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Americans - would you support single-payer?

Would you support a single payer system in the US?

  • Total voters
    108
Checkerboard Strangler said:
To put a fine point on it, one of the reasons so many car manufacturers moved operations to Canadian plants is because taxes covered healthcare for the auto workers whereas in the USA the car company has to cover worker healthcare policies.
Same reason for moving operations to Mexico, not that Mexican healthcare is necessarily always stellar, but the car companies aren't on the hook for paying for worker healthcare down there either.
And Mexico's system is sorta kinda a single payer system...about 70 percent of Mexicans are covered by their public healthcare system.

If you want more heavy manufacturing to come back to the USA with good stable high paying jobs to go with it, you have to allow yourself to consider single payer.
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Would bet that Canada and Mexico have less people who have to call out sick, also.

“Preventative medicine is actually a pretty good idea,” she said facetiously.
 
Captain Adverse said:
Emotional appeal...denied. (n)

I will choose what to do with my resources as I see fit. If I can help a person I can see in real need, I will. That is real, it is in front of me, and I can act as needed.

But when it comes to the great mass of humanity and creating social safety nets, all I have seen is people in power using those funds for their own purposes and goals.

Buying power with giveaways using other people's money.

That's my last word on the subject. Feel free to have yours... :coffee:
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So step away from the VA.
 
trouble13 said:
It depends on who the single payer is that is going to pay for everyone's healthcare 😁
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We all should be supporting with our taxes single payer health care for all. Instead it goes to corporations for tax breaks. We are currently subsidizing the giant corporations and the very very wealthy instead of helping each other stay healthy and have healthy kids. Is that a sane way to use taxes?
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
To put a fine point on it, one of the reasons so many car manufacturers moved operations to Canadian plants is because taxes covered healthcare for the auto workers whereas in the USA the car company has to cover worker healthcare policies.
Same reason for moving operations to Mexico, not that Mexican healthcare is necessarily always stellar, but the car companies aren't on the hook for paying for worker healthcare down there either.
And Mexico's system is sorta kinda a single payer system...about 70 percent of Mexicans are covered by their public healthcare system.

If you want more heavy manufacturing to come back to the USA with good stable high paying jobs to go with it, you have to allow yourself to consider single payer.
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It's worth several dollars an hour in savings to manufacture in Canada.

The Big Three Automakers Push For Single Payer! – Healthcare-NOW

www.healthcare-now.org www.healthcare-now.org
 
Stealers Wheel said:
You would do away with Medicare, arguably the most efficient and beneficial government program in history, which has given healthcare access to millions and millions of Americans. And Medicare exists today because way back in the 1950s some very smart people realized that health insurance companies had no interest in marketing to a bunch of old people who tended to suck up a lot of resources by getting sick.

Seniors as a group tend to be of lower income in their later years and you would strip them of even that if they refused to die.

The entire industrialized world treats healthcare like infrastructure while we treat it like any other commodity. If you can't afford healthcare **** off and die!
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Dick Lamm, is that you?
 
Captain Adverse said:
I don't have an opinion one way or the other. I've rarely had need of medical assistance, mostly (IMO) because I don't have a lot of "vices" that lead to poor health.

1. I don't smoke. (Nothing, so don't ask if that includes "preferred drugs").

2. I don't drink alcohol of any kind. To be honest it all tastes terrible, and if it tastes bad I figured it's not that good for you.

3. I avoid foods that are full of processed sugars (no candy, no confections, and no soft drinks).

4. I don't do any "recreational drugs."

I have annual physicals at the V.A. and pass them all with flying colors. That is literally the only "medical visits" I've had in decades.

I am not sure I support massive government programs of most kinds, but especially those that give people a false sense of security allowing them to think they can "party on," and someone will come take care of them.
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You, Captain Adverse, an admitted beneficiary of a government healthcare program called the VA and you would deny others the same. How very noble of you. You've got yours, so the rest of us can just **** off and die.
 
