Last week I talked about the crisis of health care availability in Champaign County. To recap: over 70,000 residents of a Champaign County, which has a population of about 180,000, lack meaningful access to health care. This is due to a system where the uninsured or those on Medicaid are turned away from seeing a doctor, because 90 percent of physicians in the county are employees of for-profit clinics which are allowed to do this (and a significant portion of the other ten percent are not primary care providers).

There are a few additional issues plaguing the health care system. One is that due to the rising costs of health care and behavior on the part of insurance providers, it is these providers who determine what kinds of treatments a patient will receive. If a patient’s insurance decides not to pay for a necessary form of treatment, doctors can often not provide it. So we have insurance companies, not actual medical professionals, deciding what kind of treatment people will receive.

On the national level, 46 million Americans have no form of health insurance. Not incomplete or poor health insurance (of which there are many), but none at all. The problem, which is so severe in Champaign County, shows up all around the nation: the wealthy have access to preventative care and life-saving treatment, but the poor? Sorry. A nation should be measured by how well it treats the least fortunate of its members.

Responses to the call for universal health care from opponents, including Daily Illini readers, often contain the chilling idea that health care is a privilege and not a right. There is also the more practical notion that doctors need to make money, they can’t be expected to work for free. While technically both are true, some form of social safety net that reimburses doctors and provides treatment to all our citizens regardless of their economic status sure would be a nice.

One solution that will both provide universal coverage and reduce bureaucratic waste is a single-payer health care system. The statistics used in this column come from the Web site of Physicians for a National Health Program, a group pushing for a single-payer health care program, which aims to bring universal health coverage to all American citizens.

A single-payer health care program would address the crisis of availability to health care in Champaign County and the United States in general. No longer would checkups and preventative medicine be out of the reach of those living paycheck to paycheck, and no longer would insurance companies be able to decide who receives treatment. Patients would be free to choose whatever doctors they want, and doctors would bill a single program.

But isn’t this inefficient socialized medicine? Well, no. A key difference between socialized medicine and a single-payer health system is that physicians and hospitals would still operate independently, not as employees of the government, and would bill the government on a fee-per-service basis, with prices for procedures negotiated beforehand.

The expensive bureaucracy predicted by opponents of a single-payer system already exists. According to phnp.org, the United States currently has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. Right now we have a “patchwork” system of coverage, with many different insurance providers (more than 1,500 different insurance plans!) providing incomplete or no care to some, wonderful care to others, and a massive bureaucracy necessary to hold it together. For each dollar spent on health care, 24 percent goes to administrative costs ($400 billion in total). According to a study from the New England Journal of Medicine, Canada’s system spends just 1.3 percent on bureaucratic costs. Medicare and Medicaid spend between 2 and 5 percent. Furthermore, since people could afford to go to the doctor, conditions could be caught when they are in the early, and more affordable, stages of treatment, to say nothing of the suffering caused by the disease.

If this column interested you, go check out the Web site for Physicians for a National Health Program, at www.phnp.org. There is a lot more there than can be fit into a single 650-word column.