Nearly a trillion-dollar defense budget this year. A third more is proposed for next year. Fossil fuel subsidies around $800 billion, Elon Musk with $38 billion in government contracts. Allowing fast food and fake food to proliferate, toxins and microplastics in our bloodstreams. Taking care of people is a choice, and cancer is a for-profit industry, not a search for a cure. The medical system IS run by business, Big Pharma, and greedy insurance companies. $500 bandages, anyone? Private equity is closing small hospitals. Is that the kind of competition you advocate for?
Other developed nations provide socialized healthcare for their citizens. Not America, where it bankrupts people as insurance CEOs make tens and hundreds of millions.
We spent $5.6 trillion on healthcare last year...an average of twice the price per person compared to every other advanced nation with universal healthcare. The difference is we use a profit-driven coverage model and they don't.
Privatization of healthcare and what should be government services is a disaster. Efficiency is one thing, maximizing profit another. Trusting business with our health is at odds with our health.
I particularly like to note that in NYC the "good" Hospitals (most of them are) have reaped the rewards of an aging Oligarchy who want their private rooms in first class hospitals and doctors to serve them. They have found it expedient financially to donate extraordinary sums of money to upgrade, and build new, develop research and teaching hospitals etc making them the best possible. The people who are lucky enough to have doctors who practice in those hospitals can get a very high level of care. I always said you could know what illnesses the Koch Bros had by what specific wing they donated to 'their' hospital. But seriously, this New Yorker, having moved upstate, is experiencing the kind of mediocre care that everyone else in rural suburbs or towns gets that makes a gigantic difference in one's life and lifespan! I understand why my neighbors dont trust anything, much less government. They are right to and can be manipulated very easily by the wrong information and by experience built by corporate medical care that for example, rations the time your doctor can spend with you or doesnt allow them spend the time to argue with your insurance company about a necessary expensive medication.
We definitely have a tiered healthcare system as well as a profit-driven model that makes getting the right doctors and treatment more difficult. I had a brain tumor in 2019 and was referred to a mediocre-at-best hospital with an angry nursing staff not paid or treated for their value. The MRI I got was on equipment so old that when I sent the scans to better facilities, the IT department had to open them first.
Insurance approved me for the Cleveland Clinic, then said no. They approved me for Memorial Sloan Kettering, then sid no, literally why I was consulting doctors.
What saved me was remembering a hospital that was part of a focus group study at an agency I worked for as a graphic designer years earlier. They were in-network, a teaching hospital, and had state-of-the-art technology. Never did the insurance I had mention them.
Meanwhile, the meds I was on from hospital number one nearly killed me. No one followed up when I declined surgery there to tell me to get off them. They were intended for short-term use to reduce inflammation around the tumor. One was dexamethasone, which wasted my muscles to the point I could barely get up a flight of stairs! What a shitshow.
I lived in the UK for 18 years and I can say, from my own personal experience, their socialized National Health System (NHS) was so much better than the medical treatment that I receive here.
Unfortunately, the money in the UK's political system has resulted in "austerity" policies and legislation that have been systematically defunding the once fantastic NHS. Now it is in deep trouble due to the understaffing caused by underfunding. It is being undermined by more and more privately operated practices and for-profit insurance companies. It is really sad.
Some doctors practice the art of medicine. Some practice the science of medicine. These two are preferred is the third kind who practiced the business of medicine who need to be avoided at all cost.
Sometimes I feel like I’m being treated by an MBA and not an MD
Bravo! The corporate Dems and conventional progressives won't like your views about Medicare-for-All, but you've delivered an important truth. We need to pay attention.
Fact is that we spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as the next most expensive developed country. That country's outcomes put them in the top performing group worldwide, while all our spending ranks us last among all high income countries.
We can continue to bend ourselves into pretzels to try to make our for-profit system work. Or we can learn something from all the other developed countries around the world, who have near universal coverage for their citizens, with far better outcomes, at substantially less cost!
100%, we've got to be approaching the ability to bring cost down and supply up from a common sense position. For me, the common sense here is that if the market can't deliver it for you at a reasonable price, at reasonable speed, then we can do it ourselves
There is another flaw in the argument about not trusting government. It assumes the government is this hostile adversary we have to constantly be on guard against. No, that would be for-profit corporations. It is they who are competing with us to see who will come out ahead in the transactions for goods and services. But, we are supposed to be the government. The people are sovereign. We can figure out how to trust ourselves.
