I’d say that it’d mostly solve itself. If you give me the option of paying $100/mo for private insurance or just being on M4A, I’m not even going to look back at BlueCrossBlueShield.
Because it ain’t.
Socialist governments tend to be keen on implementing collectivised services, but that’s an effect rather than a cause. State-administered collective goods alone do not a socialist society make. The modern welfare state was invented by Bismarck, for fuck’s sake, and he was about as far from socialist as its possible to get.
The defining feature of socialism is democratic control over the economy; a society in which the working class majority has the power to control the wealthy minority.
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Dance on their grave because they can no longer refuse to pay for needed medical care?
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*searches for guillotine images *
(Just kidding, of course 
)
Politically, yes. For the practical nuts-and-bolts part, there are lots of examples to choose from if the US doesn’t insist on reinventing the wheel.
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Here in LA, there was no municipal garbage collection until the '50s. Most folks disposed of trash by burning it in a backyard incinerator. Trash too awkward or difficult to burn piled up until you had a pickup-load, and then you would haul the truckload off to the dump (if you had a pickup; otherwise you’d pay someone with a pickup). Most dumps then burned anything the scavengers didn’t take.
But the Killer Smogs that enveloped LA in the '50s led to the banning of backyard incinerators and the institution of regular municipal trash collection and landfilling.
(Though even today, multifamily buildings like apartments rely on private haulers. Generally, the cost is folded into the rent.)
Single-family homes pay a collection fee to the City.
In an amusing twist, the City Council tried to roughly double the fee to raise revenue to pay for more police (thus evading the voter supermajority required for a tax increase), but the courts said, no, garbage collection fees can only pay for garbage collection.
So the city audited the Sanitation Dept’s collection costs, and discovered that the fees only paid about a third of the actual cost of collection - so they tripled the collection fees, and used the resulting general-fund savings at Sanitation to hire more cops.
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it’s quite useful if our goal is to have a maze full of mysterious, unaccountable bureaucracies that make money by denying claims and blaming their customers for buying the wrong things
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If they do it correctly, nobody’s subsidizing anything. The store pays its own costs from the money it makes from its customers. No tax dollars needed.
This isn’t socialism, it’s just municipal ownership of needed services – an idea promoted by progressive reformers starting in the 1910s-20s. Like municipal utilities and transit systems and roadways and fire services and trash pickup.
And this is only the government filling a need left unserved by private providers, not a monopoly operating from a belief that only the govt. should provide grocery stores.
It’s not even remotely “socialism.”
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The government doesn’t have to do anything to the industry, except maybe draft some supportive legislation that allows them to offer niche products, etc. There are people who pay for private insurance in every single country that offers single payer…there’s no reason to think that it would be any different in the States.
But I agree with you, that their business would shrink, especially in the beginning until a new normal was reached.
Wheelwrights and coopers were not entirely happy about progress either.
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Or… dancing on the graves of their companies could be a hoot, too!
Just sayin’!
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A couple I used to game with recently moved down to Florida specifically because there’s no state income tax; they’re hard-core Sovereign Citizen types who think taxes are illegal and that once you earn your money, it’s your right to keep every cent of it. Of course, they’re more than happy to take advantage of all of the things taxes actually, uh, pay for. That more or less describes a huge number of people who live in that state, honestly.
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Sorry: I was wearing my work hat and being realistic about how it would have to be presented publicly.
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Socialism is a very broad umbrella. Those saying this isn’t socialism are using a very narrow definition of socialism. This is a government owned and operated not-for-profit grocery store. In other words, the means of distributing food and some other goods in this town are publicly owned and operated. That’s socialism. It’s a textbook example of a socialist program.
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