Ultimately of course business will be taxed which will affect wages, employment, and the costs to the consumer as well as making it harder for us to compete globally because already our standard of living means our production costs are higher than most countries.
UHC has NOT worked and can't--it violates principles of economics and human nature. When something is perceived as free then SOME will waste it--with limited docs, meds, hospital beds, etc. those with TRUE needs are shoved out by pigs who exaggerate every sniffle.
Canadian doc who studies world health care, and like 500 of his Canadian colleagues a year, moved to the US from the "UHC paradise" of Canada:
"...Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.”
And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room.
This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente.
Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It’s important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual—market reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer."
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html
Read the entire long article for more facts on UHC which Dems don't want you to know. Also consider these facts:
The NHS, the oldest system, is in Britain:
"Staff are being laid off, and deficits are at an all time high (£1.07bn for 2005-2006)” (Hazel Blears, Labour Party Chair and Minister Without Portfolio, labourachievements.blogspot.com/2006/08/23-investment-in-nhs.html).
In the National Review Online article, Coburn & Herzlinger state “more than 20,000 Brits would not have died from cancer in the U.S.” Just recently Alex Smallwood of the BMA (British Medical Association) was quoted in the Scotsman as saying: “’Rationing is reduction in choice. Rationing has become a necessary evil. We need to formalise rationing to prevent an unregulated, widening, postcode-lottery of care. Government no longer has a choice.’” (Moss, “NHS rationing is ‘necessary evil,’ says doctors,” 26 June 2007).
"Comparing Canada with other industrialized countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that provide universal access to health care, a study released by The Fraser Institute in May revealed that Canada spends more on its system than other nations while ranking among the lowest in several key indicators, such as access to physicians, quality of medical equipment, and key health outcomes.
...
In 1999, Richard F. Davies, MD, described how delays affected Ontario heart patients scheduled for coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. In a single year, for this one operation, 71 patients died before surgery and another "121 were removed from the list permanently because they had become medically unfit for surgery;" 44 left Ontario and had their CABG elsewhere, such as in the USA. In other words, 192 people either died or were too sick to have surgery before they worked their way to the front of the waiting line.
One of the reasons Canadians are slow to acknowledge the problems with their system is that general practitioners have been relatively easy to access and reasonably efficient at providing everyday services for common complaints, such as colds, sprains, aches and pains.
As time passes, however, more and more Canadians are confronted by the halting quality of their system when they face complex and expensive medical problems. They often cannot get timely or appropriate care for bone fractures, prompt treatment for cancer, or non-emergency surgery such as hip replacements. Their doctors complain that they are unable to help them and the government pleads shortage of funds.
...
Canadian physician frustration with their inability to provide quality and timely care is resulting in a brain drain. According to one poll, one in three Canadian doctors is considering leaving the country. A doctor shortage looms, as the nation falls 500 doctors a year short of the 2,500 new physicians it needs to add each year to meet national health needs, according to Sally Pipes, a policy expert formerly with the Canadian Fraser Institute.
Another casualty of the lengthy waiting periods is Canada's much-vaunted equal access to medical treatment. Even though medical emergencies allow some people to jump ahead in the waiting line — making others wait longer — a survey published in the Annals of Internal Medicine medical journal found that more than 90 percent of heart specialists had "been involved in the care of a patient who received preferential access" to cardiac care based on non-medical reasons including the patient's social standing or personal connections with the treating physician."
Jewish World Review June 11, 2004 written by Dr. Cihak
AND
"The biggest Canadian fiscal drain comes from the single-payer medical system. "Current model of health-care delivery leading us down the path to financial ruin," states the lead editorial in the Calgary Sun. Health-care costs would consume 50% of Alberta's budget by 2016 (according to the Fraser Institute) or 2017 (according to Aon Consulting, a firm hired by the Alberta government). Health care would devour 100% of the provincial budget by 2030, if present trends continue.
...
An estimated 90,000 Canadians sought medical care outside their country in 2005. The cry "no two-tiered system" could be replaced by "set our patients free," stated a lead editorial (National Post 9/18/06)."
Jewish World Review Dec. 1, 2006 by Dr. Glueck
So why no total collapse yet? Because “illegal, for-profit health-service centers” have “proliferated” in Canada and are so accepted that the head of one became the president of the Canadian Medical Association (“Individual Freedom vs. Government Control,” 1 August 2007, nationalreview.com).
Japan doesn't fare any better:
"According to Japanese legislator Takashi Yamamoto, who was just diagnosed with cancer, "abandoned cancer refugees are roaming the Japanese archipelago." Patients are told they¹ll never get better, even when treatments exist, and many are not even informed of their diagnoses. Cancer mortality rates in Japan have been steadily climbing and are now more than 250 per 100,000, while U.S. rates are now around 180 per 100,000. (Glueck, “Far East illustrates the limitations and dangers of universal health care,” 26 January 2007, jewishworldreview.com)
Sweden:
A May 2007 article the National Center for Public Policy Research ran called “Sweden’s Single-Payer Health System Provides a Warning to Other Nations” (Hogberg, nationalcenter.org) indicates that this government with good GDP ($31,600) and relatively low unemployment (5.6 percent) had a single-payer system for much of the 20th century. They covered basically all health care costs and as a result, had to ration health care, and found themselves with waiting lists for both surgeries and doctor visits. In the 1990s, there was a move toward semi-privatization which reduced those problems, but they have re-emerged. In that author’s, view, the reforms were not permitted to work as they were not full-on free market ones.
The much lauded French system raises some questions as well. From their Embassy site