Bureaucracies are not automatically bad. They can tend toward inertia or they can be well constructed and well run. That is a choice. And it's not like insurance companies aren't bureaucratic. Actually, insurance companies are clunky and slow bureaucracies when it comes to paying claims and efficient and nimble machines for collecting premiums.
Healthcare can be what we say it is. Stop letting the corporations run the narratives and control the parameters of the solutions to the problems they cause. Business can have a seat at the table. It just can't have all the seats.
Ironically most Americans who do not trust gov't also want to be on the same plan as the president and congress. Perhaps as a frame for the best picture, "single payer" (which emphasizes the former) should be changed to "single plan" (which emphasizes the latter).
Cynthia, your post implies that we are fighting the wrong enemy. That is in fact what we are doing. Most of the energy of our resistance is being employed against our politicians. We should instead be focusing on those with the real power in our current system -- the oligarchs who own the corporations and who fund those politicians.
I meant to be explicit about that, not to just imply it. I agree. What I am noting is that the oligarchs are manipulating the terms of the battle by deflecting blame for their actions onto government. And they do it by purchasing politicians and directing them like they do their employees.
As a physician for the last 26 years who works in public health, I have come to believe that the only way to make this happen is to convince the overwhelming majority of Americans why this makes sense for them by illustrating with examples based on their personal experience. I’ve heard for too long, too many people with the wrong argument - “I don’t want to pay for poor people’s healthcare.” What makes me sad about this is that these people are too uninformed to understand they are already paying for poor people’s healthcare. Every time an uninsured person gets emergency care for a catastrophic illness, we pay ridiculous amounts for their healthcare. Yes, primary care is less expensive and has the potential to prevent this, but even access to primary care doesn’t mean people will go and get it. Then came the silly talk about how electronic health records would improve healthcare quality. Maybe, but right now, not everyone uses them, those who do don’t use the same system, and they don’t all communicate so that (at least up until now) was another colossal waste of time and money. It is now perfectly clear to me that the only way to get folks on board is to highlight why this not only makes sense financially, but will also improve our lives by highlighting the time and money spent trying to navigate the stupidity of the existing system we operate in. Ask folks how many times they’ve had to change providers because they moved or changed jobs, or because the provider they had and loved for the last 10 years no longer has a contract with their insurance company. Ask them how many times they had to wait for weeks or months for an appointment because the provider that does take their insurance doesn’t have any appointments. Or maybe they had to drive an hour instead of going to the place up the street for that same reason. Do they want to spend more time with their provider and get the best possible care? Maybe removing the huge burden of that provider having to play games with payors to get around gatekeeping and pre authorizations might help. Maybe they’ve been looking for months for a skilled nursing home that will accept Medicare and provides quality and compassionate care so they can feel confident that their elderly parent will be able to live with dignity and respect. Ask them if they think it’s right that the companies that provide health insurance don’t care one bit about their health and only care about making money for executives and investors. Ask them if they think it’s right for the people who want to take care of them to have to go tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt for the training to do so (and you wonder why we don’t have enough providers?). Healthcare should not be about profits, it should be about making people healthy. I have never heard a single rational argument against any of these things. Sadly, I haven’t really heard much argument at all. And that is where I think the problem lies. Until people demand it, nothing will change and we will not get the healthcare we deserve.
Excellent points! Just yesterday, I was in a medical office, and a nurse was logging into My Chart™️ to see when my surgeon had scheduled my follow-up appointment. I made the comment that I think there should be a law that every provider had to use the same program because between my husband and me, we use at least four. (She said she has a love/hate relationship with My Chart™️ because so many patients use it primarily as a means for communicating with their doctor. I had never considered that.) She DID agree that it would be good for everyone to use the same program because she could access their records.
Ask them if they would like to be on the same plan as the president and congress if we could save trillions of dollars and tens of millions of unnecessarily devastate American lives doing it.
