Don’t forget Old Glory Robot Insurance.
No kidding - Nixon proposed single-payer back at the start of the 1970’s. We still don’t have it.
Does it matter at all to your view that every other developed nation have instituted single payer without this happening?
Well, there would be a lot of jobs no longer needed. However, I’ve always though that the notion of paying for people to do makework jobs because they can’t get a job in a normal market was against republican ideas.
And, no it is not generally accepted that people without insurance don’t get healthcare. In the developed world, it is generally assumed that everyone gets healthcare. There is one country where this is not the case, and its considered a cautionary tale.
As transactional parasites, I don’t see any need to save the health insurance industry. Am I missing something here, Tee?
It’s accepted as a premise to discussion, in this country, at this time, on this board, in this very thread concerning the repeal of the ACA, that without insurance, people go without health care. That without insurance, people are screwed. Without insurance, sick people just get sicker, because the cost of treatment in the US is such that the average person cannot afford it.
What we call “insurance” here should be called 3rd party payers, but whatever you call them, they are providing access to health care now for people who would be otherwise unable to afford treatment.
Not by me it isn’t. And there does seem to be a lot of people who feel that this is not a good way of doing things and that this is a very relevant thing to bring up. Especially since a lot of the participants on one side of discussion work hard to avoid any examples from other nations.
For example by stating that single payer means a government takeover of the healthcare industry as if it was a fact.
Uncle Bernie Bedhair on the meaning of “access to healthcare”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/politics/confirmation-hearing-cabinet.html
Right, but if we implement single payer, we won’t need these people who exist more or less as middlemen.
Even after it was recommended by Dick “I am not a crook” Nixon? Shocking. 
No, it’s a highly rational view of insurance companies. In Canada, with respect to medically necessary health care, health insurers were told to pack their bags and get the fuck out of the country and take their reprehensible trade elsewhere. Some are still around providing supplementary insurance, and that’s all they’re allowed to do. They’re not allowed to mess with human lives or tell doctors what to do.
No, it isn’t. If that were actually true, then Republicans and the insurance industry and its lackeys would have to explicitly admit that they really are OK with having people literally die in the streets, that they really are OK with having the poor and the elderly literally thrown out of hospital emergency rooms for inability to pay, with having young children go completely without health care. But since they can’t politically admit that, they’ve gone along with a whole series of half-measures, stopgaps, and smokescreens to try to make it look, at least superficially, that the US health care system is actually humane: Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the very poor, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, etc.
All these programs are half-assed efforts to address the reality that, no, you cannot just let people die in the streets for lack of insurance – or at least, you can’t openly admit it. The trouble is, these pathetically half-assed half-measures are sorely inadequate, enormously inefficient and costly, and basically don’t fucking work, with millions of people falling through the cracks every year, left without care and/or going bankrupt from health care costs, sometimes even when they have insurance, and many of them literally dying from lack of health care. Civilized countries have streamlined, universal health care systems that cover everybody without complexities and conditions and endless bureaucracy, and they do it for a fraction of the cost of the broken US system.
As I said before, it’s always good to have some random Internet poster like yourself pull a baseless opinion out of his ass, when there are experts in health care systems who have spent their lives studying how such systems work around the world, and who advise governments on establishing workable health care funding systems. The US has, instead, an insurance industry plutocracy and its Republican lackeys, and ignoramuses like you cheering for them.
Perhaps you could dial down your douche level, wolfpup, because this is not a fun exercise for me, I’m living it. Medicare would be a step up here, but I’m twenty years away from that yet, and I expect that Medicare will not be anymore when the Republican Congress gets rolling. It is interesting to me that people here – in the Pit – entertain the notion that it might be expanded into a single-payer-for-all system by those same people. We obviously travel in different circles.
If I get seriously ill, what’s standing between me and losing everything I have to health care costs is my health insurance. The federal government is the entity least likely to give a shit. The providers are the people who can, and will, save your life and restore your health and expect deep sacrifices as payment, especially if you are not insured. If you can’t afford health insurance, you get to pay more than everyone else for every kind of care, until you have very little left, and then they might treat you for free…but it’s hard to say. If people are actually being tossed out of the ER for inability to pay, then there’s your answer. That’s not the fault of insurance companies.
They are not directly responsible, they only profit from the situation. I have even heard dark suggestions that they use their considerable wealth and influence to keep the status quo.
