Just consider what “The Market” has done for health care in the last 30 years: a steady increase in the number of uninsured; a decrease in the choice of providers; diversion of resources into more profitable hospitals and services; consolidation of HMOs into health care oligopolies; underfunding of less profitable endeavors, such as public health, trauma centers, and mental health services; unaffordable prescription drugs; dissatisfied patients; frustrated physicians; and of course, an inexorably increasing trajectory of health care costs.

Myth #4: Single-Payer Would Stop Medical Innovation

To my knowledge, there is no correlation between innovation and a country’s method of health care financing. Many technologies and medical advances we now take for granted originated in nations with national health insurance, for example, CT scans and MRIs (Great Britain), laparoscopic cholecystectomy (Canada), percutaneous coronary angioplasty (Germany), and H. pylori treatment (Australia). The largest single source of funding for medical research in the U.S. is a government agency – the National Institutes of Health – which provided almost $31 billion in funding for medical research in fiscal year 2012. And in terms of per-capita drug R&D costs, the U.S. lags behind Britain and Sweden.

Myth #5: Single-Payer Is Impossible to Enact Politically

Perhaps this is true – for now. But if social change depended solely on what was politically pragmatic, women would not have achieved the right to vote in 1920, civil rights legislation would not have been enacted in 1964, and Medicare would have failed in 1965. We should always be careful to distinguish between what’s desirable and what’s doable. The fact that tort reform is certainly desirable, but not politically doable at the present time, has not stopped ACEP from investing significant time and financial resources to advocate for change. Public opinion polls have consistently shown that the level of public support for single-payer is 60% plus. A survey of physicians published 4 years ago showed that single-payer garnered 59% support among the 2,193 physicians polled (support among emergency physicians was even higher, at 69%). Despite this, there is no question that moving to a single-payer system will face enormous obstacles. What is needed, as columnist David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times pointed out, is a “massive infusion of political courage and the willingness to forsake political purity.”

Myth #6: We Can’t Afford Single-Payer

Given our current system, perhaps the better statement would be “we can’t afford not to have single-payer.” The most recent financial projections portend no overall decrease in the cost trajectory for health care over the next 8 years, even if the ACA remains intact. Under a single-payer model, a modest increase in taxes would be overshadowed by savings from elimination of insurance premiums, offsets from economies of scale, decreased out-of-pocket payments, and the disappearance of cost-shifting. The annual savings from transforming to a single-payer system are estimated to be $400 billion. If you look at the cost curves for U.S. and Canadian health care, they were identical until the mid-1970s, when Canada’s health system was fully implemented. From then on, the curves diverged, with America’s climbing much faster than Canada’s. When Taiwan converted to single-payer in 1995, the costs went up in the first year, as expected, and then leveled off to a reasonable increase of about 3% per year.

What Does This Mean for EM?

Well, consider the ED as a de facto single-payer environment. Patients come to us by choice without needing to first check with their health plan (assuming they have one) to see if their ED visit is covered. We see them without asking them to pay in advance for their ED services, and their care is not predicated on their job, income, or insurance coverage. As emergency physicians, we have more autonomy than our primary care colleagues in terms of making diagnostic and therapeutic decisions without the nonsense of “pre-authorization” or other interference from an insurer who is interested only in the bottom line. While it’s nice to be able to make medical decisions without checking on insurance status, it would be even nicer if we actually got paid for every ED patient treated. Private insurance companies simply have no incentive – in fact, it’s not at all consistent with their business model – to pay for EMTALA-mandated services provided by out-of-network emergency physicians.