Key benefits are less waiting and, if in hospital, superficially plusher surroundings – though not necessarily better care: private hospitals have something of a reputation in the UK for dumping “difficult” – e.g. expensive – cases back on the NHS.
ETA: No, I don’t know what Gwyneth Paltrow has to do with that story.
I would suggest that everyone call their senators and have them vote against this bill. Alternately, language should be added that creates a line-item tax specifically to pay for this bill. This new tax should pay, yearly, for 100% of the costs incurred by this bill during the previous year.
Healthcare and health care access are important determinants of health. But they are far from the major determinants of populations’ health.
@Mangochin wrote:
Most of the developed world has similar health outcomes at a fraction of the cost due to single payer options.
Most of the developed world has better population health outcomes because they do not have systemic economic inequity (income gap, wealth gap, debt gap) of the US, and because they do not have the legacy of chattel slavery and other forms of institutional racism still perpetuated here to this day.
Adding in @Mindysan33 Single payer systems are great. I support, including here in the US. But health care does not explain why most people get ill and injured in the first place. Arguing that it does ignores the importance of clean air and water, safe and accessible nutrition, access to daycare, self-determination, lack of violence, education, etc. that cause good or poor health. Ignoring these much more primary determinants of population health—and I will say it a third time in this thread now: I support single payer, and even nationalized health care—is saying that Trump’s appointments to head the EPA, Department of Education, etc. are irrelevant to health (they aren’t), is saying that economic disparity is not the most fundamental determinant of population health (it is), is saying that the legacies of chattel slavery and other forms of systematic racism do not fundamentally shape the distribution of health and disease along race/ethnic lines (they do).
All or most of the factors you list would be present whether or not the US had public health care, and they exist in other countries too. I don’t think anyone is dismissing them. But the majority of them can be included under the category of poverty.
What is different in the US is the phenomenon of people postponing or going without treatment because they can’t afford it, or because they don’t wish to bankrupt their families. This simply doesn’t happen in other developed countries, and I suspect that most of the discrepancy in health outcomes between them and the US occurs among the poorest of the population. Single payer is all about removing the economic factors from the question of health.
Dental isn’t covered at all in Canada, although in Alberta they cover chiropractic and acupuncture. 
Ah, I’d forgotten about the expansion. Still, if you have a good job, you almost certainly aren’t eligible.
I was thinking of the means testing and the entire “are you deserving of government help” apparatus. As opposed to Medicare, where you get a card in the mail on your 65th birthday and suddenly all those medical visits become far less expensive without any effort on your part.
Is everyone who dissagrees with you or the populous a “know nothing”. What if the polls go against you? would that make you a “kniw nothing”? Or could it be that both sides have valid but opposing views and concerns?
My kingdom for an edit button!
Oz gets universal free-at-point-of-use coverage for less than half of what the US spends for not-universal not-free lack of coverage.
TLDW: because every sector of the profit-driven healthcare industry is ripping y’all off to a spectacular degree.
It’s disingenuous to call the plan Medicare for all since the plan is vastly different than medicare and would in fact kill medicare, one of the few well run programs im the government.
Thanks bud but I am not cool enough for that poserfull little pencil yet. The gods from up on high have not yet blessed me. Great walkthrough though. I see you have had to explain II to the unwashed masses in the past.
BTW, a reminder:
*powerfull
*UI doh! …
All the countries with better health outcomes than the US spend less per capita on health care than the US. Some of them, including #1 to #4 in the latest health index: i.e. Spain, Italy, Iceland, and Japan, spend less on health care per capita than the US government already spends per capita on health care. Part of this is due to the excessive profit that the US medical establishment can extract due to the lack of universal health coverage.
Of course, government spending on health care is not everything, The US government should also stop subsidizing unhealthy foods, e.g. production of high-fructose corn syrup and meat, and unhealthy habits, e.g. low fuel taxes when compared with other countries and over-dependence on private car transportation. We should also reduce access to people-killing weapons that are use both for murders and suicides. There is no need for additional taxes. The changes will pay for themselves.
wow! they’ll really be raking in the money! there’s 138.3 million taxpayers. hmmm… so if each of us are paying 100% of the bill… let me see… 138.3 million * 100%… why that’s 138.3 million times the cost! our deficit military spending will be gone in no time.
oh you meant the actual per person cost. sorry.
the whole point is that we are all paying too much – via our employers, via taxes, via personal private insurance, via the systemic burdens of medical bankruptcies, via an unhealthy citizenry (ex. our inflated infant mortality rate. )
and that it will be cheaper overall to have single payer.
so, how about an estimated savings on every tax “bill” instead?
It’s only called Medicare for All because the well was already poisoned to any other name. We already know how single payer systems work, because everyone else does it but us and we are the only ones that claim they are all failing despite our richest citizens still going outside the country for care.
Eh. Every single developed country with multi-payer also has similar health outcomes at a fraction of the cost.
Single payer isn’t really comprehensive cost control. If we used Medicare’s reimbursement rates right now to cover everyone in the US, we’d still be paying more than everyone else.
Heck, right now, the federal, state and local spending on healthcare, covering ~40% of the population, is already more per-capita than Canada’s. Or France’s. Or Germany’s. Or Japan’s. In other words, we would already be able to cover every single person in the US with the money the government currently collects if we had the cost control mechanisms, reimbursement rates and risk profiles they have.
There are two ways having a larger pool lowers costs.
The first is that it allows insurers to lower their overall risk profile, but the effect has diminishing returns and most insurers already have pools large enough for this to be a nonissue.
The second major cost savings function is around increasing the bargaining position of the insurer vs. a healthcare provider to negotiate lower rates, however you don’t actually need single payer to maximize this. France, for instance, simply negotiates one rate schedule for all payers instead of having every payer negotiate separately. Japan just centrally fixes the prices of treatments (something we used to do).
Unrelated to pool size, there is cost savings from potentially reduced billing overhead with single payer, but that can easily be wiped away if cost controls aren’t firmly stuck to.
I don’t see much in the way of cost control measures in these bills which is… troublesome. Congress has a long history of killing cost control mechanisms of Medicare (the annual “doc-fix” giveaway for instance).
Of course, I’ll still happily say I support Medicare-for-All, but really I support fixing the system and if the only way we can do it politically is to call it MFA, so be it. I just wish the bills were more than a way for politicians to raise money.
This seems worth posting again:
Xenazine is the US trade name for Tetrabenazine. It’s an out of patent drug, developed more than fifty years ago.
In Australia, it was $38.80 per 112 pill bottle for me (a two-month supply). Were I on any sort of government support, it’d be $6.30/bottle. The government pays the drug company $338.60/bottle.
In the USA:
