Mehmet Oz, widely recognized as television’s “Dr. Oz” and President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid, has sparked controversy over resurfaced remarks from a 2013 speech, where he addressed the balance between personal and governmental responsibility for the uninsured.Dr. Oz...
Which is exactly why we’ll never have single payer: It would crash the economy and put millions out of work.
Downvote me all you want but it’s the exact reason Obama gave for not pushing single payer
Privatize ALL the health insurance companies.
Reduce inefficiencies (fire all the parasites that don’t do actual work, like the CEO’s, etc)
Continue operations as normal, but now with 100% guaranteed claim coverage.
Over time, phase out the need for people to “deal with insurance” at all and make the whole thing transparent.
I’m not sure how that puts people out of work? Still need people to process the claims, they would just work for the government vs the company. Which for them would probably be better long term getting federal benefits and retirement.
It’s only a couple companies at this point. There’s been so many members over the years. Economy would be fine. We probably had more tech layoffs this year than would lose their job from closing these leeches
But that would go against small govt and the GOP cannot let that slide.
How?
For the same reason not paying our insurance will crash the economy: Big parts of it would go out of business.
The obvious solution is to put a plan into place to transition to a new system over time. There’s no reason it has to come all at once, unless there’s a viable way to do that without collapsing markets.
The conclusion to any problem is never, and should never, be “Welp! The problem is too big to fix now! Guess we’ll just leave it as it is!”. Every problem has a solution. Most problems have more than one.
Further than that, as a recently unemployed working class person who was paycheck to paycheck before my freelance gigs dried up a month and a half ago (slow season started early this year), fuck the stock market. Why should I worry about the extractors losing money when they have already created a system in which, through no lack of effort on my part, I have nothing left to lose. I’m in the top 10% of technicians in my city, in a very niche field, in one of the largest cities in the US, and I can’t afford my bills because my industry is dominated by a single monopoly. Anyone who doesn’t serve the monopoly directly either serves it indirectly, or feeds on its scraps. Small company owners (I’ve worked with many) justify paying people just slightly more than the starvation wages the monopoly doles out. Unions are gaining ground, but it’s very slow progress and they haven’t really expanded far beyond entry level positions yet, which I leveled out of well over a decade ago.
Fuck the stock market. Fuck the rich. Why should I care about them when all they do is extract?
I don’t disagree with you but I do not believe our government is capable of a decade-long transition to single payer.
Why not? All they have to do is make a single payer option available. Make it functional and accessible, and people will switch to it as their current insurance policies end, or when they move to their next job. The health insurance stock market will likely initially dive, then stabilize into a long downward slope. I’m sure the feds have all kinds of “quantitative-easing” tools they can use to make the process less painful for the ownership class. Whatever pain they do feel would be a necessary consequence of the wrongs they have committed being made right.
Is “the economy” code for how hard you can fuck yourself in the ass with no lube?
I don’t know why I’m getting grief for agreeing with OP that eliminating health insurers would crash the economy.
To me this is fine but most people won’t like it which is why single payer won’t ever happen without a revolution.
Is not liking it the same as crashing the economy?
I’m not suggesting you’re wrong, but isn’t there an obvious inefficiency here that reduces the standard of care provided?
Like if a national healthcare system doubles the number of administrators involved, there will be less money available for actual health stuff.
Yes, and the inefficiency of private health insurance creates thousands of jobs and powers a $2.2 trillion industry.
The stock market has survived fire sales before and it will survive it again. Oops we got too large to easily stop has never been cause for anything except getting the stick out and beating them down to size.