3 ms·

As bad as some private insurance is; having friends and family who must seek care at the VA makes me want to run far far away from single payer. We have failed

As bad as some private insurance is; having friends and family who must seek care at the VA makes me want to run far far away from single payer. We have failed our members of the armed services, what makes you think we would do better for Joe & Jane Schmoe than we do for them? Larger organizations fester with waste and mismanagement the bigger they get, its simply a law of nature.

jernfrost 9y ago
That is not single payer though. They run the hospitals as far as I know, so it is more like socialized health care. I actually thought VA was good from what I've read/heard. Anyway a problem with a public option for the few is that there will be no political pressure to make it good. You see this in every country which offer public and private options, where the rich primarily chose private. The public option turns into crap because the very people who could have put heavy political pressure on the public option don't care. This is the experience we've had in Norway at least through history. If you want good public services, they need to be universal and apply to both rich and poor people. Means tested solutions only for the poor or disadvantaged always end up crappy. When somebody is universal, everybody gets a stake in it and a desire for it to be good, including the politicians who get elected. If all the politicians and the bankers on wall street had to use VA, you can bet it would have offered great service. Once great example of this dynamic is from the 60s when they forced mixed schools in the US. "black schools" which suddenly got white students, suddenly got all sorts of maintenance work taken care of. Those schools got big upgrades due to that. In short if people with power and influence has to use a system, it will get a lot better.

3 ms·

As bad as some private insurance is; having friends and family who must seek care at the VA makes me want to run far far away from single payer. We have failed

by ChrisBland 9y ago

jernfrost 9y ago
That is not single payer though. They run the hospitals as far as I know, so it is more like socialized health care. I actually thought VA was good from what I've read/heard. Anyway a problem with a public option for the few is that there will be no political pressure to make it good. You see this in every country which offer public and private options, where the rich primarily chose private. The public option turns into crap because the very people who could have put heavy political pressure on the public option don't care. This is the experience we've had in Norway at least through history. If you want good public services, they need to be universal and apply to both rich and poor people. Means tested solutions only for the poor or disadvantaged always end up crappy. When somebody is universal, everybody gets a stake in it and a desire for it to be good, including the politicians who get elected. If all the politicians and the bankers on wall street had to use VA, you can bet it would have offered great service. Once great example of this dynamic is from the 60s when they forced mixed schools in the US. "black schools" which suddenly got white students, suddenly got all sorts of maintenance work taken care of. Those schools got big upgrades due to that. In short if people with power and influence has to use a system, it will get a lot better.