| Certainly, and I am in full agreement with you on pretty much everything you said. I'm ranting against those who continually tell me "it's not that bad", "suck it up", "you're lucky you have insurance" or some variation of the above. The first step in fixing the problem is to recognize the problem, and there's many I've talked with that reflexively reject the premise that there is a problem in the first place because of what that means for the ACA. The foundational issue is that we're stuck in an uncanny valley between single payer and private insurance. Either single payer or private could be viable, but not the unholy menagerie we have now. The high costs, over prescription and under prevention that are bloating the system all driven by that issue and could be solved with a single arbiter that gets the bill, whether that be the government or the citizen. The best proposal I've seen is a two-tier system like Germany has, with public healthcare for all and private healthcare available for the rich. That tends to rub Americans the wrong way because fairness, but really solves most of the problems because it gets universal coverage to spread the risk pool while accepting the natural impulse to want to pay for better care if you can rather than rejecting that option out of hand like some single payer systems do. |
I lol'ed. Because... we already have private healthcare for the rich, we just don't have public healthcare for all. Because fairness ;)
And I'm very much enamored with the German system as well, but then, I'm biased. I'm from there. (And currently pondering going back there, because as much as I love what the US could be, I hate what it currently is)