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King Beauregard 👂's avatar

I don't object to both in principle, but:

1) I am like the only person out there talking about how we need to regulate medical providers directly. Check out the various single payer proposals, and see if you can find ANYWHERE that they talk about the need to put our medical providers on a controlled diet. You won't find even a trace of that. In fact, what you will find is a lot of tacit acknowledgement that single payer is going to be hella expensive, but we will manage to fund it somehow ... which is a far cry from the claims of 2015-2016, when single payer was going to be dirt cheap. Which leads to ...

2) Until we bring medical costs down, single payer is going to have major cost problems that will jeopardize its viability. If you want a single payer program that works, drive costs down first. This will have the additional benefit of making things cheaper even under private insurance, because one stipulation of Obamacare is that, as medical costs go down, premiums go down too.

Single payer can't make the changes to medical providers we need, because single payer's only mechanism for changing medical providers is to underpay whoever submits the bill. So, what happens when single payer underpays doctors who are being strangled by student loans and malpractice insurance? What happens when a hospital buys a drug from Big Pharma and single payer will reimburse only a fraction of what the hospital paid? Single payer is a completely inadequate way to bring medical costs in line, which leads me to repeat my previous question:

Are we so in love with single payer that we insist on ramming single payer through, even if it doesn't significantly improve things? Because that's the course we've chosen.

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Perry made me do it Jesterpunk's avatar

I do too, we could even build from the ACA to M4A over time. It is much easier to build on an existing successful platform then it is to nuke everything from orbit and start over from scratch.

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