Re:People Lose Their Employer-Sponsored Insurance Constantly
by munk-a on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @02:13PM
(#19685025)
It might be hard to find... unless you take a gander up north, Canadian public health care is a recent thing and the transition was flow and began with regional efforts. This[1] is a nice little rough timeline of things that happened. And, to be honest, it's not done yet, Canada lacks national pharma coverage (most places having provincial coverage of a sort) and entirely lacks dental & vision coverage, the later is a bit arguable but poor dental care has been strongly linked to heart disease.
[1] https://www.healthcoalition.ca/tools-and-resources/history-o...
Re:People Lose Their Employer-Sponsored Insurance Constantly
by dv_dt on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @02:01PM
(#19684915)
Medicare for all plans a two year transition. There are already mechanisms to expand to set payment costs for procedures in Medicare. We would have to extend those to cover a system of setting fairer prices for drugs - as medicare is legally prohibited from negotiating drug prices currently. That's a legal precedent, not a cultural one.
But basically, future history begins today. I don't see why because we historically have an ineffective system, we shouldn't strive to build a working system.
One worrying thing about single-payer healthcare in America is that we can look at other countries with a _rich history_ of single-payer healthcare from before the modern era [0] and see that they have developed efficient public healthcare systems, but it does not follow that our system, with its similarly rich history of for-profit entities developing methods to thrive in the weird world of American health insurance, can be immediately brought to a level of cost efficiency that is comparable. Consider, for instance, how much ownership of the healthcare space is held by private equity firms in the U.S. I'd love to see a great transition plan towards single payer, but it would need to be one that takes into account that the operators have no inherent incentive to reduce costs.
[0] http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/96410/E7...