Medicare: Universal health care for everyone?

With a genuine universal health care plan headed for the state assembly, Wisconsin’s abuzz with debate over the best ways to improve health care access and cut costs.

Some see salvation in the plan, which opens to all the system state employees use. Others see socialism and disaster. Business groups are divided, with many trade groups opposing the plan but some independent operators supporting it. Republicans have vowed to administer a swift death to the plan.

Wisconsin Democrats aren’t the only supporters of universal health insurance. The National Older Women’s League, OWL, is, too. In their Mother’s Day report for 2007, Give ‘em Health Revisited: Medicare for All, authors Joan Brodshaug Bernstein and Merton C. Bernstein say we’ve already got a system that works, so why not use it for everyone?

The Oregon Alliance for Retired Americans writes of the report:

Give 'Em Health, Revisited: Medicare-for-All illustrates the ways midlife and older women are especially at risk for lack of health care coverage. The report provides a scathing overview of what is wrong with the current health system including the one-third of total health care expenditures that go to pay for administration, the tripling of profits over five years of the top seven U.S. health care insurers, and the exorbitant salaries of pharmaceutical company CEOs. Yet 47 million Americans have no health insurance, including 15 percent of women age 60-64. OWL concludes the report by endorsing a Medicare-for-All plan that would provide health care insurance coverage to all Americans without requiring new taxes or fees.

Here’s one Tennessee woman’s response:

I am a registered nurse and health care administrator (recently retired). I spent a huge part of my 37-year career finding ways to get coverage for the medical needs of patients. If health care providers were freed from this laborious concern, there is no telling how much talent and skill would be freed up to care for patients—the impact would be wonderful and dramatic!

What do you think? Does dealing with insurance take your time away from more important tasks? Is universal health care important? Viable? Could Medicare be a good system for all? Who would benefit--and who would not?