This world map of single payer healthcare systems is seven years old, it is now bluer and greener. It also puts America healthcare on par with all of Africa, most all of the Muslim and Hindu world, Columbia, and not to forget Greenland and Antarctica.
No matter it be Trumpcare, Ryancare or Obamacare every single time such plans are reported it should be a requirement for the media or a Democrat to respond with a short, sweet, simple, easy to understand explanation of what a “Single Payer” system is. Each and every time. For a generation polls show that most Americans want it. Get that up to about 60% of voters and it can be done.
“Single Payer” means each person has a payroll tax deducted from their pay check, just like Social Security to which each person gets basic health care. Like giving everyone a Medicare card.
The deduction for a single payer system would be somewhere between 5% and 10% of income which would give everyone coverage for Wellness [prevention], catastrophic, pre existing condition, hospital, drugs and keep us from health care bankruptcy. It will cost the nation and the individual less with much better outcomes. In fact employers who now give health care to their employees could pay the payroll tax for them. Or if not, raise their salaries by the amount they pay to insurance companies now. It is win, win, win. A win for the people, a win for the employers and a win for the nation.
Most every civilized nation in the world uses some form or hybrid of a “single payer” system that they all enjoy and believe in. Most all use existing private health insurance companies to run the system in “non profit” mode. They make up for that loss in profit in supplemental and HMO insurance plans which will become bigly huge when most people buy such plans to round out the bare bones of a universal plan.
[Example: Today most everyone on Medicare pays out $120 a month for Plan B deducted from their Social Security checks. Insurance companies offer HMO plans that take that already paid $120 a month and pay for copays, most drugs, many other benefits and still make a profit. Though it must be said that these HMOs are very dependent on where one lives. Here in Houston my CIGNA HMO happens to cover all my doctors and all my hospitals. In Bodunk, Nowhere it is a different story.]
We should not be fighting over who is covered and “socialism” [which really means “civilization”] versus free market ideology, but how much the payroll tax will be and what is covered.
It is the right, the moral and the Christian thing to do.
But there are three elephants in the doctor’s office that presently keep it from happening.
- The American Republican Party who put free market ideology and their wallets above people’s lives.
- That the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are so powerful they will not allow it. If that is the case it is full admission that we do not live in a democracy but in an oligarchy. Which is the real bottom line of Republican politics.
- And of course the thing that has been haunting America for centuries, I DON’T WANT MY TAX MONEY GOING TO THOSE LAZY BUMS DOWNTOWN. You know, the code words.
I think this is what so depressed Democrats with the loss last November. We thought we would be in control of the White House, the Senate and the Supreme court for eight years and would follow the rest of the world to become civilized in this matter. Because just Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare, once it’s in it stays in.