Comment on "No precedent in American history!" NYT would have defended child labor.

oce@jlai.lu ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• blueduck@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Here’s a gift link to the 2019 article.

  the early part of the article is about change management. It WOULD be highly disruptive to a large part of the economy:

  But doing away with an entire industry would also be profoundly disruptive. The private health insurance business employs at least a half a million people, covers about 250 million Americans, and generates roughly a trillion dollars in revenues. Its companies’ stocks are a staple of the mutual funds that make up millions of Americans’ retirement savings.

  Such a change would shake the entire health care system, which makes up a fifth of the United States economy, as hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies would have to adapt to a new set of rules. Most Americans would have a new insurer — the federal government — and many would find the health insurance stocks in their retirement portfolios much less valuable.

  But removing the industry that increases costs and extracts rents (to benefit investors and creates worse healthcare outcomes) is kind of the Point…

  Many supporters of this approach see elimination of private insurance as a key feature, not a bug, meant to improve the program’s efficiency and equity by streamlining the health care system and weakening profit motives. With a single insurer covering every patient, hospitals and doctors could spend less time and money complying with differing policies, negotiating contracts, and filing forms to get paid.

  “It’s worth it,” said Adam Gaffney, the president of Physicians for a National Health Program, which supports single-payer health care and helped design Ms. Jayapal’s bill. “Because we are not going to get to true universal health care without the greater efficiency of a single-payer system.”

  I think the commentary is fair throughout the first half of the article… but then there’s some real lack of critical thinking (emphasis added):

  Their plans would include nearly every doctor and hospital in the United States and provide generous benefits, including dental care and hearing aids, and would not require patients to pay any out-of-pocket cost to see a doctor. The federal government, of course, would have to cover those benefits, and would need to raise taxes to pay for them.

  “Raising taxes” is present as a boogeyman here… taxes bad (they do poll poorly in general) but the key advantage of a single payer system is less bureaucracy (I don’t have n-teams to support doing the same job differently) and more streamlined rules. I don’t have to have more administrators than medical providers in hospital systems. They can focus on care instead of negotiating prices

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  • rhymeswithduck@sh.itjust.works ⁨56⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    Private insurance employs 2x the number of people covered by the insurance?? Wow, wtf. No wonder it’s expensive. Your premiums are basically paying someone’s entire salary.

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  • oce@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Thank you for providing the link and quotes!

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• queeradjacent@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I’m curious as well. It just states a fact (well, it would abolish a lot of private insurance but not all, headlines aren’t always perfect), why is the assumption in the comments that it is somehow in favor of private insurance?

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