Single payer is never single payer. If the US goes to single payer tomorrow, anyone with the money to do so is still going to pay a for-profit company for insurance on top of it. There is no way anyone who’s used to our current system and has money is going to wait in line with everyone else.
The unintended consequence of single payer is that it creates a two-tier medical system where the poor wait in lines to get care from lower skill / less experienced medical professionals and those who can afford it purchase supplementary or additional coverage that pays for them to access higher skilled / experienced medical professionals.
This is already happening in the US. How many doctors in the US refuse to take Medicare or Medicaid patients because reimbursements are halved or more? Hell, if you live in NYC some of the best doctors don’t even take insurance at all because they’re the best at what they do and people will pay a market price.
Having health insurance or “coverage” doesn’t guarantee you have access to health care. Equality of coverage doesn’t equal equality of care.
One could make the argument that it’s not even that great for poor people.
Expanding medicaid is a good idea, but understand that in order to improve or expand medicaid you have to increase taxes. To put that less eloquently, poor people get free healthcare paid for by middle and upper class tax payers.
You can skin the cat any way you’d like to, but at the end of the day SOMEONE has to pay.
@Onyx_Z32 Did you come across any other data for wait times in the US? I found this:
A study by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan research foundation that promotes improved health care access and quality, showed that 57 percent of adults in Canada who needed a specialist said they waited more than four weeks for an appointment, versus only 23 percent who said so in the U.S. For emergency physician visits, 23 percent of Canadians and 30 percent of Americans said they could get in to see the doctor the same day, but 23 percent of Americans and 36 percent of Canadians waited more than six days. Wait times for elective and non-emergency surgery were even more disparate: Thirty-three percent of Canadians reported a wait time of more than four months, but only 8 percent of Americans had to wait that long.
It’s certainly less than ideal, but I’m not sure anyone is saying our system should be just like Canada’s.
I always felt that at least having the public option would have been the best way to cover people. (Which I think was in the original version of the ACA) People in here have mentioned already, and they’re right, that you end up with a two-tiered system but isn’t some care better than no care at all?
The simple truth is that millions of deserving people cannot afford health care. They would love to have the benefit of a great paying job with benefits, but there aren’t enough of those jobs out there. And of course there are shitty people who abuse those things. That goes for everything. Should everyone lose their license because of the idiots who drink and drive?
winner winner chicken dinner. So you’re proposing something that does the same thing that the current thing is already doing.
Look, I’m not saying that the current system is great, or that it was great before ACA or that AHCA is great. I’m not saying that any of them are terrible either.
But the entire country seems to be under some belief that we can cover 100% of our population AND bring down costs at the same time. Not. Going. To. Happen. Get used the high costs. They’ll either come in the form of premiums, deductibles or taxes. Or some combination.
The big disparity is with specialists, not so much access to emergency care or well care. For example my Canadian girlfriend waited 6+ months for a specialist procedure she could have had done here in 2 weeks.
No, not everyone is saying we need exactly Canada’s health care system but I’d say most on the left agree with its basic principles.
The US has about 330m people, Canada has about 30m people. In all the discussion of single payer I never hear anyone explain how the US is going to maintain current levels of care when a country 11x smaller is struggling with a similar system. Also remember we have a significant doctor and nurse shortage in the US.
And for them there is Medicare and other programs. But quality of care and access to care concerns are just as valid as the cost concerns.
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Nah, I haven’t proposed anything. I’m just playing devils advocate
The US has more people, more doctors, and more health care professionals. It would make more sense to compare physician to citizen ratio.
US = 245 per 1000 citizens (2013 data)
Canada = 228 per 1000 citizens (2015 data)
I agree with all of your points. I’m not pretending to have the answers here, just pointing out what the goal is. People deserve care. We’re a first world country.
I’m essentially doing the same, because I think that a lot of people just approach this issue with tunnel vision and refuse to really analyze the situation to its fullest.
What a 24 hours huh? Trump was under surveillance, immigrants rape girl in MD, London has a terror attack. There is still not a chance in Hell that Dems question their position on anything.
Since this is NYSpeed, can we talk about the little paragraph Chris Collins added to the republican healthcare bill? The part about states having to pay for Medicaid at the state level and not being allowed to pass Medicaid costs down to the counties? 49 other states are looking at that going, “WTF is this for? We set our Medicaid coverage and spending at the state level so of course we pay for it at the state level. Doing anything else would just be stupid” because NY is the only state in the country to pass Medicaid costs down to the county.
Here in NY we spend more per capita on Medicaid than any other state in the country. How much more? You can take what Texas ($35 billion) and Florida ($21 billion) spend, combine them, and it’s still not as much as NY spends. That’s a combined total of 48 million people and they still can’t touch the $59 billion NY spends on 20 million people.
Erie County’s share of this unfunded mandate consumes 98% of the property tax the county collects. Why does NY’s Medicaid cost so much more than every other state? Medicaid has levels of coverage that are federally mandated to provide a safety net for the poor, as well as tons of optional coverage. NY of course takes every single option it can get, creating a loaded Cadillac plan. When the average family of 4 is carrying a $5k a year tax burden simply to pay for what should be basic coverage for those in need while the plans they get through their jobs aren’t nearly as good you have a problem. When that Medicaid plan coverage is set at the state level but paid for at a county level and the county gets no say on what options it wants to cover you have a bigger problem. When that Medicaid cost literally breaks the budgets of every upstate county in the state you have a broken and unsustainable system. Then our asshole governor and his cronies get in front of the cameras claiming the republicans have declared war on NY, that we’ll be closing hospitals and putting old people out on the streets because of this.
Nothing says NY has to make a single cut. They should make cuts to get their spending more in line with other states, but all this amendment to the bill does is say NY has to pay for the entire Cadillac plan at the state level.
If this passes it’s HUGE for NY. I don’t think people realize how long upstate counties have been fighting for this to happen but getting nowhere because all the power in this corrupt state is downstate.
