zlacker

>>iamthi+(OP)
>Since 2014, eight other babies have been born to women who had uterus transplants, all in Sweden

Just to show that single payer system can be good for medical innovation, not just universal healthcare.

>>quickC+tk
It looks like the swedish transplants were funded by research at a university, not insurance: http://sahlgrenska.gu.se/english/research/uterus/questions (though perhaps that's a distinction without a difference?)

> The cost of a uterus transplantation is estimated to be around SEK 100,000 per patient. [...] > Will this cost the patient anything? > No. The first initial experiments with uterus transplantation will be covered entirely by research funding.

Apparently some of the research also came from a Professor in the US:

> The team learned this technique at the University of Connecticut and received help at the beginning from Professor John McCracken, who is a pioneer in reproductive medical research. It took about a year before the autotransplantation method on sheep worked well.

Single-payer systems also have to constrain costs, so its not clear that they would actually cover a procedure like this, or if they did there might be a really limited supply. (I suppose the supply would be inherently limited anyway by how many available uteri there are)

Single-payer systems are actually rarely actually single-payer. For example apparently private insurance is becoming more popular in Sweden:

> The number of people purchasing supplementary private insurance is rapidly increasing, from 2.3 per cent of the population in 2004 (Swedish Insurance Federation 2004) to approximately 4.6 per cent in 2008 (Trygg-Hansa 2008). The voluntary health insurance mainly gives quick access to a specialist and allows for jumping the waiting queue for elective surgery (Glenngård et al. 2005).

http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/98417/E9...