Howabout this for Medicare for all?

The problem is that heath care is for profit in the US. It isn’t a public good.

You have MBAs running hospitals, not physicians, and the health insurers create massive externalities for all of society. It’s a system of perverse incentives that’s highly inefficient, unless you have your hand the cookie jar as an MBA running a hospital or a CEO of one of the health insurers in the US.

It’s not that. It’s the regulations they have to follow. Your own insurance company is getting to be same way. It’s just not as simple as a doc writing a script anymore. It’s more complicated.

Perfect example. My wife has Afib. A few years back…her cardiologist wanted a nuclear stress test with pictures. The whole 9 yards. He wanted to see how her heart was working. The insurance co. Would not approve. So he did the regular stress test and stopped it. Failing her. By doing so he was able to get what he wanted. However the dumbassed insurance co. Had to pay for two tests instead of one. How does that make sense??

Competing goals. I agree.

It makes sense their goal is to maximize shareholder value, not provide your wife with treatment. They have legions of claims adjusters whose job it is to reject medical claims. They invented the concept of death panels, it wasn’t the government.

500K families go bankrupt as a result of medical bills in the US. 65% of all bankruptcies were a direct result of medical bills. A good percentage of these people have health insurance too.

The personal responsibility meme is nonsensical when you look at the aggregate numbers.

Personal responsibility includes being prepared.

The government created and regulates the system.

It’s virtually impossible to be prepared even if you have savings. Medical bills can be crushing for working and middle class people.

I’ve seen it happen again and again and again. Health insurers refusing coverage, people getting huge bills from hospital stays thanks to narrow networks, etc.

I now live in country where this doesn’t cross my mind, but I still have family in the US, so I’m intimately familiar with the parasitical health care system the US.

My mom’s best friend, OTOH, wasn’t so lucky. She was forced to train her replacements from overseas, got coverage via the ACA, then needed a new knee. The hospital wanted 12K upfront, so she had to work ten months to save it up, since she depleted here savings after 20 months paying her rent after being laid off before she found a new jobs. That is the very definition of waiting list, and this isn’t even some of the more horrific stories.

Health insurers lobby Congress to pass regulations to favor them. Fixed it for ya.

What do health insurers do, exactly? The don’t do checkups, they don’t operate on you, all they do is extract economic rents and dump the externalities on society.

No it’s not. It just requires planning and discipline.

They hedge risks.

The problem is you believe the government can do it better here. I don’t. I am not opposed to trying it, the problem is if it doesn’t work we can’t put it back.

So an 80k bill for example?

Here are some examples: People Share What Struggling With Medical Debt Is Really Like

Again, I don’t live there, these types of horror stories cannot happen in Italy, but needless suffering over ideology is pretty gay.

Who do you know that has an $80k deductible on an insurance policy?

1. I was brought to the ER for a drug overdose.

$8,000 in medical debt

First one in your link. Are you ■■■■■■■■ me?

You should have read that link.

The government is simply a funding mechanism under single payer. Hospitals stay private and public, but the government would effectively set prices to bend the cost curve. When my dad goes to the doctor, he doesn’t go to a private Medicare doctor or hospital.

I do agree those running government could mess it up. For example, under neoliberal capitalism, the credentialed class is obsessed with ‘choices’. Since the idea is to reduce the citizen to a mere consumer, and consumption and transactions replace the greater good of society, so-called proponents of single-payer poison the well with the ‘public option’. Choices for this and that. Yeah, how about bending the cost curve via monopsony. Idiots.

But yeah, point taken. Also, in Italy, I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but health care has been a defacto public good since Mussolini. One of his accomplishments was creating our single-payer system, which he based on Otto von Bismark’s social reforms.

On a side note, Steve Bannon was basically laughed at as some nutty Boomer in Italy. He met with Italian right-wingers and Salvini some years ago and asked them why Italy didn’t adopt a US market-based type of health care system. He was literally laughed out of the room as some tool.

If you’re in you 20s or a student or teenager, yeah, that’s a sticker shock.

Then they aren’t private. What if government sets a price I can’t pay?

Once you go government you can never go back.

I’m willing to try it, but I want stronger guarantees than campaign promises and EOs.

You realize of course you are making the same general argument as for social security. Can we retire off of it after working for 50 years?

Missed the point. How is a drug overdose personal responsibility?