You haven't had much experience with governments if you think a national health service is going to treat people with dignity and humanity.
If where you live has a bad healthcare system or ineffective government, you need to look at the local conditions and please don't generalise. Maybe a positive attitude that government (which is after all, us) can be a force of good would be a good start.
Presumably, since the context is US healthcare, maybe the commenter meant "governments" inside the US. At the least, it's not worth assuming they meant every government everywhere for all time given the context. Please don't generalize.
> Maybe a positive attitude that government (which is after all, us) can be a force of good would be a good start.
Amusing that such a general statement about government follows a statement about not making general statements about government. Experiences and governments vary wildly. Benefits of support/trust attitudes versus the opposite also vary wildly with differing levels of success.
I have, and in all 3 cases, I've seen exceptional care from professional doctors, nurses and support staff delivered with dignity, humanity and care.
Your statement is pure ideology.
All i can say is you are wildly off base, we're putting my dad on an international flight to save him 200k on treatment costs (immunotherapy). Same shit, different system, fully funded and no out of pocket cost compared to the us of a.
Keep your system, its failing.
In Canada, by contrast, the doctors and hospitals tend to be private. The government pays, and sets price schedules, but they don't directly control care.
It's obviously a bit more complicated than that, but the public system sounds much less centralized than your VA health system.
However, the jump from that to asserting that it's the "public" part of that statement that leads to the "terrible" part is a huge one, and frankly not in evidence.
We've already got at least a Medicaid system by state, federal Medicare, and federal VA. Are any of these non-terrible? Is there any realistic reform towards making them non-terrible? Is it realistically feasible to scale any of the non-terrible ones up to service the whole US population?
Certainly, it's possible for a government run healthcare system to not be terrible (or at least, mostly not terrible; any healthcare system has to make some hard choices at times, and people don't usually like it when they're the hard choice), and I'm sure you can find examples of that; but it doesn't seem possible with the governments the US has.
I'm not convinced that it isn't possible to scale up to the entire US population in a way that doesn't suck, but you could be right. To work well it would certainly involve systemic change across the healthcare industry, and some current players would be hurt. Perhaps it's not politically feasible in the US, but if so that is a pretty damning indictment of the state of things.
Hmmm, it sounds more like a terrible implementation, whereas some of the other implementations are generally decent?
Knowing what I know of the VA and my former service roommate’s experiences with them, I can’t really blame people for thinking any such system run by our government expanded to more people would never be efficient or better. Something something better the devil you know...
Occasionally people look into replacing it with something else, but it never goes anywhere because it just works even in the US.
Why, was their something specific you wanted to know? Or was that a low effort attack?
That's what I thought.
The powers are entrenched and voting does little to change anything in government anymore.
We don't have a free market health care system anyway, it's a hodgepodge of regulation and absurdity today. Making it single payer would simplify that situation, but claiming it would add dignity to the process is just uninformed.
I agree with you there in the context of the US. What desperately needs changing is campaign finance. Lobbying, Citizens United, etc has completely ruined politics in the US.