Legal Niches

Online Game Promotes Single-Payer Healthcare System

By gamepolitics

Today brings the launch of an online game created for the California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee. 

You Bet Your Health advocates a single-payer healthcare system by highlighting ways in which American citizens can be negatively impacted by the current system of commercially-provided healthcare insurance.

The game is a simple spin-the-wheel affair in which all of the outcomes are bad except when the player lands on a single-payer coverage plan. A press release explains the NNOC/CNA's position:

When American patients trust their health to a for-profit insurance company, they're doing nothing less than gambling with their lives...  The game is part of a wide-ranging public education and political mobilization campaign for single-payer health reforms, which is the choice of nurses and doctors.

This video game... features an everyday patient trying to win healthcare from her insurance company.  In each case, the insurer wins.  Finally, as a bonus round, the patient spins to choose a healthcare system—and is fortunate to land on the single-payer model, which is succeeding in much of the rest of the industrialized world and which has been introduced in Congress as HR 676 (Conyers - MI) and S 703 (Sanders - VT).

Although the NNOC/CNA press release indicates that You Bet Your Health will be ad-supported, there are presently no ads on the game's web page.

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on May 27, 2009 (boomark / email).