congress and the Obama administration are just a small step in the right direction, although either they're getting better over time, or my expectations are falling.
I am mystified why U.S. healthcare reform always seems to get into the topic of "mandates". As I understand it, this makes it a crime (or some type of legal wrong) not to buy a minimum level of health insurance, just like you are required to get third-party coverage for your car. Or to put this another way: Send more money to the organizations that are causing the problems (high overheads and poor coverage) in the first place.
On a related note, I read another post recently (but cannot lay my hand on right now) that showed how the general rise in U.S. wages over the last few decades was almost exactly swallowed up by the rising cost of employee healthcare. Employers feels that they're paying more. Employees feel that they're getting exactly the same. The graph was striking. I wish I could show it to you.
To clarify in advance what I've found to be a common confusion when I offer opinions on U.S. healthcare, I am not holding up the British NHS as a shining example of a perfect system. It is superior to the U.S. system in many ways, and I often miss it, but it also has many flaws. In particular, it has too many times been used as either a political football for ideological experimentation, or a convenient place to cut budgets.