Single-Payer

Over the last few years, several states have tried their hand at creating a “public option” health insurance plan. Their experiences offer a cautionary tale to those pushing for similar reforms at the federal level — as well as to states considering public options of their own. In its purest form, the ...

Editor’s note: Today’s blog is part two of a three part series featuring PRI’s CEO & President Sally Pipes’ health care speech delivered at Reason Weekend on March 18th.  Despite the obvious failures of Obamacare and Medicaid, Democrats still can’t get enough of public health care. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) ...

California is dreaming about a government takeover of health insurance once again. Earlier this month, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced SB 770. The bill would seek a federal waiver to allow the state to use federal funds earmarked for Medicare and Medicaid to create a state-run health insurance system that ...

Consultants at the British Medical Association are threatening to go on strike, citing pay cuts. They’d be joining a months-long series of walkouts by British medical staffers. Nurses with the country’s government-run National Health Service took to the picket lines in mid-December, January, and February. And while the British government plans to discuss ...

Single-payer healthcare is back on the legislative agenda in New York, California, and Oregon. And just like previous efforts by state governments to take over their health insurance markets, these new ones are nothing to celebrate. Single-payer healthcare invariably leads to long waits for low-quality care, all paid for by ...

Senator Bernie Sanders, the tireless champion of “Medicare for All,” has just assumed the chair of the Senate’s powerful Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Unfortunately, that means we can expect to hear more bogus statistics about the supposed failures of the American health-care system. Lately, Sanders has been asserting that “85 ...

When Washington’s Democratic Governor Jay Inslee signed the nation’s first public health insurance option into law in 2019, he claimed it’d ensure that “all Washingtonians have high-quality health-care insurance, an option they can afford that is available across the state.” Three years in, it hasn’t. Advocates for a public option would do ...

While Democrats in Washington extol the virtues of socialized medicine, Canada’s most populous province is beginning to move away from single-payer health care. Last month, Conservative Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced plans to increase its reliance on private healthcare providers. The move is a necessary response to the ongoing crisis in Canada’s ...

In my last column, I wrote that Canada’s healthcare system was no model for the United States. Perhaps Canadian officials were listening. Earlier this month, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that Canada’s largest province would take a page from the U.S. playbook—and expand private care in order to provide some relief to the ...

Sen. Bernie Sanders would do well to look at what’s happening across our northern border before he tries to advance legislation that would import Canada’s single-payer health care system, where the government is the only insurer. The new chairman of the influential Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, he’s made clear ...