What are your feelings on universal healthcare in the U.S.?

I was the owner of a small business for a long time. I had three employees and I looked into health care for the employees. Crazy ass expensive. I had pretty much told them that I will buy it but it will come straight from their paycheck. Everyone made the same and the discount for four people was small.

The big part was that the rates could fluctuate so it was hard (impossible) to predict the cost. After a lot of searching all of us (30 year old males) decided to roll the dice and go without.

It would have been easier with a government run program to know the cost. At least the cost would be stable for a year. Tax everyone at 8 percent for healthcare. I can deal with that

It is time for the United States to catch up with the rest of the developed countries.

Single-payer. If business won’t be able to compete with a more efficient government run system, why should we have to settle with a more expensive plan?

Single-payer is the only way that makes sense. But America will try every other possible way before they try the way that will work.

@daloon because that would be socialism!! (which is just a code word for COMMUNISM!)
oh noes!! you wouldn’t want commies operating on you, would you?

I liked John Stuarts take on this subject from last night, where one canadian had a cesarian performed on her neck, a Brit had his heart surgery done by a dermatolagist, and an american had a clever through his head, but his insurance company claimed it was a preexisting illness.

@monsoon :: this is the link

Single payer. Long overdue.

I think it’s about damn time for universal health care, and I’ll take it any way we can get it. But I would hope multi-payer would be a stepping stone on the path to single-payer. Health care is a basic human right; we should all have equal access.

We really need and will benefit from universal health care. How do you have a right to pursue happiness if you are not healthy?

@benjaminlevi As I’m sure you know, that’s what the right in the US is trying to paint single payer as. Of course, as usual, they couldn’t be more wrong. Mostly it’s because they don’t understand the role of insurance, nor do they understand economics.

Insurance is about spreading the risk. The more people you spread the risk over, the less risk there is for each individual. The largest risk pool we could have is every person in the United States. Single Payer puts everyone in the same risk pool, and thus is most cost effective for all of us.

Now you might say we need competition in insurance products, and normally, this would be true. There is a special problem in health care in the US. Health providers are not allowed to turn away sick patients, even if they can’t pay. They do this anyway, but they are tricky about it, and they violate the whole purpose of this law.

Now who pays for uncompensated care? The public is supposed to. Government pays for the health care of poor people, and elderly people and disabled people. Government is also supposed to pay for care when the uncompensated care in a hospital or clinic is higher than for most hospitals.

That pays for part of uncompensated care. The rest is supposed to come by charging private insurers a little more than they otherwise would in order to make up for the losses for unpaid care. This is called cost-shifting. However, if you are clever, you will notice that this means we all (the entire population of the US) pay for all care provided in the US.

This means we should all be in the same risk pool. However, if you allow private insurance, then you are essentially allowing insurance companies to pick out the healthiest people to insure, and forcing the public to pay for the sick people. I.e., we are guaranteeing a profit to private insurers. And what do we get in return? We’re supposed to get a savings, but since we pay for all care, anyway, there is no savings, overall. There is merely cost shifting from poor people to rich people.

This creates enormous inefficiencies, and drives health care costs up higher that they should be. With single payer, we eliminate cost shifting, and gaming the system, and a significant portion of administrative costs. Single-payer helps us all pay less—enough so that we will all see savings if we switch to a single risk pool for the US.

Well, almost everybody. The health insurers will lose out, since they will no longer be guaranteed a profit for selecting the healthiest people to insure. But why do we need them to do that? What benefit does it provide us? We don’t save money. What’s the point?

@daloon I totally agree with you on this. I am actually surprised at how many people on this site are in favor of single payer. Most people seem afraid of the government regardless of if they could do a better job than private insurers

I wish everyone in America could read what @daloon just wrote. That was the clearest explanation of the benefits of single payer I’ve ever seen. Bravo.