Single Payer Health Insurance

I submitted the letter below on September 10, 2007 to Moscow [Idaho]– Pullman [Washington] Daily News on September 10, 2007. I think they published it not long afterward.

Dear Editor,

     On September 8, one of your columnists suggested jocularly that the concept of buying and selling "carbon offsets" should be used to "offset" other guilty pleasures, such as smoking and gluttony. Coincidentally, the following evening I saw the movie Sicko, directed by Michael Moore, and learned that France has already put into practice a close cousin of that idea.
     Like most industrialized countries (ours being a backward exception), France has a single payer, government managed, tax supported,universal health care system. Doctors treat people according to their health care needs, without even asking about ability to pay. In the film Moore interviews a French doctor who drives a fancy car and lives in a posh house. The doctor explains that under the French system,doctors, as government employees, are paid amply enough to live comfortably. He goes on to say that his income was raised in recent years, because the more he showed that he was convincing his patients
to practice healthier living habits, such as quitting smoking or
lowering harmful cholesterol levels, the more the government increased his salary.
     Paying doctors more if they not only treat disease but promote healthy living habits is a beautiful and sensible idea, as universal health care is in general. In the examples looked at by Moore –– Canada,England, France, and Cuba –– everyone gets health care for free when needed, with the cost shared by the whole society through taxes,lowering overall health care costs and benefiting all. I've lived in Canada and can vouch that it works wonderfully.
     In contrast, Sicko exposes the USA’s degenerate and shameful health care and health insurance systems, in which the big bucks are made by dishonorably and dishonestly denying care to those who need it and who by our system’s own rules should get it.