Talk:National health insurance

User:kevlar67 asked for evidence that the term National Health Insurance is used as a generic international term for Single Payer insurance.

The following countries all refer to National Health Insurance as nationally implemented health insurance programs.... (Most are of course translations into English)

Japan http://www.kokuho.or.jp/english/index.htm USA http://www.pnhp.org/ http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=1623 Taiwan http://www.nhi.gov.tw/English/index.asp# Bulgaria http://www.nhif.bg/eng/default.phtml Korea http://www.nhic.or.kr/english/ Israel http://www.btl.gov.il/english/health.htm

as the term for a national implemented system of health insurance. The vogue at the moment in the US is Single payer but it is in effect a national health insurance porgram and even PNHP who are the main medical backers of Single payer in the US refer to it as National Health Insurance. You will not find other countries refering to their National Health Insurance Systsems as Single Payer. Google if you like, but I doubt you find any.

In Britain National Insurance was originally known as National Health Stamp because the payment to the fund could be made by buying insurance stamps at the Post Office for placement on a contributions card. Most Brits would know what is meant by National Health Insurance but would be bemused by the term Single Payer.

These references above came from just the first few pages of a Google search for National Health Insurance and they all refer to existing progams (the US excepted if course). I'm sure you can find more if you look. --Tom (talk) 21:11, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Here's the problem with that

How about, in the name of being "unbiased", you put a more recent poll of american doctors in this article. The numbers today are around 60 percent OPPOSED to the president's plan. And on top of that, more than 50% of Americans oppose a national insurance plan, so u should add something like that since in america the opinion of the citizens is what writes law, not the opinion of a select few. I have no problem with these plans elsewhere in the world, but when a majority of people in a country are opposed to a law i dont think it should be shoved down our throat and i dont think people from other countries should try and persuade us —Preceding unsigned comment added by 136.160.191.18 (talk) 19:58, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

What is it refered to in Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Places that actually speak English? I'm not saying your wrong, just needs some more evidence before you say that it's the most common term. Kevlar67 (talk) 18:54, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

>Ireland's healthcare system does not operate through sickness funds:
>There is a government funded health service
>and a strong private health insurance sector.
>I am not aware of the sickness fund model at work in Ireland.
>Will I remove this reference or does someone else want to do so? Revatim (talk) 15:03, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Merge proposal

I support the merger of social health insurance into this article. That article is a five-sentence stub that appears to have had very little editing attention or expansion since its creation almost three years ago (how many articles do you see that have only a one-page edit history over three years???) The reference list may be valuable, but I don't have access to the references in order to evaluate them. The term should redirect here with any details and references added here that aren't already in the content here. --Sfmammamia (talk) 19:16, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

I support the merger also. The article on "Social health insurance" seems to me poorly formed - it mixes the concepts of National health insurance and Social Insurance in a confusing way, so that it's not really clear which one the article is intended to address. The one thing that it seems to bring to the table is a list of references. EastTN (talk) 18:37, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

An IP editor recently removed the merge tags and made changes both to this article and to Social health insurance. I restored the merge tags and left a message for that editor requesting that they participate in discussion here if their edits indicate an interest in keeping the two articles separate. The Social health insurance article has been slightly expanded, but that does not change my position that the two should be merged. --Sfmammamia (talk) 20:11, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, Sfammamia, for removing the tags without discussing. I just didn't know how this works... new to Wiki. Even though I agree that somehow social health insurance could be seen as a type of national health insuarance, I think these articles should be kept separate. One reason is that this is generally done so in the literature (e.g. freely downloadable: http://www.euro.who.int/observatory/Publications/20041122_1 , especially chapter 2 explains the situation). A second reason is that social health insurance does not need to be 'national'. And a third (admittably not the best argument of the three): national health insurance does not need to be 'social'. Furthermore, national health insuancre suggests tax/state interference, which is certainly not always the case. Sickness funds are often private non-profit organization. Hope it's clear like this. I'll try to put some more time in it to improve the section and add some more references. Best wishes. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.206.98.195 (talk) 11:29, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Support the merger. Merger done. --Prowler08 (talk) 10:02, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Blocking request for User:LincolnSt

Editors may wish to be aware that I have today placed a blocking request on User:LincolnStfor perisitently vilolating the spirit of editorial co-operation, for demonstrating bias in his edits, for depleting the usefulness of WP articles on health care to its readers and for making changes so rapidly that they seem to be planned aforethought and dumped on the editing community. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Blocking_request__User:LincolnSt for examples and to express your thoughts if you have any.--Hauskalainen (talk) 08:49, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Hauskalainen, you have not argued anything in the talk page. An editor associated with you, Cosmic Cowboy (talk · contribs), has already received last warning from administrators.LincolnSt (talk) 11:56, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Reform

I removed a sentence that National Health Insurance is "usually instituted as a reform". Many countries have had national health insurance for fifty years, and it's not thought of as a 'reform'. Of course originally it was a reform, but then EVERYTHING was originally a reform because it was different before. Private healthcare insurance was instituted as a reform (over the previous pay-whatever-the-doctor-asked-and-pray-you-could-afford-it method) and employer-provided insurance was instituted a a reform compared with pure private healthcare. So the sentence is at worst wrong and at best irrelevant. DJ Clayworth (talk) 17:16, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Of course ít was INSTITUTED as reform at the time of the change! You may be relatively young and think that reform has to be something recent or yet to come. But that is not the meaning of the word.

why wrong? Very very few countries have got there by gradual increments

and why irrelevant? The point that the text was making is that national health insurance does not happen by accident. That may be obvious to you, but perhaps not to everyone. It happened in those countries that have it because the people in those countries wanted it to happen. I know that there are some people in some countries who would like to think that NHI is some kind of national error or just a fluke, but that is the complete opposite of the truth. It happens because people want it to happen. I think that was the point of the edit. --Hauskalainen (talk) 03:03, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

I'll accept that the statement belongs in the article, but not in the very first sentence. It places too much emphasis on a statement (still of doubtful usefulness) about the history of national healthcare. I suggest a section on the history of NI schemes.

While we are about it, I'd like to remove the statement about what NI is not. It's not helpful, and it's pandering too much to the US Healthcare Reform debate. DJ Clayworth (talk) 16:32, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Not every article should be focussed on the current US Healthcare debate. Let's not always relate a kind of NI to whoever is proposing it in the US. DJ Clayworth (talk) 01:24, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

What do you mean by "it places too much emphasis on a statement about the history of NHI schemes"? Too much emphasis? All it says is that NHI comes about as a process of reform. In a sense it is a truism and it cannot be exaggerating anything!--Hauskalainen (talk) 16:19, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

If it's a truism then it doesn't belong here either.

In the current climate there is a tendency to make every healthcare related article about US healthcare reform (you should realise this, given how much editing of US healthcare reform related articles you've been doing). Believe it or not, some people actually want to read about healthcare in other countries. We should not clutter up articles like that with references to US healthcare. One of the main points of an online encyclopedia is that you can follow the links if you want to read about a related topic. DJ Clayworth (talk) 18:07, 5 October 2009 (UTC)