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Old 6th November 2019, 10:20 AM   #159
Segnosaur
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Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: Canada, eh?
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Originally Posted by PhantomWolf View Post
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If you tell people who do have coverage "Your own health care and that of your family will get worse, so that some unnamed person might be better off", you might have a hard time getting broad public support.
The thing is that there is no need for that to happen even with a single payer.
Canada has been attempting to deal with the issue of how to allocate health care resources in a 'single payer' system (for basic medical services) for decades, and yet we are stuck with long waiting lists.

Why exactly do you think the U.S. will somehow be magically different? That somehow the U.S. will be able to somehow solve the problems that Canada (a pretty normal western country with no major corruption issues) has been unable to?
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The US system has privately run hospitals and doctors. All that really has to happen is to change who the payer is.
Its a little bit more complex than that I think.

Governments will have to budget for whatever health care costs are expected, and plan for any expected infrastructure upgrades that are needed. (After all, you probably don't want to give private hospitals and clinics free reign to decide "We want to buy X and the government will pay".) That means health care will be subject to the actions of a government that will have multiple competing priorities.
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There is no need to make the service worse just because there is a single payer.
Keep in mind that I am not saying single payer makes the system worse overall... I am saying it will probably make the system worse for certain people.
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In fact, just to put a level between the politicians and the hospitals, having a Federal Health Board who would act like an insurance company in that it negotiates costs, lobbies to get the money from Congress, does the paying, and works to organise specialists to help with any special cases.
Whatever levels of government bureaucracy are implemented to lobby politicians and negotiate costs, ultimately the decisions about how much to fund health care will come down to the president and congress critters.

Would you really feel confident putting complete control of your health care funding in the hands of a President Paul Ryan a decade from now?

I can just imagine the conversation at the GOP headquarters:
"We need to give the rich another tax cut"
"But that will increase the deficit"
"Maybe we can cut down on defense spending."
"Ha ha! good joke"
"I thought you would think that was funny"
"Lets just cut a few extra billion out of health care. After all, by the time waiting lists get too long the Democrats will be back in power."
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