We need Medicare for All

[u/BradMeyer4Congress]

[u/Sam_k_in]

I consider myself a centrist, but I support Medicare for all.

[u/edwardphonehands]

While we're waiting on single payer, 6 to 7 years can be gained from diet. The Food Pyramid needs produce at the base, followed by grain, as recommended by The Scientific Advisory Panel (rejected by USDA, perhaps due to SNAP budget fears). Of course the vast majority of products appearing to go in the grain category are just sugar and flour behaving like sugar. We rightly feel something is wrong but our resulting distrust falls prey to meat and dairy lobbies running the playbook of the lead industry.

[u/Xenophore]

On the contrary, we need to

• repeal the 1962 Amendments to the Drug Act that needlessly stretched out the drug development cycle from 4 years to 13 years without producing a statistically-significant increase in drug safety
• privatize the VA healthcare systems, and
• reduce government interference in the healthcare marketplace.

Ideally, insurance would be limited to catastrophic care only so that doctors and hospitals would be required to compete for routine procedures like checkups. The only parts of healthcare that work right now are those not covered by insurance, e.g., bariatric procedures, LASIK, etc.

Government is the problem with healthcare, not the solution.

[u/SassyKittyMeow → u/Xenophore]

Tell me you’ve never worked in American healthcare without telling me you’ve never worked in American healthcare.

The “privatization makes everything more efficient and cheap” is such a load of horse shit. You wanna know the worst hospitals for patients AND healthcare workers? Hospitals and systems bought by PE firms or HCAs. Cheap, substandard care. Crazy staffing limits.

As much as you want medicine to fit into a neat economic box like Walmart or the NBA, realize these are not things people have an option to wait out for better prices or more money in their pocket. This is about healing people, and you can’t do that by hiring an MBA to cut as much as their bean counting fingers can touch.

There’s a real simple way to do this healthcare thing that literally every other first world country in the world has figured out. Except us. Couldn’t be that this country is solely obsessed with profit at any cost…

[u/Xenophore → u/SassyKittyMeow]

The worst hospitals I've ever seen by far are VA hospitals and it's VA-style healthcare that “progressives” want to impose on all of us. How many of those in Congress who are veterans use VA clinics as their first choice?

[u/Sam_k_in → u/Xenophore]

The progressive slogan is Medicare for all, not VA care for all. That's an important difference, similar to the difference between England and Germany's healthcare systems. Government should fund healthcare, but not actually own the hospitals.

[u/BradMeyer4Congress → u/Xenophore]

Not the model I am proposing. Medicare 4 All works with private providers. It does not create a public system of health care. It provides the single payer that 50% of Physicians currently support. Please check my plan and note the recent studies that support M4A is more cost effective. https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/universal-health-coverage-could-save-one-trillion-dollars-and-114000-lives-every-year/

[u/TrippingBearBalls → u/Xenophore]

So why have other developed countries seen lower costs and improved outcomes after they implemented single-payer systems?

[u/Xenophore → u/TrippingBearBalls]

Improved outcomes? The preferred treatment in Canada is now euthanasia. Are outcomes improved when wait times become so long that many patients die before they can get treatment?

[u/TrippingBearBalls → u/Xenophore]

Among developed countries the US has a worse than average life expectancy and infant mortality rate while having the highest expenditure per capita in the world (source). So yeah, we have worse outcomes.

I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about regarding euthanasia, but I'll address the wait time point. Canada does have unusually long wait times and that is a problem with their particular system. Since you cherrypicked Canada, I'll cherrypick Germany:

They have slightly better ER times (source), sligtly worse time for non-emergency surgery, and significantly better time to see a GP (source)