Check out this link for info re M4A and for a model system that goes beyond M4A and eliminates all profit from all healthcare: https://nationalsinglepayer.com/
The question is, why do we not double our capacity for training doctors and other key providers? We have been artificially holding back on how many people we admit to such programs, and then we import foreign doctors. But what foreign doctor would want to come to the United States as it is now and risk ending up beaten up and thrown into a murder prison in some hellhole country?
In the 60's Americans who could not get into an American medical school went to other countries to get their degree and then came back to the states to practice. I dont know what they had to do to get a license here after that.
Lee Iacocca wrote that upon arriving at Chrysler (in the late 1970s/early 1980s) he discovered that Blue Cross/Blue Shield had become their largest supplier, billing them more than steel and rubber. This has been a massive issue for many decades. 🫤
To get more doctors, Congress needs to increase funding for Medicare’s Graduate Medical Education, which largely determines the number of doctors trained each year. Without this funding, teaching hospitals must scramble for money from other sources to cover the cost of resident training programs. Every year there are more medical students searching to “match” with a residency training program than there are spots available. To put it simply, the government is already deeply involved in the supply of available doctors; we can have more public hospitals and facilities and doctors at a lower cost than the current system.
Years ago med schools said they needed to raise tuition and the number of enrollees to be able to stay afloat financially. So powerful moneyed interests convince congress to supply the additional funding so they could keep the number of enrollees low. I support the equal opportunity for publicly-financed education through college and/or trade school...including med school. The original GI Bill returned $7 for every $1 invested just in increased tax revenues alone. Doctors, enginneers, etc. pay more taxes than low-wage workers.
Ok, Corbin, you've got my first hundred. Wish I could send more. Show us what you can accomplish and lots of other despairing Boomers can be induced to invest. This is such important work. Thank you for doing it.
Tell us more about the process we need to undertake in order to untangle our healthcare from the giant mess of “insurance” companies, medical intermediaries, pharmaceuticals, and medical professional groups? What does that look like to start, in progress, and finally when it is done? Yelling about costs is a way for everyone to make the problem “shut up” instead of addressing it thoughtfully. Define the path for us and maybe we will want to go there with you.
Check out this link for info re M4A and for a model system that goes beyond M4A and eliminates all profit from all healthcare: https://nationalsinglepayer.com/
Yes Absolutely. This place would be a good one to learn in greater detail and understand for us to make our political practice better. Also, It is my belief that if we elect those who profess medicare for all they can be educated to better understand as well.
Check out this link for info re M4A and for a model system that goes beyond M4A and eliminates all profit from all healthcare: https://nationalsinglepayer.com/
Spot on, Corbin. I wrote on another of your posts that I'd love to see a phased commitment, e.g. dropping the eligibility age for Medicare by [x] years every [y] years (say, 5 and 5). Import doctors from overseas while we are building the supply of doctors, nurses, hospitals, and other infrastructure here, that gradually catches up with the demand.
Government pays for healthcare tuition, and healthcare graduates must work in general practice or underserved communities for [z] years.
I'm just spitballing, but I haven't seen any other concrete proposals on how to implement single-payer.
I hate to sound like an incrementalist, but all the problems have solutions... that are gonna take a minute.
I agree that Medicare for All will not happen overnight, but it would immediately cut out the massive amount of money paid to the insurance industry. It could also begin incrementally by age groups. There will have to be incentives to draw people into training for doctor and nursing professions.
The AMA, CDC, and NIH must barred from taking "pay to play" money from any pharmaceutical or other health related industry. Until that happens, any thing they say or promote is suspect. "The Science is Settled" is one of the great lies lapped up by liberals who are too lazy to actually read the science. There is a regressive bias against alternative therapies that actually work, but are too cheap to satisfy corporate greed. My doctors over the years dismiss (sometimes rudely) any question I ask about DMSO, CoQ10, photobiomodulation, and others...."well you want to be careful about those 'fringe' ideas") Adding the word "horse" to the item is a sure killer. We have to be open to exploring all possibilities, especially those that have won a Nobel Prize in medicine.
Are American children healthier than those of other developed nations because of their 70 vaccinations by age 18? No. More allergies, asthma, autism, obesity, etc. So many things could reduce the overall M4A cost. Clean air, water, soil=grown food crops (minus fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides), an NOSB with strict regulation of hydroponics. The necessary remediation across all sectors of life is nearly overwhelming, but I believe what we should have begun 50 years ago we have to now attack with great speed.
Let me be clear that I’m 100% for a single pair of Medicare for all system that does away with any co-pays and covers medical care from cradle to grave and includes mental, health, dental, vision everything there’s no question that’s the optimal way to go for everybody involved.
My biggest concern is that while we focus on how we pay for our health healthcare, we are not thinking about how we pay to build healthcare capacity that’s capable of servicing our entire populations needs
So while we debate the pay for it, we are not thinking about stocking the shelves along the way.
Fundamentally what that tells me is that we believe that the American healthcare system is foundational strong enough to support the entire population and the data says that it’s not
Sorry Corbin, but the United States does not have a "healthcare system." It has a system of extracting profit from the most sick and desperate among us.
So you’re saying that moving the country to a single payer government run healthcare payment system would not be the best way to start to reform our system? I disagree. Removing the majority of overhead cost from the payment system by eliminating the redundant payment processors on both ends and the huge profits that are sucked out of the healthcare income stream by the private insurers would go a long way to pay for improved access. The British National Healthcare is not a good model to follow. Its total control of nearly the entire healthcare system there has resulted in rationing of care that Americans would find unacceptable, as is the current state of TRumpian healthcare that will close many rural hospitals. The upsurge in private equity acquisitions of hospitals bodes ill for our country as well. New York State is now seriously looking at a state-run single payer system.
Nearly a trillion-dollar defense budget this year. A third more is proposed for next year. Fossil fuel subsidies around $800 billion, Elon Musk with $38 billion in government contracts. Allowing fast food and fake food to proliferate, toxins and microplastics in our bloodstreams. Taking care of people is a choice, and cancer is a for-profit industry, not a search for a cure. The medical system IS run by business, Big Pharma, and greedy insurance companies. $500 bandages, anyone? Private equity is closing small hospitals. Is that the kind of competition you advocate for?
Other developed nations provide socialized healthcare for their citizens. Not America, where it bankrupts people as insurance CEOs make tens and hundreds of millions.
We spent $5.6 trillion on healthcare last year...an average of twice the price per person compared to every other advanced nation with universal healthcare. The difference is we use a profit-driven coverage model and they don't.
Privatization of healthcare and what should be government services is a disaster. Efficiency is one thing, maximizing profit another. Trusting business with our health is at odds with our health.
I particularly like to note that in NYC the "good" Hospitals (most of them are) have reaped the rewards of an aging Oligarchy who want their private rooms in first class hospitals and doctors to serve them. They have found it expedient financially to donate extraordinary sums of money to upgrade, and build new, develop research and teaching hospitals etc making them the best possible. The people who are lucky enough to have doctors who practice in those hospitals can get a very high level of care. I always said you could know what illnesses the Koch Bros had by what specific wing they donated to 'their' hospital. But seriously, this New Yorker, having moved upstate, is experiencing the kind of mediocre care that everyone else in rural suburbs or towns gets that makes a gigantic difference in one's life and lifespan! I understand why my neighbors dont trust anything, much less government. They are right to and can be manipulated very easily by the wrong information and by experience built by corporate medical care that for example, rations the time your doctor can spend with you or doesnt allow them spend the time to argue with your insurance company about a necessary expensive medication.
We definitely have a tiered healthcare system as well as a profit-driven model that makes getting the right doctors and treatment more difficult. I had a brain tumor in 2019 and was referred to a mediocre-at-best hospital with an angry nursing staff not paid or treated for their value. The MRI I got was on equipment so old that when I sent the scans to better facilities, the IT department had to open them first.
Insurance approved me for the Cleveland Clinic, then said no. They approved me for Memorial Sloan Kettering, then sid no, literally why I was consulting doctors.
What saved me was remembering a hospital that was part of a focus group study at an agency I worked for as a graphic designer years earlier. They were in-network, a teaching hospital, and had state-of-the-art technology. Never did the insurance I had mention them.
Meanwhile, the meds I was on from hospital number one nearly killed me. No one followed up when I declined surgery there to tell me to get off them. They were intended for short-term use to reduce inflammation around the tumor. One was dexamethasone, which wasted my muscles to the point I could barely get up a flight of stairs! What a shitshow.
