Argumentative Essay: Saskatchewan's Single Payer System

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Recommended: Health reform efforts by President Barack Obama

Saskatchewan, the vast and rural Canadian province above Montana and North Dakota, is a place farther even than Vermont from centers of power. Barely a million people live in Saskatchewan and its largest city, Saskatoon, would not even be one of the fifteen biggest in California. In 1947, Saskatchewan began paying the hospital bills of everyone who lived there. No province had ever done anything like it. But people loved it and word spread. Three years later Alberta, the larger province next door, began doing the same thing. By the early 1960s, every Canadian province was doing it. In 1966, Canada passed a bill that made the Saskatchewan model national law. Canada had a single payer system.
The United States just needed its Saskatchewan. …show more content…

Governor Shumlin had admitted that the stakes were high, observing, "If Vermont gets single-payer health care right, which I believe we will, other states will follow. If we screw it up, it will set back this effort for a long time.”
As Shumlin approached the podium, he laced his fingers and looked down at his hands and then out at the waiting crowd before beginning to speak. After a short preamble, he made his big announcement: he was pulling the plug on Green Mountain Care. There would be no single payer system in Vermont. The crowd listened, some literally with mouths open, as Peter Shumlin, the first American ever to win a gubernatorial race by campaigning on single payer, the first man to successfully shepherd a single payer bill into law, was announcing the death of what would have been his signature achievement in office. Yet again, the dream of single payer was out of reach. What happened? How did Vermont’s single payer effort …show more content…

Within a month of taking office in early 2009, Barack Obama announced that he was focusing on health reform. Healthcare consumed Washington and cable news for much of the next year. The plan that emerged was based on Mitt Romney’s reforms in Massachusetts, which incorporated Republican ideas endorsed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the conservative Heritage Foundation. The ACA made changes to America’s existing health insurance system, though some progressives wanted to see Obama blow it up and create something new, like a Canadian-style single payer

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