Here's why you don't like Medicare-For-All, why it can't work and so on.

[vision63]

Everybody wants single payer. Broadly presented, everybody likes the concept. When the elimination of private insurance and tax increases are included, support plummets. It will be impossible in this country to take something away from someone in order to replace it with something that "may" be better.

With the public option, anyone could choose that route. If it provides a reasonable substitute, then either private insurers would have to be competitive or just lose the business.

The song said "Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes. How do you measure, measure a year?"

Why waste a minute of it on fruitlessness?

[AllGold]

Acer wrote:
I fail to see how government could do it worse than the way health care insurance and billing is done now. Copays, coinsurance, deductibles, family limits, negotiated discounts, denied/allowed procedures, pre-approval requirements, drug formularies, one procedure generating bills from multiple providers and a partridge in a pear tree. THIS is the system we think is a capitalist dream?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the government would do it worse but have you seen any of the behind-the-scenes nuts and bolts of Medicare and Obamacare? There is some spectacularly complicated stuff there.

[pdq]

I’m with Vision and Dennis S. Give us a public option in the exchanges, make it revenue-neutral (ie, premiums + standard subsidies needs to cover expenditures, just like the private plans), and see how it flies. I tend to think over time that would move us toward a public health care system.

[deckeda]

AllGold wrote:
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the government would do it worse but have you seen any of the behind-the-scenes nuts and bolts of Medicare and Obamacare? There is some spectacularly complicated stuff there.

Absolutely. And so?

You’re seeing the sausage of necessary workarounds and political compromises (read: sabotage) made just in order to get it to exist at all.

It can be improved because at its fundamental core, it’s an old and sound idea. Just not one invented in ‘Merica.

[vision63]

Things our government still needs to work on.

1. Departments of Motor Vehicles
2. Stopping spam and robocalls
3. You ever walk into a Social Services office? That.
4. Can't stop guns
5. Can't stop drugs
6. County Hospitals.
7. Can't stop Republicans. They're not going anywhere.

I'll stop there.

[Ca Bob]

If we get Medicare for all who want it (ie: the public option) then every year, there will be a migration of people who have lost their insurance (by losing a job, for instance) into the public option. The fact that the public option is always there and can't be taken away from you makes it the obvious choice, particularly if the premiums and payouts are better than you can get in the private sector. The predictable result would be that most small companies will stop providing insurance because their employees will go to the public option. The medium term result is that private insurance will dwindle as part of the economy.

And what of all those people who used to work in the insurance industry? Some of the money that went to pay their salaries will be generated through taxes, and some of that will go to pay salaries as workers migrate into more productive sections of the medical economy. For example, we are in need of people to provide care to the elderly and child care workers.

But yes, there would be some unavoidable unemployment, particularly of a temporary kind, just as there have been losses in coal mining and in steel mills. If we were being rational, we would be creating the solar energy industry on a large scale, and this will create millions of jobs of all kinds.