What Is ‘Socialized Medicine’?: A Taxonomy of Health Care Systems - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com

What Is ‘Socialized Medicine’?: A Taxonomy of Health Care Systems - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com:

"Socialized medicine refers to health system in which the government owns and operates both the financing of health care and its delivery. Cell A in the chart represents socialized medicine.

"Social health insurance, on the other hand, refers to systems in which individuals transfer their financial risk of medical bills to a risk pool to which, as individuals, they contribute taxes or premiums based primarily on ability to pay, rather than on how healthy or sick they are."
...........
"Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York has exemplified the perennial confusion in this country over socialized medicine. In his ill-fated presidential bid, and subsequently as a supporter of Senator John McCain’s bid for the presidency, Mr. Giuliani routinely decried as socialized medicine (or “socialist”) any proposal presented by Democratic candidates, because typically the latter advocated tax-financed subsidies toward the purchase of health private insurance or expansions of public insurance programs. But technically none of them advocated socialized medicine.

"Perhaps Mr. Giuliani was unaware that Americans all along the ideological spectrum reserve the purest form of socialized medicine — the V.A. health system — for the nation’s veterans. I find this cognitive dissonance amusing. Indeed, if socialized medicine is so evil, why didn’t Republicans privatize the V.A. health system when they controlled both the White House and the Congress during 2001-06?

"Mr. Giuliani also seems to forget that, in 1996, he found social health insurance a perfect solution to the financial problems faced by former Mayor John V. Lindsay, who fell on financially hard times during the 1990s as a result of chronic illness. "

The chart in the piece is a little tough, the text is better, specifically the first two paragraphs above.

But to me, the key is do we want to continue to decide who can get health care and health insurance based upon their luck? And I don't mean luck in being financially successful, I mean luck in not getting a chronic, life threatening, debilitating illness. And if we get lucky, and make it to Medicare without a big illness, do we really want to rely on that luck holding out for our children, our nieces and nephews, our grandchildren? I don't.

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