He proposed it before the Watergate scandal, silly - if that hadn’t blown up maybe he could have pulled it off.
Of course, by the standards of today’s Republican party Tricky Dick was a soft, left-leaning, liberal pussy.
Those, of course, who don’t still believe that he was the simple victim of a liberal press witch hunt.
By today’s standards, so was Atilla the Hun.
Would that be because Dick Nixon (before he dicks you) was such an honest, and upright, politician before he OK’d the White House Plumbers, and then CREEP’s (Committee for the Re-Election of the President) burglary and cover up.
Maybe you’re impressed with presidential-candidate Tricky Dick’s 1968 illegal interference with the U.S. government’s attempt to broker a cease-fire in Viet Nam?
*Nixon’s newly revealed records show for certain that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, he ordered Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to persuade them to refuse a cease-fire being brokered by President Lyndon Johnson.
…Published as the 40th Anniversary of Nixon’s resignation approaches, Will’s column confirms that Nixon feared public disclosure of his role in sabotaging the 1968 Vietnam peace talks. Will says Nixon established a “plumbers unit” to stop potential leaks of information that might damage him, including documentation that he believed was held by the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank. The Plumbers’ later break-in at the Democratic National Committee led to the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down.
Nixon’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks was confirmed by transcripts of FBI wiretaps. On November 2, 1968, LBJ received an FBI report saying Chernnault told the South Vietnamese ambassador that "she had received a message from her boss: saying the Vietnamese should “hold on, we are gonna win.”*
All very interesting. Turns out Nixon was a creep. Who knew?
However, I read the “even Dick Nixon” line not as saying that Nixon had all good ideas or morals, but that a man who was considered quite conservative in his time and a strong anti-Communist was proposing single payer.
Which is why we have a single payer system in place today??? Proposing vs establishing.
In order to have a single payer system, you have to convince enough voters, either from the individual state level, or in the various legislatures, to create a single payer system. Nixon, Clinton, Obama, etc. haven’t been able to make that happen.
I think the point was that the Watergate shit hit the fan before Nixon had a chance to see if he could do it.
I wouldn’t need to be argumentative if you stopped posting utter nonsensical drivel like this, the kind of idiocy that comes straight out of the Republican and AHIP playbooks. How the hell do you think every civilized country in the world achieves universal health care for all its citizens regardless of ability to pay? Think about it for a moment, if you can. It sure as hell isn’t thanks to the avaricious mercenaries who run private health insurance empires, whose only accountability is to their owners and stockholders, and who have been content on many occasions to let their own customers die in fulfillment of their fiduciary responsibility to make a buck.
No, the way every civilized country has achieved universal and freely accessible health care for all is government, directly or indirectly – government elected by the people and accountable to the people. It doesn’t necessarily matter if it’s a government-run single-payer system or a government-regulated network of third-party payers – what does matter is that the system that serves at least the majority of the population is functionally like single-payer, which mostly means that it’s a community risk rated model in which everyone pays the same for a common set of unconditionally provided essential services, and there is a 100% participation rate. Which is completely different from the business model of insurance – in fact it’s diametrically opposite – and which also provides a common basis for the standardization of provider fees.
It’s not that government is perfect and saintly and business is necessarily evil, it’s the fact that business has a fiduciary responsibility to make money while there is at least a fighting chance that a properly constituted accountable government will look after the public interest. Often, it takes an exceptional and courageous political figure to truly transform health care, but once it’s done, it tends to become popular and entrenched so that lesser politicians have to support it as a matter of political reality. And single-payer at its core is fundamentally pretty simple, since the elimination of insurance bureaucracy makes it operationally little more than a gigantic payments processing system.
Look, I’m sorry if you’re living through health care issues. It’s not fun, especially when costs become a major factor. I’ve been living it, too, but from the single-payer perspective, and my experience has only reinforced my lifelong commitment to what I view as the only humane system possible.
But perhaps we’re talking about different things. The ACA is not single-payer, and neither is Medicare, really, because of its huge gaping inadequacies and its forced coexistence with the existing disastrous mess of private insurance. The point, however, is that the ACA was a step in the right direction, and reasoned arguments for reform need to dump this Republican mantra about the alleged evils of government and focus on more government involvement in health care, not less – the same government that created Medicare in the first place, and universal health care in every civilized country in the world.