Despite efforts by Republicans to scale back the Affordable Care Act, there is another movement to push the healthcare industry further left and into a single-payer system.

In the latest Managed Care Cast, Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP, FRCP, president emeritus and senior fellow of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and a former administrator of CMS, and Patricia Salber, MD, MBA, of The Doctor Weighs In, discuss the idea of single-payer system and misconceptions about the concept, such as that is means the government will run healthcare. Some countries have chosen government-run healthcare in addition to a single-payer system, but the United States has been discussing a single-payer environment, which is a discussion around payment, not care delivery.

They also speculate on the steps of getting from the current multipayer system in the United States to single-payer system and what individual states are doing to investigate the possibility of setting up a single-payer system.