Comment by s1artibartfast
1 year ago
Single payer literally meant that all citizens are subscribed to the same government operated health insurance.
If the entire "single payer" program was completely optional and offered at cost, they totally missed the messaging on that one, because I was paying attention and that wasnt my take away.
> Single payer literally meant that all citizens are subscribed to the same government operated health insurance.
Correct, but that's a pretty big change from the propaganda you repeated in your previous comment. What you said was, "This was discussed briefly during the Obama healthcare debates, but broadly rejected by left who wanted to eliminate private options." In another now-deleted comment, you also said, "the left was too fixated On preventing people from buying better care".
Nothing about having single payer healthcare prevents people from also purchasing private healthcare. Single payer does not require the elimination of private options--when you said that was what the left wanted, you were repeating a lie. People can and do purchase private healthcare in countries with single-payer systems--it's just not common because generally the private healthcare options aren't worth it.
> If the entire "single payer" program was completely optional and offered at cost, they totally missed the messaging on that one, because I was paying attention and that wasnt my take away.
Single-payer is optional in the same sense that current subsidies to insurance companies are optional, it just costs less and results in less death and human suffering.
Your insistence that it has to be "offered at cost" is basically an insistence that people who can't afford that cost but need life saving care can just die. So no, it wasn't "offered at cost"--that's the entire point. I want Americans to be able to receive life-saving medical care when they need it, even if they are poor. That's just basic empathy for our fellow humans.
I havent deleted any comments, you read it in a sibling thread that is still there.
There is a big difference between supplemental insurance and alternative options, and I think you are conflating the two. the first big difference is being able to opt out of the cost of public insurance if you go with something else.
I think that any puclic healthcare should carry the true price tag, and any subsidies for the poor should be subsidized as a separate benefit. Essentially, I am strongly opposed to funding the public healthcare with an income/payroll tax because I dont thinnk there is much incentive to actually tackle prices.
> There is a big difference between supplemental insurance and alternative options, and I think you are conflating the two. the first big difference is being able to opt out of the cost of public insurance if you go with something else.
I don't think that's a big difference. You can't opt out of paying tax for health insurance subsidies under the plan you're proposing--the difference here is that the amount of tax you can't opt out of under single-payer is less, because you're not forced to pay the corporate middle-men.
Yes, I'm saying the combined cost of paying your own healthcare AND poor people's healthcare under single payer is lower than the cost of paying just the poor people's healthcare under corporate health insurance, because it is. The government already pays more than half of health insurance costs[1]--the total cost would go down under single payer by every estimate I've found.
In short, it's literally cheaper to pay taxes for single payer AND a private health insurance premium, than to pay taxes for subsidies to private health insurance in addition to your private health insurance premium. The inefficiency introduced by ubiquitous private health insurance is that bad.
> I think that any puclic healthcare should carry the true price tag, and any subsidies for the poor should be subsidized as a separate benefit.
Ah yes, the "we should make poor people apply for healthcare, so that we can deny people coverage and so people who can't fill out paperwork can't receive coverage" solution to lowering costs.
I'm sure there's no way that right wingers will underfund these programs for the poor and then use their failure to function as an excuse to get rid of them.
> Essentially, I am strongly opposed to funding the public healthcare with an income/payroll tax because I dont thinnk there is much incentive to actually tackle prices.
I'm glad you brought up incentives! Here's how single-payer provides better incentives than what you're proposing:
1. Politicians are motivated to tackle the price of healthcare because this allows them to lower taxes for their constituents, which keeps them office. Money isn't the only incentive that exists. How do you justify ignoring this?
2. The perverse incentive to increase the price of healthcare to line the pockets of insurance is removed, because most of the healthcare isn't provided by private insurance companies that can lobby. How does your solution address this problem?
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4880216/
In all fairness, Bernie Sanders did want to eliminate private insurance under his medicare for all proposal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/health/private-health-ins...
Warren and DeBlasio also signaled they would abolish private insurance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaTecufx8Sk
That's just the unclear messaging that the right wing is taking advantage of. I don't have a NYT subscription so I can't see the whole article, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing in that article that mentions actually preventing companies from offering private health insurance--it's just assumed (correctly) that these companies will be operating at a miniscule fraction of their current scale when people can obtain health insurance from a single payer, because few people will pay for private health insurance when there are better, cheaper options.
As I've reiterated repeatedly, this isn't a loss of options. Health insurance companies can still operate and consumers can still pay for private health insurance, they'll simply be competing with a cheaper alternative that doesn't have a perverse incentive to deny care.
I suppose you could make the argument that there will be fewer options because some of these insurance companies will go bankrupt, but that's just capitalism--there's nothing about the current system which guarantees health insurance companies will remain solvent or guarantees a variety of insurance options. In practice there are many places in the U.S. where there's effectively only one health insurance option.
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