Good. Block their deal, let them drop out of obamacare, and then give us the Single Payer that we've always deserved and watch those fuckers go bankrupt like they've always deserved.
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what people really want when they push for socialized medicine is equality over improvement.
envy holds us back so much.
the idea that SS and medicare are great and have done wonders is what's causing the country to go broke and costs to skyrocket.
it was never good in the first place. you see the benefits when the programs are implemented, but everyone fails to see the costs and lost future opportunities.
Serious question: are you a refugee or emigrant from an oppressive communist country? Often this can color one's thinking to reject all aspects of those regimes, even including the few positive things.
Edit: I don't think it's insulting to ask a question. Context helps us to understand each other and the world around us. Downvote, but also reply.
Read your Wilkinson and Pickett. Aside from perhaps the environment, equality is the political and economic issue that will shape the 21st century.
Did you know that before the AMA was created that doctors had to do house calls or face living in abject poverty as a result of the market being flooded with healthcare professionals?
Don't be dense. You know there are happy mediums.
* Read your Wilkinson and Pickett. Aside from perhaps the environment, equality is the political and economic issue that will shape the 21st century.*
I've read Pickett. Equality is horrifying. Eastern Europe is the result. The handicapper general is terrifying.
It's the end to any human greatness.
In fact, not only is it possible, but almost every country in the world that has it does it cheaper than the US (depending on currency fluctuations, Norway is ironically one of the less than a handful of countries that is occasionally more expensive than the US - largely driven up by high salaries).
The difference between the US and the single-payers is that more care is given and better care is given vs. the rest of the world where gov't budgets are constrained so care is constrained.
I'm in Ontario and I can't even get a general practitioner. This is worse than communism.
To blame equality for problems caused by systems that never implemented anything like equality is quite bizarre.
It usually boils down to $5,000 for surgery X in one country, $8,000 for same surgery in another. What an analysis like this always skips is the care that wasn't provided that should have been provided.
…the story about the two fellows in the Soviet Union who were walking down the street and one of them says: Have we really achieved full communism? Is this it? Is this now full communism?
The other one said: Oh no, things are gonna get a lot worse.
Her treatments were cheaper than paying a doctor here in cash. Normally I pay a doc $150 or less for a routine walk in with "I have the flu".
Our dog got chemo pills, checkups, hell the vet even called us each week to check her status between treatments cheaper than that $150 I would pay for fifteen minutes of doctor time.
As for your problem getting a GP, that sucks for you, but that is a local political problem and not a systemic problem with single payer. E.g. in Norway everyone has a legal right to a named GP, and gets one. I live in the UK now, and while there is no guarantee here I've never had a problem finding a GP.
I can afford private insurance here if I'd like it, but I've never had any issues with the NHS that'd justify it. On the contrary the treatment has always been stellar (I've not had to use it all that much myself apart from a "mystery infection" t
If you have the money, nothing stops you from getting supplemental private insurance in Canada either, so I wonder what you mean when you say you can't find a GP. Do you mean that you're unwilling to go private? Or that you actually can't find one either way?
I find it almost comical that you want to opt for such an extreme measure rather than accept systems that have a proven track record of delivering much cheaper care.
And as I've pointed out: Both in Canada where you live, and in the UK where I live (as well as in unlikely places like China, which doesn't have a proper socialised healthcare system) you can pay to go private if you for some reason don't get to see a doctor fast enough, or isn't happy with the service. But at least in these countries there is something in place for those who can't afford to.
It doesn't matter. There provably wasn't equality.
So whether or not what they had was socialism (which, by the way, does not require equality in any case) is entirely irrelevant to the argument.
The ACA established programs to make payments to insurance companies that got unusually expensive customers but the funding for those payments has been blocked.
http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20160517/NEWS/160519...
But what has happened is that all (or most) companies are losing money on the exchanges so there is no one to pay into the pool. Congressional Republicans have blocked funding the pool with government money because the pool wasn't supposed to cost money in the first place.
I'm skeptical of that the public option will work as well as its proponents say it will. We already have non-profit health insurance companies, and they haven't completely eaten everyone else's lunch. But it's worth a shot, as long as it really truly sticks to that mandate of not being government supported. The argument would need to be really convincing given how many of its backers think it ought to be government supported any way.
A proper public option receives no more government support than a private company does. If answering to political pressure instead of answering to a board of directors turns out to be an amazing thing for health care efficiency, single-payer could be on its way. I think that's dreaming by people who have never run anything in their life, but I also think that they should be free to try and fail, as long as it's a genuine same-as-a-private-company public option.
When you want something to happen politically, you need to work from a position of strength. If you have had a bunch of failures recently, people will not trust whatever new promises you are making. (And saying the failures were someone else's fault is the worst excuse of all. It's not like all those people you blame the problems on have died.)