[themolecularman]

To be fair America has the Veterans Affairs administration, which is socialized medicine, albeit for a small subset of the population, veterans.

If you recall from Donald Trump's presidency, one of the things he campaigned on for veterans, is the ability to choose your own healthcare, such that they wouldn't be locked into the veterans affairs medical system, which was found to be far insufficient.

This isn't an apples to apples but it's worth considering that there are examples of the alternative model not working in America either.

[jodison]

I, like many veterans, love the VA. https://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel/pressrelease.cfm?id=5328

My understanding is that that the veterans' choice private options would still have been payed for by the VA.

https://www.va.gov/COMMUNITYCARE/providers/index.asp https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpomete...

[Sohcahtoa82]

> one of the things he campaigned on for veterans, is the ability to choose your own healthcare

Veterans can already do that.

> such that they wouldn't be locked into the veterans affairs medical system, which was found to be far insufficient.

They aren't locked into the VA, and whether or not the VA is sufficient depends on who you ask.

Veterans already have the choice of choosing their own healthcare or using the VA. If the VA is considered insufficient, but they're using it anyways, then that means that their other choices are even worse.

Don't be fooled. Republicans want to gut the VA as a way to cut spending so they can give the rich even more tax cuts. They will happily do this at the cost of healthcare for veterans while framing it as expanding freedom by giving them a choice that they already had.

[dragonwriter]

> To be fair America has the Veterans Affairs administration, which is socialized medicine, albeit for a small subset of the population, veterans.

It also has TriCare (military & dependents, ~10M), Medicare (Aged/Disabled, 61.2M in 2020), and Medicaid (medically indigent, 68M in 2020). With around 9M in Veteran Health Administration, the US has socialized medicine for nearly 150M people out of the 330M population.

[jdmichal]

Medicare and Medicaid are not exclusive. They call it "dual eligible".

(PDF WARNING) https://www.cms.gov/Medicare-Medicaid-Coordination/Medicare-...

This lists 20% of Medicare and 15% of Medicaid enrolled are dual eligible. So that's somewhere between 10.2 and 12.2 million lower, using your numbers.

(And yes, those numbers are obviously off somewhere, since the two should match. But it's good enough and I'm not sure it's even possible to track down the actual numbers used in the given link.)

[dragonwriter]

> Medicare and Medicaid are not exclusive. They call it "dual eligible".

Good call. Forgot to consider dual eligibles; which drops it closer to 1/3 the population than half with socialized medicine.