http://hr676.org/ is basically model legislation for expanded US single payer for everyone.
It's closest to what I think is the best way to go about it -- expand Medicare to cover everyone, with appropriate subsidies, etc., for lower income as needed, and add in things that Medicaid covers, like some optometry and dental. After a certain date, American citizens would be born into the program and issued a combo Social Security/Medicare card at birth. It could work like the Taiwanese smart card, which looks like a debit card and bills to a central agency when swiped by the doctor at a patient's visit (that idea is not necessarily in the hr 676 proposal but it seems like a good one to me).
Of course the big opponents to this or anything are the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA) and Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Association of America (PhrMA), two of the big reasons we don't have this already, along with the politicians they buy off and AM talk radio hosts, etc., who do the ideological groundwork for these organizations, invoking communism and all that.
-B.
Jenny Brown wrote:
"On a per person basis, we're already spending more public money (if you include tax breaks) than most countries do to cover their whole population under a national system."