A form of financing health care in which there is one agency that pays the providers for the care they deliver: it provides private health care through public insurance. 

•  Comprehensive Health Coverage for everyone

•  Greater choice of provider

•  Health decisions made by patient and provider instead of HMO's

•  Improved Health Planning

•  Health coverage would be portable, not tied to employment

•  Eliminates the high (up to 33 percent) overhead cost of multiple private, for-profit insurances by including coverage for everyone in a single-risk pool by reducing administrative costs to 1-5%

•  Instead of hundreds of insurances with differing requirements, which can lead to a need for increased office staff, providers would deal with only one form

•  The plan would be financed with a progressive tax, at less per-capita cost

•  Companies would avoid hassles of managing health care, and become more competitive without annual inflationary health costs

•  Consumers would pay less for goods and services that are inflated by businesses' high health costs-e.g., currently $1,500 is added to the cost of each U.S. made automobile due to health costs

•  U.S. Consumers, who now spend twice as much per capita as consumers in other developed countries, with poorer outcomes, would save as administrative health costs are reduced

•  Single-risk-pool coverage would permit negotiation of lower, bulk rates for medications

•  Increased U.S. life expectancy: Similar socioeconomic single-payer European countries enjoy average two-year longer life expectancies

•  The over 45 million uninsured Americans and 50 million more underinsured would have access to preventative care, without having to resort to delayed, crisis Emergency Room care, at 4 to 5 times higher cost

•  Lessening demands on the nation's emergency rooms for primary care would stem the tide of closures of overburdened emergency rooms

•  Retirees would not face loss of health coverage by employers

•  Eliminates the profit motive that places priority on stockholders' profits, and creates a perverse incentive to deny health coverage to the ill or high-risk

•  Would have a favorable effect on such add on health care costs as malpractice insurance premiums because most medical malpractice suits arise, not out of bad results, but out of what consumers perceive as “mistreatment.” When consumers feel they have been over-charged, a lot more issues become “mistreatment.”

•  Physicians would no longer have to set up practice “where the money is” so the distribution of physicians around the state and around the nation would erase some of the inequities in our current system.

•  Universal single payer health care could make family practice rewarding enough relative to the specialties to encourage more physicians to go into primary care, which is underserved, and fewer physicians to elect specialties, which are currently over-served.

•  Universal single payer health care modeled after the system in Scotland could reduce or eliminate physicians' medical training debts, further controlling costs.