UNC Health Care CEO Wants to Compel Citizens into Single-Payer Program

UNC Health Care CEO, John Roper stood before state legislators and decried the inadequate health care Americans are receiving.   He believes the only way to cure the ailments of the collective is a single-payer system.  And he doesn’t care if you like your plan or not.  As a matter of fact, he believes we should be “compelled” into a universal (Marxist) health care system.  Here is an excerpt from a Carolina Journal article:

Under the current American health care system, Roper said, hospitals have to charge people who can pay more money to compensate for those who can’t pay.

He said “a more sensible approach” would be to set up “one insurance scheme for everybody and charge premiums to people who could afford to pay it, and a sliding scale for those who couldn’t. Then [provide] subsidies for those and the bottom of the scale, and then collect the money and pay the bills … that works in other countries.”

The host noted that the system Roper was advocating sounded “suspiciously” like a single-payer system, and Roper confirmed that was what he was describing.

“The problem with that here is it runs counter to our tradition of radical individualism and Americans having great distrust of major government programs,” Roper said.

“None of the reforms that Americans would find reasonable will work unless most if not all of our population is in the system,” he continued. “Unless people can be compelled … and I’ll use the word compelled… to make plans and buy insurance ahead of time then the only people who will buy it are those that have these chronic, serious illnesses, or pre-existing conditions.”

How is it that Mr. Roper comes to his statist solutions?  Well, he once served as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  He is a big government bureaucrat.  Go figure.

And as it goes with our wannabe lord and masters, Mr. Roper believes health care cost is too high, mainly due to obstinate Americans not willing to exercise preventive care.  He also stated that any meaningful reforms would incur “cost controls.”  Can anyone say Death Panels?

The assertions of Mr. Roper have been easily refuted by Dr. Andrew Foy.  Here are few excerpts, again published by Carolina Journal:

Foy agrees that the health care costs are spiraling out of control, but blames government intervention for the problem and argues that more government intervention is not the solution.

“Prior to the advent of Medicare and Medicaid, individuals paid for the majority of medical goods and services out of their own pocket and utilized health insurance as a rational tool for mitigating financial risk posed by catastrophic events,” Foy wrote in another article. “During this time a real market existed for the vast majority of medical goods and services, and prices were reasonable.”

But after these government programs came into existence, private insurance companies also began covering health care “maintenance” to remain competitive, he said, causing third-party spending on routine medical services to increase and out-of-pocket spending to fall.

The result, he wrote, is “consumers now use many medical services that they would simply reject if they had to pay for them out of pocket — and truthfully, in most cases, they would be none the worse off for rejecting them.”

Try explaining that to a statist like Mr. Roper.

Source:  http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive.html?id=9750