The way we finance healthcare does not work well for all American's because it's not a system that was designed to work for all Americans. This is evident in the plethora of health plans, some large, some small, most group plans, but with a few individual plans, most private, several government-sponsored, with different eligibility requirements, different benefits, different waiting periods and exclusions, widely different administrative expenses, ranging from less than the four percent spent to administer Medicare, to the 30 percent of premium spent to administer an individual health plan. Despite decades of lip-service to the concept that healthcare in America is a right, we still have no universal plan to guarantee the financial protection needed to make that right a reality.
The public/private system that has evolved to finance health care is not the result of the best minds in America planning thoughtfully for the needs of all of the American people. It is largely an accident of history, where each step has been taken to address some subset of the population: The poor and the elderly in the mid-60's; those who are between jobs in the mid 80's; uninsured children in the mid-90s, prescription drugs for the elderly in 2003.
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