• The Obama-Biden plan provides affordable, accessible health care for all Americans, builds on the existing healthcare system, and uses existing providers, doctors and plans to implement the plan.
• Obama will lower health care costs: The Obama plan will lower health care costs by $2,500 for a typical family by investing in health information technology, prevention and care coordination.
• Promote public health: Obama and Biden will require coverage of preventive services, including cancer screenings, and will increase state and local preparedness for terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
• If you don’t have health insurance, you will have a choice of new, affordable health insurance options.

Make Health Insurance Work for People and Businesses - Not Just Insurance and Drug Companies:

• Require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions so all Americans regardless of their health status or history can get comprehensive benefits at fair and stable premiums.
• Create a new Small Business Health Tax Credit to help small businesses provide affordable health insurance to their employees.
• Lower costs for businesses by covering a portion of the catastrophic health costs they pay in return for lower premiums for employees.
• Prevent insurers from overcharging doctors for their malpractice insurance and invest in proven strategies to reduce preventable medical errors.
• Make employer contributions more fair by requiring large employers that do not offer coverage or make a meaningful contribution to the cost of quality health coverage for their employees to contribute a percentage of payroll toward the costs of their employees health care.
• Establish a National Health Insurance Exchange with a range of private insurance options as well as a new public plan based on benefits available to members of Congress that will allow individuals and small businesses to buy affordable health coverage.
• Ensure everyone who needs it will receive a tax credit for their premiums.

Reduce Costs and Save a Typical American Family up to $2,500 as reforms phase in:

• Lower drug costs by allowing the importation of safe medicines from other developed countries, increasing the use of generic drugs in public programs and taking on drug companies that block cheaper generic medicines from the market
• Require hospitals to collect and report health care cost and quality data.
• Reduce the costs of catastrophic illnesses for employers and their employees.
• Reform the insurance market to increase competition by taking on anticompetitive activity that drives up prices without improving quality of care.

A Commitment to Fiscal Responsibility: Obama will pay for his $50 - $65 billion health care reform effort by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for Americans earning more than $250,000 per year and retaining the estate tax at its 2009 level.

www.barackobama.com/issues/healthcare/
http://www.webmd.com/news/20081104/obama-wins-what-it-means-for-health-care?print=true
http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2008/03/a-detailed-anal.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122152292213639569.html

Case Study: Canada Health Act

Canada's national health insurance program, often referred to as "Medicare", is designed to ensure that all residents have reasonable access to medically necessary hospital and physician services, on a prepaid basis.

The principles of the Canada Health Act (CHA) began as simple conditions attached to federal funding for medicare. Today, they represent both the values underlying the health care system and the conditions that governments attach to funding a national system of public health care.  Healthcare is the prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of mental and physical well-being through the services offered by the medical, nursing, and allied health professions

The Act sets out the primary objective of Canadian health care policy, which is to protect, promote and restore the physical and mental well-being of residents of Canada and to facilitate reasonable access to health services without financial or other barriers.

The five criteria of the Canada Health Act guiding the provincial public health insurance plans are:

• Public Administration: The public health insurance plan must be managed in a public, not-for-profit fashion.
• Comprehensiveness: All residents must be covered for “medically necessary” health services.
• Universality: All residents must be covered by the public insurance plan on uniform terms and conditions.
• Portability: All residents must be covered by their public plan, wherever they are treated in Canada.
• Accessibility: All residents must have access to insured health care services on uniform terms and conditions without direct or indirect financial charges, or discrimination based on age, health status or financial circumstances.

Pros and Cons of Canada’s Healthcare System:

• Canada is unusual in that the government pays for almost 100% of hospital and physician care, but contributes very little in areas such as prescription drug costs and dental care.
• About 30% of Canadians' health care is paid for through the private sector. This mostly goes towards services not covered or only partially covered by Medicare such as prescription drugs, dentistry and optometry.
• Canada's hospitals are often of high quality, but the wait times to get into those hospitals can span weeks or months, including wait times for simple procedures.
• There is a severe lack of physicians in Canada.
• This highlights a significant problem with Canada's half public, half private system, and that is that because it is not a true public system, and profit is a prime motivational factor, simple treatments, simple cures, simple preventative measures are not at the core of the system's motivations.

In some cases some people and some doctors abuse the so called 'free' medical services, however the one great positive attribute of Canada'a health care system is that 'most' services are publicly funded, ensuring that all individuals are not denied critical services, if they are available.

Sources:
http://www.mapleleafweb.com/features/cananda-health-act-provisions-administration
http://www.profitisnotthecure.ca/learn/cananda_health_act.html
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Health-care-in-Canada