Single payer health care is a public-private partnership

[eridani]

Publicly funded; privately delivered. We have a different private sector than all the incremental plans proposed, though. Our private businesses provide health care; in the other proposed private-public partnerships, the private part includes businesses which exist to prevent as much access to actual care as possible.

[Lasher]

1. And the private sector argument is falling into ill repute.

Contrary to Republican ideology, everything actually doesn't work better in the private sector.

[eridani]

4. All I meant is that single payer does not mean that providers will be government employees

--any more than the contractors who built the Interstate Highway System were government employees.

[scisyhp1]

5. So what if they are government employees?

Maybe even they should be government employees. The soldiers, sailors and marines
certainly are. Maybe they will argee to work for less and save us all a lot of money
in exchange for employment security and a good pension plan? What would be so wrong
with that?

[eridani]

7. Too much hassle

Leave the delivery of care as it is for now. If we want more government clinics and hospitals like VA, we can deal with that later. The important thing is to divert the health care money we are now spending to actual care.

[Lasher]

8. I got your point and it's a good one.

Just wanted to add a caveat.

[patrice]

2. Could you explain this for me a little bit more, please?

I'm kind of new to the issue and trying to get up to speed (with a local group, based in one of our regional (teaching) medical centers, who is working on this AND have taken a strong stand for Single Payer).

[eridani]

3. Best information is at Physicians for National Health Care

http://www.pnhp.org/

The idea is to put everybody in one big risk pool. Funding will be from the same sources it is from now, but none will go through private insurance. Delivery would be our current delivery system, with free choice of providers.

[knixphan]

6. thanks for that link-

[Greyhound]

9. One thing that is not mentioned when talking about this plan is that after

30 years of our formerly mixed delivery system being given to and destroyed by the health care denial industry is that, no matter what plan is adopted, we will have to invest a considerable sum in rebuilding capacity. What's left of our system simply does not have the capacity to absorb another 50 - 70 million users.

Qualifier; I am one of the earliest promoters of HR. 676 here. This is not to equivocate on single payer universal health care, but to point out that the system is even more broken than most imagine.

[eridani]

10. In many respects we have overcapacity. The undercapacity is in the area

--of general practice physicians and nurses.