Corbin is one of the bright lights I have tapped for conversation about where to from here. My herding cats project. Love to have you be part of that.
I lived in the UK for 18 years and I can say, from my own personal experience, their socialized National Health System (NHS) was so much better than the medical treatment that I receive here.
Unfortunately, the money in the UK's political system has resulted in "austerity" policies and legislation that have been systematically defunding the once fantastic NHS. Now it is in deep trouble due to the understaffing caused by underfunding. It is being undermined by more and more privately operated practices and for-profit insurance companies. It is really sad.
Yes, I’ve heard that. My daughter moved back to Brixton.
My daughter lived in London for decades and a few years ago moved to the Stroud area.
Some doctors practice the art of medicine. Some practice the science of medicine. These two are preferred is the third kind who practiced the business of medicine who need to be avoided at all cost.
Sometimes I feel like I’m being treated by an MBA and not an MD
Bravo! The corporate Dems and conventional progressives won't like your views about Medicare-for-All, but you've delivered an important truth. We need to pay attention.
Fact is that we spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as the next most expensive developed country. That country's outcomes put them in the top performing group worldwide, while all our spending ranks us last among all high income countries.
We can continue to bend ourselves into pretzels to try to make our for-profit system work. Or we can learn something from all the other developed countries around the world, who have near universal coverage for their citizens, with far better outcomes, at substantially less cost!
Please see my reply to Corbin. He does not understand what M4A is designed to do. I have addressed some of his mistaken ideas in my reply.
Please see my reply to you.
Corbin, you are 100% on target. We do not have a “healthcare” system in this country, we have a disease management for profit system.
Half of evening television advertising is direct-to-consumer ads for drugs. The medical industry’s worst nightmare is a healthy population.
When will we connect the dots -: when any endeavor is done for profit, monetary considerations, eventually eclipse all other needs and values.
100%, we've got to be approaching the ability to bring cost down and supply up from a common sense position. For me, the common sense here is that if the market can't deliver it for you at a reasonable price, at reasonable speed, then we can do it ourselves
I don't understand what "ourselves" means.
There is another flaw in the argument about not trusting government. It assumes the government is this hostile adversary we have to constantly be on guard against. No, that would be for-profit corporations. It is they who are competing with us to see who will come out ahead in the transactions for goods and services. But, we are supposed to be the government. The people are sovereign. We can figure out how to trust ourselves.
Bureaucracies are not automatically bad. They can tend toward inertia or they can be well constructed and well run. That is a choice. And it's not like insurance companies aren't bureaucratic. Actually, insurance companies are clunky and slow bureaucracies when it comes to paying claims and efficient and nimble machines for collecting premiums.
Healthcare can be what we say it is. Stop letting the corporations run the narratives and control the parameters of the solutions to the problems they cause. Business can have a seat at the table. It just can't have all the seats.
Ironically most Americans who do not trust gov't also want to be on the same plan as the president and congress. Perhaps as a frame for the best picture, "single payer" (which emphasizes the former) should be changed to "single plan" (which emphasizes the latter).
Yes! I think that’s brilliant.
Spread the word!
Cynthia, your post implies that we are fighting the wrong enemy. That is in fact what we are doing. Most of the energy of our resistance is being employed against our politicians. We should instead be focusing on those with the real power in our current system -- the oligarchs who own the corporations and who fund those politicians.
I meant to be explicit about that, not to just imply it. I agree. What I am noting is that the oligarchs are manipulating the terms of the battle by deflecting blame for their actions onto government. And they do it by purchasing politicians and directing them like they do their employees.
