Only if you want to see government in charge of everyone's health care. We don't need to socialize health care to help the poor.
Administrating reimbursement is not placing the entity in charge of your health care, unless you're also saying that private insurers are in charge of your health care too. Is that what you believe? You can always vote legislators out if you don't like how they are in charge of your health care (not sure what you mean by this since all single payer does is socialize insurance, not health care). People on Medicare seem to like it more than people like private insurance. You can vote legislators out...you can't vote out insurance company Board Members or executives. And it doesn't matter what private insurance you go with, they
all have the same fundamental flaw; that they put their profits ahead of your needs. Medicare doesn't do that. So the people currently in control of your health care are not concerned with your health, only their profits and are wholly unaccountable to you.
Right. If you want to help the poor, insurance is a bad choice. We went over that.
No, we didn't. You said it, but just because you said something doesn't then mean that something you said makes any sense. Insurance
reduces costs because you pay into a premium pool instead of paying out of your own pocket. Most health care isn't something you can pay with using pocket change. It's naive and delusional to think it is.
Maybe so, but if the market remains free, and the statists don't succeed in taking it over with government, then I can find some other way to pay for my health care.
OK, so two things:
1. Now you're admitting health insurance companies put their profits above your needs. In which case, your health is under the "control" (using your words here) of a private company who is looking to profit at your expense by denying you care. This is a system you want to preserve, why? It doesn't improve outcomes. It doesn't make things cheaper. It puts more risk on you to not get sick, which in many cases isn't even something you can control because your genetics predispose you to things. You get that, right?
2. The market isn't free! You don't get to go to any doctor you want. You don't get to choose which drug you want. You only get to go to the doctors that contract with your insurance company, and you only get the drugs that your insurer decides to pay for. So if you have bipolar disorder, for instance, and your doctor prescribes you Lamictal, the insurer may only pay for the generic brand instead of the name brand, and if you take a peek at the bipolar support forums anywhere, you'd see there's a huge difference in side effects between the generic and name brand. You also don't have "free market" because you don't get to pick whatever doctor you want. So you say it's a "free market", but it's becoming crystal clear you don't even know what that means, or what you want it to mean. It's just an empty platitude meant to paper over the void in your argument from a lack of knowledge, specifics, or even understanding. There is no competition among providers for your care. The competition that exists is among insurers, which means providers have no incentives to improve outcomes. Don't you want your provider to produce the best outcome? How is that possible when they're not competing for your care? Wouldn't a true "free market" for health care be that you can go to any doctor you want, so as to get the best results? Can you do that now without first getting health insurance? No. So it's not "free market". It's not even close.
I don't have to 'vote him out' - I can just tell him to fly a kite. I can do that with government. I'm bound by what most voters think I should do. And, frankly, I don't want the majority in charge of my health care.
You can't tell the private insurer to go "fly a kite" because the same problem with that insurer exists for
any insurer. You get that, right? In all cases of private insurance, the needs of the profit margin outweigh the needs of the patient. In. Every. Case. And insurance companies aren't making these determinations based on medical needs or advisement from physicians, they're making these determinations purely on a bottom-line basis. So you are at the mercy of their profit margins. Doesn't that sound backwards to you?
Only if I can persuade the ignorant masses that it should happen. Again, I simply don't have that much confidence in democracy. Especially when it comes to something as personal and important as health care.
So this is the part where you have to not be lazy and be a more engaged citizen, which is universal of everyone. Want to know why you get such crappy representation? It's partly because of the people you vote for, but it's also because half of voters
don't vote. In a system where everyone voted (and we can certainly take steps to increase turnout), if you find yourself in the minority, it's probably a good reason. But those people can be voted out whereas insurance company executives who denied your care because they wanted to inch their profit margins up by a hundredth of a percent, cannot.
I don't really care about corporate profits one way or another. But I definitely don't want 'universal coverage'. Centralizing that much control under national government is a horrible idea, especially in the US.
First of all, universal coverage merely means everyone has access to health care. Secondly, what is the "control" you're talking about? You already conceded that insurance companies control your health care. You already conceded that insurance companies put their profits above your needs. I'm guessing you also are willing to concede that the actual function of an insurance company, to administrate reimbursement, isn't germane to how health care is delivered to you. So if you concede all three of those points, you should support single-payer. So what do you support? And don't say "free market" because that's just a platitude I've already deconstructed.
