Single-Payer Health Care in Cartoons

About once a year, someone makes the universal health care argument in the form of a cartoon and puts it on YouTube. This is a worthy entry into that genre. Clearly part of the appeal of single-payer health care, a system where all health insurance is paid for by the government out of a central fund to private hospitals and physicians, is its simplicity – you have the whole thing explained in about 4.5 minutes, maybe 10 if you want to get into “What If?” scenarios. But also exposed well in the cartoon format is the Looney Tunes-style contortions we put ourselves through now in order to keep up with the perverse incentives of for-profit insurance.

The comparison of firefighters as a government paid and provided service vs. a for-profit “fire insurance” industry was also taken up in an op-ed by NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. New York City, in fact, used to have a disastrous private industry fire-fighting system. Instead of efficiencies through competition, it bred corruption and the threat of future financial pain for those who had just lost their possessions, usually because of a stroke of fortune. We wouldn’t stand for someone privatizing our police or our army or our fire-fighters or even our water treatment centers. But somehow, despite no other industrialized country standing for a system that makes a profit on basic health (some of them allow insurance companies to make a profit on add-ons and non-essentials, but the essentials are non-profit), we are convinced there’s value to a profit motive with incentives to deny care and avoid customers that are likely to need it that actually enhances our health. Although, when pressed, we’re not sure what that value is.

Sometimes it takes a cartoon to realize how much of our argument is about inertia.