I am starting to rethink single payer and am wondering what you have heard mentioned and your opinion on how you see this whole thing playing out.
A friend has a really good job as a tug boat captain. He came down with a type of blood cancer that is treatable, but will have him out of work for 6 months. At three months out of work, he will be fired. Then, if at some point he is able to work again, he will be re-hired by the same company. Since he was fired though, his healthcare stops at that point. He can get COBRA, but that is 700 a month and his family just lost all of his income so that 700 will be hard to come up with.
My employer has 8 employees. Every year workmans comp takes about 50k from him for coverage. Then at the end of the period, they demand to see his gross receipts and if his earnings are above what they estimated, he gets a bill for even more money for past coverage of that previous year that is already over.
Next thing is auto insurance. It seems like the biggest part of auto insurance is the medical coverage incase of accident.
Finally another guy I know had a bad gall bladder that went bad. He didnt have insurance, but the VA took care of it. He was still out of work for two weeks and had no pay check coming in. It seems to be like the state should provide some type of short term disability insurance for people that will be out of work for a short period, less than 90 days or so. They can come up with funds to provide care for someone for 20 years, you would think that they could help a family out that is in the hospital for a couple of weeks.
So if Single Payer is introduced, Do you see auto insurance going down? How about workmans comp for small businesses?
It is starting to look to me, that maybe taxes would go up for individuals, but a lot of other stuff would go down. I know workmans comp for my employer runs him a minimum of 45k per year. That is the price of an employee for a year. And it never goes away.
What would you think of a system where the fed covers basic healthcare on an as needed system, and then a private system where one can get private insurance and the private insurance would be similar to fed-ex or ups? One could elect to deal with the govt, or one could pay money to get a private plan that would have shorter wait times with the same provider?