Universal Basic Healthcare?

The piece that caught my eye this morning was this one by Annalisa Merelli at STAT:

Fixing the U.S. health care system can seem like a herculean task. But the solution is “actually very simple,” according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Amy Finkelstein.

In their recent book “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care,” Finkelstein and Stanford economist Liran Einav describe how years of research have led them to the conclusion that the best way forward is for the U.S. to offer universal basic health care coverage.

It isn’t until nearly the end of the piece that Ms. Merelli gets to the fine print:

Countries are divided, however, on what constitutes basic services. There are services that are clearly fundamental (say: vaccines, primary care, cancer care, maternity care) and others that are definitely not (for instance, purely cosmetic plastic surgery). But Finkelstein noted that a lot of services fall into a gray area, such as physiotherapy, new drugs that only extend life expectancy for a few months, Viagra, and in vitro fertilization.

Under certain circumstances I could support universal healthcare in the United States. I do have certain questions:

• What would be covered? I don’t believe it could work if elective procedures are covered, for example.
• If universal basic healthcare controls costs why are costs rising so fast in the United Kingdom?
• How will a country of 330 million however wealthy pay for the healthcare of 8 billion people?
• How will we persuade Medicare beneficiaries to accept a lower level of benefits than at present?
• What if they’re wrong?

I suppose we shouldn’t worry about the problems a system of universal basic healthcare might face in the U. S. Such a thing would not be possible politically for some of the reasons suggested above.