Talk:Universal health care

Archive 1 (March 13, 2006 - June 9, 2006)

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Opposition to Universal Health Care

"Not dying from an easily treated disease because a person cannot afford health insurance is not a right." I don't think even the Nation would phrase things in this manner if it were asked to list criticisms its opponents have to universal health care, hence I edited this. Furthermore, is it really appropriate to have unsourced rebuttals to the criticisms?

There are some serious NPOV problems with this section, but I'll leave it to a more experienced Wikipedian to fix it.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tin Man (talk • contribs) 15:32, 6 September 2006 (UTC).

Regarding: "[I]s it really appropriate to have unsourced rebuttals to the criticisms?" Rebuttal to criticism is OK, but Wikipedia policy is that content must be published by verifiable sources. -AED 18:25, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

pro and con lists

The lists have some serious problems, and should probably just be summary sections that point to a full article on the topic. For example, it is misleading to state "health care is a right" without explanation, and it is also embarrassing because the article states "health care is not a right" later on. Kborer 17:51, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Merge SPHC into this article

Since single-payer health care is synonymous with UHC, I think it would be good to merge SPHC into this article instead of reiterating a lot of the information. Kborer 07:07, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that's true. Universal does not have to be single-payer. -- Kendrick7^talk 18:51, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

UHC is not always SP, but SP is a type of UHC, so I thought it would be better incorporated into that article. Kborer 19:38, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

It's not true that SP is a form of UHC. Contray to what many people think, including many single-payer advocates, the two are distinct concepts. Single-payer is a economic model for financing health care. UHC is a concept that all people are guaranteed access to needed medical care; that there is universal coverage, such as under a private and/or public health insurance system. That's it. Single-payer is, in it's literal meaning--which is what's most relevant--simply an economic model for financing medical services delivered to patients. Single-payer also denotes--for nearly all of its advocates--a way of setting up a fee negotiation structure between the payer and providers (this can be referenced by leading SP advocacy organizations such as Physicians for a National Health Program). The payer of single-payer can be either a private or public payer. Single-payer does not imply UHC; they address distinct concepts; respectively, a financing model and access model. Some of the confusion comes from that fact that virtually all single-payer systems also utilize universal coverage, and most single-payer advocates--in the US and elsewhere, also advocate for universal coverage. But they are distinct. UHC is not a type of single-payer, and single-payer is not a type of UHC. I wrote a fair amount of the entry for single-payer and addressed these issues in a slightly more expanded manner there. Single-payer advocates also call for a number of other health system elements, but those, too, are not literally "single-payer." I'm new to this, so I have more to comment about in the article--not having made any edits yet, most saliently the misstatements regarding UHC and socialism and the inapt inclusion of this entry in the Socialism category. If anything is to be done, rather than repeating the info from other entries, like single-payer, or merging, is to hyperlink to the more expanded commentary elsewhere and to strip it out of here, allowing the focus on UHC itself, and secondarily referring to the related issues such as financing mechanisms. ---- my sigg isn't showing up, so by JackWikiSTP