You have to love idealistic students. Medical students in California, working with a prominent legislator, are pushing for a state-run single-payer system that would end the health insurance industry’s role in the system.
The students have a solid case, but single payer will never succeed in the US.
The insurance industry, medical providers, politicians, employers, and libertarian-leaning polis just won’t have it. That isn’t stopping the students or bill sponsor Sheila Keuhl, who has been a tireless advocate of single payer.
These irresistable forces make it much more likely that a hybrid system, rather than a monolithic one, will be the one we end up with.
The best answer I’ve seen so far is Sen. Ron Wyden’s Healthy Americans Act.
Never say never, baby! The only thing preventing single payer will be the health care industry’s decision to compromise (before we have a 1930s style crisis in health care) overwhelming the total greed. Given its track record for the last 80 years, I’m not so sure I see this compromise coming.
I’m with Matthew.
I can imagine Southerners in the 1950s saying that there would always be apartheid in the American South. Or whatever it was that they called it.
Successful viruses don’t kill their host. The insurance industry is digging its own grave by killing their host.
The incentives in the U.S. healthcare system are all wrong for cost-effectiveness, quality, or access.
We may not have reached the tipping point yet, but as more and more middle-class Americans discover that their policies are worthless; that their children can’t afford coverage; that their brother can’t get coverage — we’re closing in on it.
Americans always knew that the system was killing other people. Maybe undeserving people who had brought it on themselves? Now that more of us have experienced it killing our own, it’s harder to buy the idea that it’s the best in the world with a few problems.
It’s unsustainable, and as long as incremental change incorporates its basic unsustainable structure we’re throwing good money after bad.