Why isn't Single Payer Health Insurance on the Table?
Single Payer Universal Health Care Insurance reform is not in consideration in D.C.'s lobbyist bubble health care reform negotiations. Here is Obama's reason why.
Obama has rejected the idea of establishing a single government insurance program, however, saying the U.S. tradition of providing health care through employers would make such a shift politically and practically impossible.
"If I were starting a system from scratch, then I think that the idea of moving towards a single-payer system could very well make sense," Obama said in response to the questioner in New Mexico, echoing comments he made during his presidential campaign. "The only problem is that we're not starting from scratch. . . . We don't want a huge disruption as we go into health-care reform where suddenly we're trying to completely reinvent one-sixth of the economy."
Bill Moyers did a segment on single payer health care, May 22, 2009. Moyers produced a mini-documentary on the history of health care reform in the United States before his interviews. It's more corporate lobbyists are once again running the show. Did you get a massive premium increase and yet another cut in health insurance benefits this month? I thought so.
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Once explained many surveys show that people
agree with the concept. The problem is taking on entrenched special interests. At some point if we want true reform that will help working class Americans we have to take on and beat the special interests.
The Obama Administration is not willing to do that despite the rhetoric from the campaign.
The only prospect of Single-payer that bugged me
Was the prospect of rationing. I know it can and actually in many cases does happen in our multi-payer system. But I know it happens in single-payer cases. As someone who is disabled, this scares the crap out of me.
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me 2
I think maybe a two tier system, enable private but keep working on an effective, efficient system. I believe that is true in Finland, UK, where one can go to a private, for profit MD and many of them work in the public system but also run private clinics, almost as a part-time thing.
But I am convinced they must get the entire sector, the entire making profits off of sick people, well, out.
We know from watching stocks and finance every day the "projections of growth" from the health care sector, stock picks, quarterly earnings and so on and how investors are banking on a huge surge in elderly sick people...
(ignoring the fact more and more people cannot afford to get sick at all).
I think they need to wipe all of that out, or significantly regulate it, something.
The thing is, the U.S. is the last to consider health care a basic right and as such, one would think we could study all of the other models, mistakes all of these other nations have made in designing a new system.
Right now they won't even look at that! I mean this is inane, we just have these health profiteers, lead by the insurance companies looking to preserve their profits instead of a complete redesign of a new system.
That's what I see going on at the moment although some blog posts on what the details are in these "negotiations" are in order so we are aware of the latest details.
After seeing the Friday night videos
I have to wonder if the rationing we've seen in England's NHS isn't caused *specifically* by performance measures trying to save money.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
is that thought provoking?
I wouldn't call it a "documentary" per say, more of a video manifesto, but most thought provoking to be sure.
Talk about behavior modification and behavioral sociology/psychology....
uh, duh, people are going to try to preserve the status quo and save their jobs, first and foremost.
I think one an analyze a system for inefficiencies but prescribing the solutions...one had better be aware of real live human beings and how they are, hard and long on solutions.
If it wasn't real live people in that segment it would have been hilarious.
But isn't this true from other inane policy changes?
i.e. IBM at one point did performance reviews with the number of lines of code someone wrote. So, needless to say they got "bloat code", with millions of lines of code that did almost nothing but make the application much more inefficient.
What it gave me
Was a possible *alternate explanation* for why things are the way they are in the NHS. You know what you call my "anti-choice" views- there's a good deal of fear among social conservatives right now about health care rationing, they see it as yet another place where mere profit wins out over human life. They're afraid, and rightly so, of getting some exotic cancer and then having a bureaucrat, looking at "the numbers", tell them that their life isn't worth a $40,000/year treatment regime.
Whenever I run into that attitude, I tell them that they'd get pretty much exactly the same treatment from their HMO- who would drop them like a hot potato for getting cancer.
But this says that *American Medicare* doesn't have to go the same way- all we need to do is pick different performance indicators.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
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