Socialized Medicine - Background

Background

Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina, maintains that the term does not mean anything at all. Exact definitions vary, but the term refers to any system of medical care that is publicly financed and government administered. If the system of care is publicly financed and privately delivered, it is called a single-payer system. This is what Canada has.

The original meaning was confined to systems in which the government operates health care facilities and employs health care professionals. This narrower usage would apply to the British National Health Service hospital trusts and health systems that operate in other countries as diverse as Finland, Spain, Israel, and Cuba. The United States' Veterans Health Administration, and the medical departments of the US Army, Navy, and Air Force, would also fall under this narrow definition. When used in this way, the narrow definition permits a clear distinction from single payer health insurance systems, in which the government finances health care but is not involved in care delivery.

More recently, American conservative critics of health care reform have attempted to broaden the term by applying it to any publicly funded system. Canada's Medicare system and most of the UK's NHS general practitioner and dental services, which are systems where health care is delivered by private business with partial or total government funding, fit this broader definition, as do the health care systems of most of Western Europe. In the United States, Medicare, Medicaid, and the US military's TRICARE fall under this definition.

Most industrialized countries, and many developing countries, operate some form of publicly funded health care with universal coverage as the goal. According to the Institute of Medicine and others, the United States is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care.

The term is often used by conservatives in the U.S to imply that the privately run health care system would become controlled by the government, thereby associating it with socialism, which has negative connotations to some people in American political culture. As such its usage is controversial, and at odds with the views of conservatives in other countries prepared to defend socialized medicine such as Margaret Thatcher.