Letter from an Expat: The Unexpected Benefits of a Single-Payer System

by Pat Salber, MD, MBA & Dov Michaeli MD, PhD

Ok, we know, ideological juices are already flowing having seen the words “single-payer” in the title. As Americans, we have been trained, in an almost Pavlovian way, to equate single-payer with the much-maligned and much-feared social and economic system called socialism. In fact, many confuse the tenets of socialism with the even more dreaded communism. Americans believe that anything short of a free market will take away our liberties and bankrupt the country. But wait, before we sit back and smugly dismiss the whole idea as one of those liberal hare-brain ideas, let’s consider some inconvenient facts from the rest of the world:

Single-payer is alive and doing well, thank you, in such “socialist” countries as Canada, the U.K., France, Japan, South Korea, and Switzerland. We purposely didn’t include Sweden, Denmark, and other countries in Northern Europe in the list of single-payer countries, since the term “Swedenization,” has been used to demonize everything that deviates from the Right’s laissez-faire orthodoxy. Never mind that Sweden has had for a long time a conservative government. As had a slew of the other countries.