It does indeed seem that middle-class families would have a hard time paying monthly premiums, as well as an annual deductible of $13,000, to get coverage. In 2016, 35 percent of American adults had only several hundred dollars in their savings accounts and 34 percent had nothing, according to GOBankingRates. That’s a total of 69 percent of Americans who had less than $1,000 stashed away.
Research from Fidelity also found that most families, even those approaching retirement, have either little retirement savings or none.
As civil rights attorney and author Chase Madar’s op-ed in the American Conservative argues, other developed nations have figured out a fix: single-payer health care, through which services are provided to citizens with no deductibles.
“In every first-world nation that has socialized medicine — whether it be a heavily regulated multi-insurer system like Germany, single-payer like Canada, or a purely socialized system like the United Kingdom — [health care] costs less,” he writes. “A lot, lot less, in fact: While healthcare eats up nearly 18 percent of U.S. GDP, for other nations, from Australia and Canada to Germany and Japan, the figure hovers around 11 percent.”
Not only are costs in Canada lower, but results are also often better, Madar adds: Residents in “Canada have less obesity and type II diabetes.” And citizens are largely satisfied. There, “the single-payer healthcare system is such a part of national identity that even hard-right insurgents like Stockwell Day have enthusiastically pledged to maintain it.”
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