quicker to start from scratch
In my view Medicare for all would be a viable path but even the Democrats are not interested in tackling healthcare.
The government simply takes ownership of UHC and they get a new charter to run it like the Postal Service.
I blame this on Louis DeJoy, who was appointed Postmaster General in May 2020, and has numerous conflicts of interest.
Most inefficiency is completely non-partisan.
Hell, I’d be ok with leeches making a comeback if it meant I didn’t have to pay a copay on top of a premium.
And to the larger question, which I hear all the time, what does “starting from scratch” even mean when it comes to ongoing health care?
You can’t seriously argue that we should risk medication interruptions so your friend loses her dad to his heart condition so we can somehow “start over?”
We need a smooth transition to a more sustainable system with incentives aligned to customers and not investors in one scenario, single payer in another, or some other working idea to continue to provide care while reducing the insane profits and aligning health and well being of patients, as well as the health and well being of the people providing it, with the actual service delivery again.
Burning everything down could kill a lot of people. I think this position is actually not particularly compassionate.
Health insurance is good, as long as it remains actually insurance - that is, risk pooling. Over the past few decades, "health insurance" transformed into "healthcare subsidization" - which caused costs (and complexity, and fraud, and many other bad things) to skyrocket. Insurance should not be used for routine doctor visits - it should literally be "insurance" against catastrophic events like getting your spine broken.
The combination between pricing that is completely invisible to the buyer (which you mentioned) and "insurance" that is really just spreading costs around (instead of risk pooling) is one of the biggest reasons why healthcare is so expensive. If the price for a CPAP machine was as transparent as that of an iPhone, and you had to pay 100% out-of-pocket (because sleep apnea is not a catastrophic event and your insurance wouldn't cover it), then we'd very quickly see the prices of CPAP machines plummet (as well as every other piece of medical equipment and procedure) because of how price-sensitive consumers are, and because now they'd have the ability to use that price-sensitivity.
How would you even do that? You need nurses and doctors and buildings and training.
The lead time is decades and the cost incredible.
Best start now guess.
> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works