As a physician for the last 26 years who works in public health, I have come to believe that the only way to make this happen is to convince the overwhelming majority of Americans why this makes sense for them by illustrating with examples based on their personal experience. I’ve heard for too long, too many people with the wrong argument - “I don’t want to pay for poor people’s healthcare.” What makes me sad about this is that these people are too uninformed to understand they are already paying for poor people’s healthcare. Every time an uninsured person gets emergency care for a catastrophic illness, we pay ridiculous amounts for their healthcare. Yes, primary care is less expensive and has the potential to prevent this, but even access to primary care doesn’t mean people will go and get it. Then came the silly talk about how electronic health records would improve healthcare quality. Maybe, but right now, not everyone uses them, those who do don’t use the same system, and they don’t all communicate so that (at least up until now) was another colossal waste of time and money. It is now perfectly clear to me that the only way to get folks on board is to highlight why this not only makes sense financially, but will also improve our lives by highlighting the time and money spent trying to navigate the stupidity of the existing system we operate in. Ask folks how many times they’ve had to change providers because they moved or changed jobs, or because the provider they had and loved for the last 10 years no longer has a contract with their insurance company. Ask them how many times they had to wait for weeks or months for an appointment because the provider that does take their insurance doesn’t have any appointments. Or maybe they had to drive an hour instead of going to the place up the street for that same reason. Do they want to spend more time with their provider and get the best possible care? Maybe removing the huge burden of that provider having to play games with payors to get around gatekeeping and pre authorizations might help. Maybe they’ve been looking for months for a skilled nursing home that will accept Medicare and provides quality and compassionate care so they can feel confident that their elderly parent will be able to live with dignity and respect. Ask them if they think it’s right that the companies that provide health insurance don’t care one bit about their health and only care about making money for executives and investors. Ask them if they think it’s right for the people who want to take care of them to have to go tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt for the training to do so (and you wonder why we don’t have enough providers?). Healthcare should not be about profits, it should be about making people healthy. I have never heard a single rational argument against any of these things. Sadly, I haven’t really heard much argument at all. And that is where I think the problem lies. Until people demand it, nothing will change and we will not get the healthcare we deserve.
Excellent points! Just yesterday, I was in a medical office, and a nurse was logging into My Chart™️ to see when my surgeon had scheduled my follow-up appointment. I made the comment that I think there should be a law that every provider had to use the same program because between my husband and me, we use at least four. (She said she has a love/hate relationship with My Chart™️ because so many patients use it primarily as a means for communicating with their doctor. I had never considered that.) She DID agree that it would be good for everyone to use the same program because she could access their records.
Ask them if they would like to be on the same plan as the president and congress if we could save trillions of dollars and tens of millions of unnecessarily devastate American lives doing it.
Check out this link for info re M4A and for a model system that goes beyond M4A and eliminates all profit from all healthcare: https://nationalsinglepayer.com/
The question is, why do we not double our capacity for training doctors and other key providers? We have been artificially holding back on how many people we admit to such programs, and then we import foreign doctors. But what foreign doctor would want to come to the United States as it is now and risk ending up beaten up and thrown into a murder prison in some hellhole country?
We did this to ourselves.
In the 60's Americans who could not get into an American medical school went to other countries to get their degree and then came back to the states to practice. I dont know what they had to do to get a license here after that.
What a dumb system!
Lee Iacocca wrote that upon arriving at Chrysler (in the late 1970s/early 1980s) he discovered that Blue Cross/Blue Shield had become their largest supplier, billing them more than steel and rubber. This has been a massive issue for many decades. 🫤
To get more doctors, Congress needs to increase funding for Medicare’s Graduate Medical Education, which largely determines the number of doctors trained each year. Without this funding, teaching hospitals must scramble for money from other sources to cover the cost of resident training programs. Every year there are more medical students searching to “match” with a residency training program than there are spots available. To put it simply, the government is already deeply involved in the supply of available doctors; we can have more public hospitals and facilities and doctors at a lower cost than the current system.
Years ago med schools said they needed to raise tuition and the number of enrollees to be able to stay afloat financially. So powerful moneyed interests convince congress to supply the additional funding so they could keep the number of enrollees low. I support the equal opportunity for publicly-financed education through college and/or trade school...including med school. The original GI Bill returned $7 for every $1 invested just in increased tax revenues alone. Doctors, enginneers, etc. pay more taxes than low-wage workers.
Ok, Corbin, you've got my first hundred. Wish I could send more. Show us what you can accomplish and lots of other despairing Boomers can be induced to invest. This is such important work. Thank you for doing it.
Thank you for the correction on dog whistle, and abandoned.
Didn’t mean to ruffle any feathers.
My fault for commenting while on steroids. They will wear off and so will my “shooting from the hip” before I count to ten.
