Types and Variations
Canada, Australia, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Cuba, and North Korea have single-payer health insurance programs. These programs provide universal health care. Single-payer healthcare may be operated in a number of ways. In some cases doctors may be employed, and hospitals run by, the government as in the United Kingdom. Alternatively the government may purchase healthcare services from outside organizations. This is the approach taken in Canada.
Some writers describe publicly administered health care systems as "single-payer plans". Some writers have described any system of health care which intends to cover the entire population, such as voucher plans, as "single-payer plans", although this is an uncommon usage. The standard usage refers to health insurance, as opposed to healthcare delivery, operating as a public service, like fire departments, community libraries, and other publicly-funded services, offered to citizens and legal residents towards providing near-universal or universal health care. The fund can be managed by the government directly or as a publicly owned and regulated agency.
Read more about this topic: Single-payer Health Care
Famous quotes containing the words types and, types and/or variations:
“The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)