Here're my two cents about the health care debate in the US after living in Sweden for 30 years. I never thought that a single-payer health system would gain as much positive attention in the US as it has these last months, but it has. Having been both on the giving (through my taxes) and receiving (mine and my family’s health care) end of Sweden’s well run single-payer health care system, I can heartily recommend a similar system in the US. While I´m sure I pay a bit more in taxes than I would in the US (given the same income), there are a lot of things I don’t have to worry about or consider when it comes to health care. It makes no difference who my employer is – I can work for a private company, a public agency, freelance, run my own business, be between jobs or retired – I know that I have full medical coverage no matter what. And so does my family and basically everyone else in Sweden. It’s an economical and efficient way of taking care of millions of people’s health care needs. We are part of a huge risk pool made up of the whole country – most of us, who are healthy and need very little health care, as well as those of us in need of urgent care every once in a while or those of us who are chronically ill. No cap on lifetime costs, no medical situations that are exempt – if I fall and break an arm, if I get cancer, if my pregnancy is complicated, if I need physical therapy, if my child is born prematurely or with serious health issues, if I need to adjust my insulin dosage – you name it – quality health care is a given. Since it is in the county’s best interests to keep medical costs down, preventive procedures are easy to prioritize – that can save not only money but suffering and future ill health. Such large groups of patients mean great leverage when it comes to negotiating costs for medicine. It creates incentives to streamline complex and relatively uncommon procedures and treatments, which can result in higher quality specialized care for more people. While no system is perfect, and Sweden’s is certainly no exception, the advantages of a single-payer health care system are huge – both on a national scale and on an individual basis. It makes economic as well as medical sense and it is humane. Sweden is a rich country whose success is firmly grounded in private enterprise and ownership coupled with a compassionate and pragmatic social agenda. While Sweden’s health care is basically a single-payer system, private and non-profit providers play an important roll alongside the public sector. The US is an immensely rich country but it is squandering the potential for both harnessing huge economical savings and providing exceptional health care to millions of Americans by not creating a more effective system of health care than the unequal and insufficient hodgepodge we have today. I hope that our congressional leaders can get past polarizing partisan politics and take steps to create a truly excellent health care system that is worthy of our great country and benefits its citizens better.