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I'd like to see a different take on single payer. First, allow anyone to buy into medicare for their insurance provider (at a market reasonable price for young

I'd like to see a different take on single payer. First, allow anyone to buy into medicare for their insurance provider (at a market reasonable price for younger people, subsidized like it is now for seniors). This could act as a nation-wide insurer without any "funny business" such as getting charged thousands because an assistant that wasn't in-network showed up the day of your surgery. Second, if an employee isn't covered by employer healthcare, the employer side of FICA should be increased to provide for employee coverage. That way if someone is working 40 hours a week, but for multiple part-time employers, they still get the same medical coverage as a full-time employee. Third, when I go in for a procedure, I want all bills to go to the insurance provider, they pay everything. Then the insurance sends me a bill for my co-pay. Make that a law. That way I'm not stuck with getting dozens of separate bills up to years after a procedure, with no way of really knowing what should have been covered by insurance or not.

jeffdn 4y ago
This is essentially what the “public option” in the original Obamacare proposal was — an opt-in publicly owned insurance company, which would compete with all the other insurers, but not have the overhead of their business models. Unfortunately, it was axed alone with much of the other important aspects of that bill. The great irony is that the initial Obamacare proposal was a Republican policy — originally proposed in the mid-‘90s as an alternative to the proposal from the Clinton White House, and implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney when he was the governor. The Republican congress and conservative media machine were so invested in seeing Obama fail that they instead branded it socialism and fought it tooth and nail. It would’ve been a fantastic opportunity for a resurgence in bipartisanship in government, and could potentially have averted the subsequent 14 years of animosity and bitter obstructionism. Ah well, so it goes.

jeffdn 4y ago

This is essentially what the “public option” in the original Obamacare proposal was — an opt-in publicly owned insurance company, which would compete with all the other insurers, but not have the overhead of their business models. Unfortunately, it was axed alone with much of the other important aspects of that bill. The great irony is that the initial Obamacare proposal was a Republican policy — originally proposed in the mid-‘90s as an alternative to the proposal from the Clinton White House, and implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney when he was the governor. The Republican congress and conservative media machine were so invested in seeing Obama fail that they instead branded it socialism and fought it tooth and nail. It would’ve been a fantastic opportunity for a resurgence in bipartisanship in government, and could potentially have averted the subsequent 14 years of animosity and bitter obstructionism. Ah well, so it goes.