Hope you have a good day.
Tell us more about the process we need to undertake in order to untangle our healthcare from the giant mess of “insurance” companies, medical intermediaries, pharmaceuticals, and medical professional groups? What does that look like to start, in progress, and finally when it is done? Yelling about costs is a way for everyone to make the problem “shut up” instead of addressing it thoughtfully. Define the path for us and maybe we will want to go there with you.
Read Bernie's and Jayapal's plans. They're the best we've got.
Check out this link for info re M4A and for a model system that goes beyond M4A and eliminates all profit from all healthcare: https://nationalsinglepayer.com/
Yes Absolutely. This place would be a good one to learn in greater detail and understand for us to make our political practice better. Also, It is my belief that if we elect those who profess medicare for all they can be educated to better understand as well.
Check out this link for info re M4A and for a model system that goes beyond M4A and eliminates all profit from all healthcare: https://nationalsinglepayer.com/
Spot on, Corbin. I wrote on another of your posts that I'd love to see a phased commitment, e.g. dropping the eligibility age for Medicare by [x] years every [y] years (say, 5 and 5). Import doctors from overseas while we are building the supply of doctors, nurses, hospitals, and other infrastructure here, that gradually catches up with the demand.
Government pays for healthcare tuition, and healthcare graduates must work in general practice or underserved communities for [z] years.
I'm just spitballing, but I haven't seen any other concrete proposals on how to implement single-payer.
I hate to sound like an incrementalist, but all the problems have solutions... that are gonna take a minute.
I agree that Medicare for All will not happen overnight, but it would immediately cut out the massive amount of money paid to the insurance industry. It could also begin incrementally by age groups. There will have to be incentives to draw people into training for doctor and nursing professions.
The AMA, CDC, and NIH must barred from taking "pay to play" money from any pharmaceutical or other health related industry. Until that happens, any thing they say or promote is suspect. "The Science is Settled" is one of the great lies lapped up by liberals who are too lazy to actually read the science. There is a regressive bias against alternative therapies that actually work, but are too cheap to satisfy corporate greed. My doctors over the years dismiss (sometimes rudely) any question I ask about DMSO, CoQ10, photobiomodulation, and others...."well you want to be careful about those 'fringe' ideas") Adding the word "horse" to the item is a sure killer. We have to be open to exploring all possibilities, especially those that have won a Nobel Prize in medicine.
Are American children healthier than those of other developed nations because of their 70 vaccinations by age 18? No. More allergies, asthma, autism, obesity, etc. So many things could reduce the overall M4A cost. Clean air, water, soil=grown food crops (minus fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides), an NOSB with strict regulation of hydroponics. The necessary remediation across all sectors of life is nearly overwhelming, but I believe what we should have begun 50 years ago we have to now attack with great speed.
Let me be clear that I’m 100% for a single pair of Medicare for all system that does away with any co-pays and covers medical care from cradle to grave and includes mental, health, dental, vision everything there’s no question that’s the optimal way to go for everybody involved.
My biggest concern is that while we focus on how we pay for our health healthcare, we are not thinking about how we pay to build healthcare capacity that’s capable of servicing our entire populations needs
So while we debate the pay for it, we are not thinking about stocking the shelves along the way.
Fundamentally what that tells me is that we believe that the American healthcare system is foundational strong enough to support the entire population and the data says that it’s not
Sorry Corbin, but the United States does not have a "healthcare system." It has a system of extracting profit from the most sick and desperate among us.
So you’re saying that moving the country to a single payer government run healthcare payment system would not be the best way to start to reform our system? I disagree. Removing the majority of overhead cost from the payment system by eliminating the redundant payment processors on both ends and the huge profits that are sucked out of the healthcare income stream by the private insurers would go a long way to pay for improved access. The British National Healthcare is not a good model to follow. Its total control of nearly the entire healthcare system there has resulted in rationing of care that Americans would find unacceptable, as is the current state of TRumpian healthcare that will close many rural hospitals. The upsurge in private equity acquisitions of hospitals bodes ill for our country as well. New York State is now seriously looking at a state-run single payer system.
Care is already being rationed in the U.S. Those who can afford it have access that many millions of others don't.