Superfly said:
A guy who used to work for me had a stroke waiting in the hallway for a bed at the Memphis VA. He ended up pretty ****ed up because they didn’t get to him in time.

I’ve never personally been there so I can’t speak for them, but my one bad instance with a VA is Huntsville, Alabama.
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I have zero knowledge about Huntsville but the first two and a half years Karen and I were together in Jonesboro Arkansas we could pick Little Rock or Memphis and Little Rock was easily two and a half hours each way whereas Memphis was about 45 minutes.
Memphis did absolutely NOTHING for Karen. They would see her, do the Twenty Questions, poke her with needles and say "Come back in six months" and when the six months came around it was a different doctor who would start completely over again, Twenty Questions, poke and prod, lather, rinse, repeat.

I don't know WHY Memphis' VA is so incorrigibly awful but the ratings have never gone above one star according to the VA's own internal accounting.

Most all of the other facilities have decent ratings but if you say Huntsville sucks, I take your word for it.
Dallas and Long Beach CA are both excellent although Long Beach is currently suffering from staffing shortages thanks to congressional football with the budgets but a lot of that goes all the way back to ****ing Gingrich who flipped the playbook between discretionary and non-discretionary spending a full 180 so that plant maintenance, construction and remodeling are NON-discretionary and actual HEALTH CARE BUDGETS (that pay for doctors, equipment, nurses, technicians, drugs and research) is discretionary.
Yes, you're thinking what I am thinking, it should be the OTHER WAY AROUND.

So what we now have is a big ****ing JOBS PROGRAM for construction contractors and tons of VA facilities with new buildings, gardens, walkways, atriums, grand pianos in lobbies (locked to prevent being played) and art on the walls, but a shortage of doctors unless the patient complaints where they then send them to the outside world.
It works JUST LIKE charter schools, draining the VA while enriching private practice.

Republicans do not give two shits about serving veterans and it shows.
Dallas and Long Beach do a great job DESPITE all this.
And it shows.
 
Captain Adverse said:
Emotional appeal...denied. (n)
I will choose what to do with my resources as I see fit. If I can help a person I can see in real need, I will. That is real, it is in front of me, and I can act as needed.
But when it comes to the great mass of humanity and creating social safety nets, all I have seen is people in power using those funds for their own purposes and goals.
Buying power with giveaways using other people's money.
That's my last word on the subject. Feel free to have yours... :coffee:
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That was a forceful, well thought out, heartfelt, definitive statement of libertarian passion.



And I hope and pray that your VA healthcare gets irrevocably stripped from you first chance it is possible to do so.
I hope and pray that they give you a heartfelt "THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE" and a check for a thousand bucks and a ticket to the outside world of for profit medicine.
 
Allan said:
Just a temperature check on how Americans feel about single-payer universal health care.
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ONLY with a mandatory balanced Federal budget.
 
Stealers Wheel said:
You, Captain Adverse, an admitted beneficiary of a government healthcare program called the VA and you would deny others the same. How very noble of you. You've got yours, so the rest of us can just **** off and die.
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Exactly. I've seen this attitude so many times from so many Republicans.

Greed and selfishness, hand in hand.
 
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Pyrite said:
Exactly.

Greed and selfishness, hand in hand.
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My father-in-law is the same way. He has not worked a day since he retired from the Air Force in his early 40s. He's now 90, recently had open heart surgery with zero out of pocket for him, all courtesy of the VA and the rest of American taxpayers. And he is absolutely against anyone getting universal healthcare.
 
Allan said:
Why is that a precondition for UHC but no other program?
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In fairness, the likelihood that Republicans would insist on under-resourcing the health care system is a legitimate reason to be wary of single-payer. Certainly it's not hard to find examples where making all health care resource allocation a political decision has led to unfortunate results.
 
Captain Adverse said:
I've been in accidents. I just deal with it. That's what savings and personal insurance (like I have for my car) are for.

We are born, we live, and we eventually die. That's life.

If life meant for everything to have a "safety blanket" you might have a point.

