When Medicare moves to the AMA to revoke a private doctor’s license you say they are targeting good doctors going the extra mile for their patients (by defrauding their coverage).
When Medicare (and a successful private career) fails to report a bad doctor (based on a government report) you say America is uniquely corrupt and is incapable of running single payer healthcare.
indeed, the post office must deliver to every valid address from coast to coast plus hawaii and alaska, all while having to fund it’s pension plan decades farther down the road than any private enterprise has to, plus can only make incremental increases in charges when it’s losing money, plus ends up making deals to deliver parcels from every other carrier. i can only dream of having a health care system that worked half as well as the postal service does.
Counter argument: The lack of an effective healthcare system is crippling our ability to do anything about rampant corruption or any of the other thousand problems with the country.
See: “I, a person that needs healthcare, can’t protest/vote/run/strike because if I lose my job I will literally die. Better just stay in my lane until someone else does something.” (A position that I myself still struggle with to a degree though I’m working to change since this cannot continue)
That’s going too far, too fast.
Death Panels - the US has them in spades. What else would we consider the faceless bureaucrats in insurance companies that work so tirelessly to deny resources to patients, err, sorry, layabout spongers?
Why not both?
I heard Martin Pearson perform this once at the Woodford Folk Festival, but I’ve never been able to find a recording online.
Shame; it’s a catchy song.
George Papapveris’ It takes a soldier
That’s another line that could be applied to just about everything in American politics.
But unsurprising.
American exceptionalism is based in militarism and empire. The whole thing is toxic and absurd.
I’ve seen an argument that gave me pause.
Now, before I get kicked in the teeth, I’ll say that my poor backwater of a country has single payer healthcare and I’m quite happy with it, and wish it fondly for Americans as well. I want single payer for everyone.
However, the argument I’ve heard that’s given me pause is that there’s so much money bound up in the overpriced medical services and insurance of today that the path to a more efficient and infinitely more equitable system goes through a financial collapse.
Anyone have data on this?
I think the Americans are in a tough spot because a decent, moral single-payer system would leave the majority of middle-class workers with slightly worse medical care.
And while I’d be happy to enumerate the massive benefits you gain for the loss of a few things, people tend to feel those few things lost vastly more strongly than what they gain.
Let me take a personal example: As a Canadian, my mother had to wait two months for an MRI for a disabling, but not life-threatening problem, because the MRI was likely not useful. It turned out that in her case, it was, and it was the key to allow her to walk once again.
This delay was the right decision, because the benefits of a low-cost health system with this sort of rationing allow us to offer medical care to all Canadians.
However, if I’d had personal experience with the US system, I doubt I’d have that perspective. Because I’m middle-class, I’d be considering that under my previous medical care this sort of delay would have been nearly unthinkable.
Rather than contemplate the fact that I don’t have to worry about switching jobs, or pre-existing conditions, or most importantly of all, for much the same costs as I was paying, I’m probably covering another family that was doing without, I’d be dwelling on the fact that under the old system, my mother wouldn’t have suffered months of pain, forgetting the fact that the MRI only had probably about a 5% chance of finding anything useful.
I, like most people, would be dwelling on what I lost.
Now, eventually the American health-care system might become so terrible for those in the median+ income bracket that they’d accept the losses that come with single payer. But honestly, I don’t see it in the near term.
The Americans who vote in the highest percentages would make whoever pushed this through pay in spades for a generation. Of course, a generation later, Americans would wonder how on earth their ancestors stomached the health-care system the US has now. But I don’t see politicians volunteering to sacrifice their career today so that they’ll be heroes 25 years after they’re dead.
America is in a “its pretty good for a significant number of voters” trap, and traps like those can last generations. My sympathies to our cousins to the South.
Collapse for the insurance companies, almost certainly. I don’t think most medical care providers would be in too much trouble as long as someone is still paying the bills though.
My dead step father thanks your service in making sure no one gets good health care soldier… He didn’t get cancer mucking about the fields of Da Nang to give free rides to people like his widow and her children and grand children! /s
You want that, a rather large part of it comes from corporation’s intervention into our political system in order to tilt the economic system in their favor. ONE OF THEIR OWN is currently shitting all over the bed in the West Wing as we speak, er, type.
And literally NO SYSTEM is perfectly run, FREE of any corruption. Not a single one in human history, because one thing that religions get right is that human beings are indeed flawed creatures.
You’re letting the perfect be the enemy of helping less people to die for no reason, other than so libertarians don’t have to pay a nickle extra in taxes.
Not apparently. In fact.
Which seems to be the very reason why many Republican politicians oppose universal healthcare - they’re also for anti-competition agreements and a whole raft of other policies that reinforce the position of those currently successful, rather than actually advancing business competition (or small businesses) as they like to claim. It’s so transparent, I’m constantly amazed they get away with it.
Everything, really. The fact that a for-profit business has to actually generate a, you know, profit guarantees that it’s less efficient. (In the case of healthcare, you have multiple entities extracting profits at various stages, making things really bad.) The only way private businesses appear to be more efficient is when they’re held to a different standard - e.g. they don’t have to actually be accountable to the public the way a government agency would have to be… you take the double standards away, and there aren’t that many things that the government can’t do more efficiently.
you can get the MRi that you statistically don’t need in America, but it probably won’t be covered by your insurance, so you can actually only get it if you have the cash to pay for it, or a very clever hospital billing system that might sneak that past the insurance company. So then you’re out a few thousand dollars, which may or may not count toward your copay and yearly out of pocket expense (and these days you get TWO different out-of-pocket numbers, depending on if your provider is In network or Out of network, which can change weekly…).
If the only example you can think of is not getting a test (that your Mom GOT anyway…) with a 95% failure rate, that’s not a terrible outcome.
What losses are median Americans facing if we convert to single payer?
I did an in-facility sleep study for sleep apnea over 2 years ago and only just finished paying off the $2,000 I was responsible for covering as part of my deductible last month. The full bill to the insurance company was easily in the mid-5-digits. If I’d had to wait a couple more months to get the study done because it wasn’t strictly medically necessary, and been able to get it “for free”, I’d have been all over that option.
Oooh, we’re adding to the list? Some other arguments that I’ve seen that are implicitly dishonest:
Dishonest argument #5:
“If we give all of the money to the elites, they’ll share it with the neo-peasantry!” a.k.a. Trickle Down economics.
Dishonest argument #6:
“But Canada has long wait times!” Uh huh, and the US doesn’t?
Dishonest argument #7:
“They can always go to an emergency room to get care!”–which ignores chronic conditions and the bills that will result.
Which is vague enough that it could mean that you were called in to fix a stopped toilet at a small town clinic.
