In talking about his single-payer bill, which he reintroduced in the Senate on Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders often claims that “I want to end the international embarrassment of the United States of America being the only major country on earth that doesn’t guarantee health care to all people as a right and not a privilege.”
But his legislation would do no such thing. Understanding why demonstrates the inherent drawbacks of his government-centered approach to health policy.
Section 201(a) illustrates the catch in Sanders’ bill, and his philosophy. That section states that “individuals enrolled for benefits under this Act are entitled to have payment made…to an eligible provider” for a list of covered services. Note the wording: Sanders’ bill doesn’t guarantee access to care. Instead, it merely guarantees that people will have their care covered—if they can access it. But in government-run systems, finding access to care often proves no easy feat.
In our own country, low reimbursement rates in many state Medicaid programs can make finding doctors difficult. One 2011 study found that two-thirds of specialist physicians would not accept Medicaid patients, whereas only 11 percent of patients with private insurance could not obtain appointments. Patients with Medicaid also had to wait an average of three weeks longer for an appointment for the few doctors who would see them.
Medicaid suffers from so many access problems that one former director of a state program called a Medicaid card a “hunting license,” because it “gave you a chance to go find a doctor.” That’s the only “guarantee” the Sanders bill actually provides—the guarantee you can try to go find care, not a guarantee you can receive it.
But “access to a waiting list is not access to care.” So ruled four Canadian justices in a landmark 2005 ruling, Chaoulli v. Quebec. In that case, Canada’s Supreme Court overturned Quebec’s ban on private health insurance, finding that it “interfere[d] with life and security,” because “the government is failing to deliver health care in a reasonable manner.”
Indeed, delays and long waits for care plague Canada’s single-payer health system. One study found that approximately 3 percent of the nation’s population remained on waiting lists for care in 2018. From physician referral to the start of treatment, waiting times averaged five months—double that for orthopedic surgery cases.
Government-run health care systems traditionally attempt to contain costs by limiting the available supply of care. Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) follows the same approach as Canada’s single payer system. So patients wait for care there, also.
Consider what happened just last year, when the winter flu outbreak created a national “crisis”: The NHS had to cancel tens of thousands of operations, emergency rooms resembled “Third World” conditions, and ambulances waited for hours to unload patients—because hospitals had no place to put them.
The language in Sanders’ legislation demonstrates how, instead of making health care a “right,” single payer would instead increase demand for care—demand the system could not fulfill. To add insult to injury, the Sanders bill would ban private health insurance—the same type of ban Canada’s Supreme Court struck down—here to the United States, giving patients little way out of a clogged government health system.
Promises aside, Sanders’ “guarantee” of coverage would quickly turn into a guarantee that patients would wait, and wait, for care. The American people deserve better.