But that's not how it is, and I am not going to go all "socialist" just to make you feel all comfy and secure.

Take your hand out of MY pocket! :coffee:
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It doesn't get any more blatantly shortsighted, ignorant, and brutal than that. You do realize you are already paying for the care of people you don't want to support. You pay for the for the poor kids that end up jobless, addicted and homeless because we saved tax money by not funding decent schools schools or livable neighborhoods. You pay for the welfare of the parents because we saved our tax money by not providing municipal transportation to decent jobs, we saved money by eliminating state funding for state colleges and universities so that many middle class kids can't afford college. We pay for the the food stamps, the municipal homeless shelters, the crime, the jails, the foster care, the lost income of people with poor education, poor health.

The hand is already in your pocket and it isn't a needy hand.

Our tax system is supporting multinational corporations and not our own citizens.
 
Allan said:
Why is that a precondition for UHC but no other program?
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Just staying on topic.
But, IMO, it should be a precondition for ANY new Federal program spending.
 
I honestly don’t get why anyone who isn’t raking in millions of dollars from the current system would support it.

The whole purpose of it being private is that it’s supposed to be more efficient. But efficient here means getting what you pay for, we have one of the least efficient healthcare systems of any country on Earth.

Shouldn’t we stick up for each other? What’s so wrong about that? I don’t have diabetes, personally, but I want to help negotiate insulin prices down for those who do.

When you pay a massive ER bill, how much of that actually goes to the things that gave you care? When you pay $1000 for an ambulance, does that go to the EMTs? The EMTs and doctors and PAs and nurses are all facing competition to keep their share within reasonable bounds, but the hospital owners and healthcare insurers and pharmaceutical companies do not.

The days of being able to opt out of healthcare are gone. Society either pays to save the dying, or we let them die. Conservatives think they can play some stupid game where we save the dying but pretend we aren’t paying for it- we are, we’re actually paying dearly for it because preventative medicine is so much more efficient.
 
Pyrite said:
Exactly.

Greed and selfishness, hand in hand.
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And ignorance of how the rest of us manage.

In 2022, I was informed I needed emergency surgery ($100,000) to avoid becoming a quadriplegic. My out of pocket costs were around $10,000. And I was laid up recovering for 3 months, which means that I took a 25% hit on my annual wages. Had to dip into retirement savings to make ends meet. I recovered and returned to work.

My father-in-law had no idea the costs were that high. He was genuinely surprised that I was not eligible for 'unemployment' benefits with my surgical recovery. If it weren't for FMLA, I may have lost my job.

Still, he sees no reason why the current healthcare situation in America should change.
 
Bullseye said:
I'd put more faith in them that US Congress.
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Perhaps you should compare Exxon's brutal killings, land takings, pollution, environmental destruction, oil spills, outright flaunting of laws, illegal treatment of indigenous people, tax evasion, illegal financial manipulation of smaller countries monetary system to how Social Security or Medicare work systems work.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
Medicare is single payer.

In Medicare the doctors you see, the clinics you go to, the procedures you have done and the hospitals you are admitted to are all private practice.
It's just that Uncle Sam is the payor and they are the payees.

VA is pure socialized medicine, it is LITERALLY "the government in the healthcare business".
A VA hospital is Federal Government property and the VA doctors are Federal Government employees.

So you see, the two are very very different.
Medicare is "sorta kinda like" Canadian healthcare whereas the VA is sorta kinda like the British National Health Service.
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Agreed. My larger point in these discussions is that we do have national health care, albeit in several forms.
 
Captain Adverse said:
I've been in accidents. I just deal with it. That's what savings and personal insurance (like I have for my car) are for.

We are born, we live, and we eventually die. That's life.

If life meant for everything to have a "safety blanket" you might have a point.

But that's not how it is, and I am not going to go all "socialist" just to make you feel all comfy and secure.

Take your hand out of MY pocket! :coffee:
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Translation: I've got mine, so **** off and die!
 
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