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I live in the UK. Here, I am covered by a communist socialist sensible healthcare boondoggle system. Naturally, I use this state handout system as reference for comparisons to the American system.
Now, why would healthcare save the economy? Well, for several reasons. Firstly, a universal healthcare system would inject a lot of money into a lot of industries. A universal healthcare system needs to build hospitals and roads to connect them. That pumps a stack of money into the construction industry. Then you need to fill that hospital with medical equipment, beds, a canteen. That's lots of money going into those industries. Then you need ambulances, lots of money to the auto industry (maybe enough to save that too). Then you need people to work there. Doctors and nurses are obvious but what often gets overlooked is that a universal healthcare system also needs a lot of jobs which can be filled by unskilled or semi-skilled workers: Janitors, groundskeepers, cleaners, a cook and serving staff. New jobs for people who currently don't have jobs. I've known people who filled similar jobs with the NHS and their wages, while not luxury, were decent; an honest wage that you could live off knowing that you were a productive, valued member of the workforce. We're not talking Porsche territory here but we are talking about a fairly recent Ford. And their jobs are pretty much recession-proof. Rain or shine, boom or bust, people still get sick and need looking after. Until the day we invent a panacea, people will need hospitals and those hospitals will need people to run them so the jobs aren't going to go away whenever times get tough.
Financially, universal healthcare saves you money. Really. OK, it costs an ungodly amount of money to set-up but running it year-on-year is pretty cheap. And unlike bailing out the banking industry, that ungodly amount of money only has to be spent once and you have a gleaming new health service to show for it. The combination of Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance costs the US populace around $2.3 trillion annually. The NHS has an annual budget of roughly £62 billion a year. In American terms, that's slightly over $2000 per citizen. So, applying the NHS model, covering the entire US population would cost around $600 billion a year, slightly over a quarter of what you currently pay. Even if you apply the French system (generally regarded as the world's best), the annual cost would only be around $900 billion, less than half of what you currently pay. That means that firstly, you don't have to buy private insurance and secondly, tax cuts (yes, lurking conservatives, universal healthcare means tax cuts); both of which put more money in your pocket and don't most of us want that? Conservatives often proclaim that universal healthcare would mean massive tax increases but the evidence says exactly the opposite, the evidence says that because of a simpler system, economies of scale and lower admin costs (private insurance generally spends about 20% of it's outlay on admin, the NHS spends 6.8% on an admin staff which is unionised with pensions and benefits), universal healthcare is cheaper. Mike Moore has made this point several times: If you include the costs of healthcare, Americans pay higher taxes than the French. At the very least, the fact that universal healthcare which doesn't have to make a profit, is cheaper than private healthcare which has to show a profit (preferably a collosal one) to it's stockholders should be so obvious that it doesn't need stating.
But isn't that messing with the free market? Well, firstly, what's so sacred about the free market? Seriously, I want to know. Hasn't the current economic divebomb shown that free markets uber alles is a failed philosophy? As the late great Molly Ivins said, the market is a great tool for creating wealth but we have to have regulation because people cheat. Secondly, yes, it's messing with the market but it's messing with it in a way which has to be done. There are certain services which we all need (or at least need to have access to) constantly: Water, electricity, gas, healthcare. One could make an arguement for telecoms to be thrown in there as well. These things are essential services, we all need them or the option of them and we all need them all the time and because of that, free market principles don't work on them. If the price of a Big Mac (for example) gets too high, you can just skip lunch or go to Subway, no big deal but you cannot choose to do without the essential services because it is virtually impossible to live without them in the modern world (at least, in any kind of meaningful way). That creates what is called a "captive market". You can jump from company to company but you cannot leave the market altogether and that allows those companies supplying the essential services to game the system, keeping prices within a few cents of each other and, essentially, price-gouging. For example, there are the pharma companies on the Fortune 500 list. Those ten companies have combined profits (not turnover, profits) that are greater than the other 490 companies combined and that is largely because you cannot choose to not buy their products except at great risk to your health and/or life. Whenever the essential services are privatised, the same thing happens: Prices soar, service deteriorates and standards are taken out back and shot. This happens every single time, as predictable as the sunrise. I lived through Maggie Thatcher's (and, to a lesser extent, Major and Blair's as well) drive to privatise everything in sight here: We privatised electricity, water, gas, railways, the mail. In every single case, prices exploded (500% in some areas) and the standard of service plummetted. Every single time.
So no, the market is not always right. The free market only works when it's free. A captive market is not free, by definition. However, if you insert a fallback option (universal healthcare in this case), then the private companies have to compete for your dollar. To convince you to take out private insurance instead of relying on the USHS (for lack of a better term), they have to offer a better product at a competative price. Call me crazy but I always thought that was the essence of capitalism.
Incidently, and this is an old observation, it is not in the interests of pharma companies to end diseases. It is in their interests to treat diseases.It is in the interests of universal healthcare systems to end diseases because that then removes a cost from their budget. Just something to think about.
Finally, there's prevention and this is best illustrated by example. I'm one of those horribly stubborn men who hates to go to the doctor (even universal healthcare can't cure this one) but I also suffer from Major Depressive Disorder. As part of my treatment for that, I'm prescribed antidepressents and every so often, I have to go and get checked out to continue getting them (to check I'm not suffering from any side-effects and suchlike). My last check-up showed I had slightly high blood pressure. Because this was caught very early during a routine check, it can be easily handled by a few minor modifications of my lifestyle and diet (and quitting smoking, I'm ignoring that one). Total cost to the healthcare system: Perhaps ten minutes of the doctor's time and whatever the pamphlet he gave me cost. Now, imagine that I was getting billed for every check. Would I have been getting treatment for my depression in the first place? Maybe but probably not. Would I have gone in for a check-up and paid the exhorbitant co-pay? Almost certainly not. Which means the problem with my blood pressure wouldn't have been caught for some time, quite possibly so long that the system would have had to expend funds on medication to deal with it.
I suspect I may be becoming boring at this point so this will be the last post I make on this subject for a while. If I give anyone the impression that the NHS is perfect, I apologise. It's not perect by any means, I'm not sure anything could be but it's safe to say that the disadvantages you hear about are exagerated. Yes, there are sometimes waiting periods for necessary but non-emergency surgery but firstly, that's considered a bad thing and we're trying to fix it and secondly, do you really not have waiting times in the US? Can you really walk into a surgeon's office, slap your money on the counter and have the operation there and then? Or do you need to find or maybe save the money, make an appointment, wait until the doctor can fit you in? If you think about it in logical terms, you already have waiting periods, you just don't call them that.
And morally? Well, if I need to morally justify universal healthcare to you, you have more problems that I can help with...
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