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I'd like their to be a single payer for my healthcare but I'd like that single payer to be me and not the government and not an insurance company. Just like I a

I'd like their to be a single payer for my healthcare but I'd like that single payer to be me and not the government and not an insurance company. Just like I am the single payer for all my food and my housing why can't we have a world where I pay for my healthcare too?

eximius 2y ago
You can already do this. It's a bad idea because of the state of the rest of healthcare _due to the state of health insurance_, but nothing prevents you from self-insuring.
mock-possum 2y ago
We shouldn’t even have to pay for essential services like healthcare. If it’s a matter of life or death, the state should be taking care of its citizens.
- marbro 2y ago
  If you rely on the state to take care of you, you'll die. Only fools rely on the government. Smart people take care of themselves.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Denvercoder9 2y ago
Because there is a non-zero chance that at some point you'll need a medical procedure that is, even at non-inflated cost price, more expensive than your net worth in order to survive; and society considers it unethical to let you die in that case. With the same reasoning you're not actually the single payer for your food, and food stamps exist.
PMunch 2y ago
Because unlike food and housing health is something that can hit people very unevenly. Imagine walking down the road with a copy of yourself, everything in your life is equal, you earn the same, eat the same, same genetics, etc. All of a sudden a car hits your copy and leaves him with a broken leg. The car sped off and the driver is never caught. Now through no fault of his own your copy has potentially huge medical bills whilst you do not. The concept of insurance and government paid healthcare is simply to distribute these costs. Everyone pays a little, but when you need healthcare you get it. Of course the current US system is quite broken so you end up paying a lot and still not getting healthcare when you need it. The government has a lot more tools to regulate prices of healthcare and no runaway capitalist drive to make money which makes them far more apt at providing such basic services as healthcare.
mrtracy 2y ago
This would work very well for medicine/procedures which are known to work very well, to both doctors and consumers. This includes medicine which is already OTC (pain relievers), but also probably anything they can do at an urgent care: x-rays for broken bones or sprains, throat cultures, antibiotics (drug resistance is complex for this but people generally know they work). Where costs will inevitably get complicated are: 1. emergency medicine, where the purchaser is in severe pain or possibly unconscious. 2. conditions without cures, or possibly even well-established treatments, and there is thus active experimentation and disagreement Both of these are unpredictably expensive to an extraordinary degree, and the second category is sometimes rare enough that economies of scale don’t come into play for individual conditions. I think government coverage of emergency medicine, aka ERs for severe injuries, is relatively uncontroversial due to its nature of treating unconscious patients. However, that other category is very large in modern medicine. It includes all chronic conditions without cures, for which many options are available and improved techniques are constantly sought - and it includes complicated conditions where treatment has risks involved, which is basically a huge range of surgeries. The problem in these areas is that the consumer does not have adequate understanding of the efficacy of what they’re buying, yet they’re driven to buy it strongly by pain and suffering. They are likely to want to do whatever a doctor or hospital tells them to do. What is needed here is a consumer advocate with medical knowledge to keep prices consistent. In the US, this is provided by a mixture of regulation, medical malpractice lawsuits, and insurance companies. Insurance companies are now failing in that role, but removing them entirely without any sort of replacement is going to leave the courts as the major vehicle to manage the costs - that isn’t a system renowned for efficiency.
DanHulton 2y ago
Just like you're single-payer for your emergency fire services, your police services, your road maintenance, your food supply health inspection service, OH WAIT. =) Health care is yet another of those services where society as a whole does better if everyone's needs as a whole are considered and taken care of together. It is definitely frustrating for those who have more and wish to pay more to get better care, but heck, it's still a better deal in that case. There are all kinds of diseases that have been eradicated (or are on the way out) due to a broad social program to first discover and then distribute the cure. Paying for the very best leprosy care yourself pales in comparison to never catching it.

eximius 2y ago

You can already do this. It's a bad idea because of the state of the rest of healthcare _due to the state of health insurance_, but nothing prevents you from self-insuring.

mock-possum 2y ago

We shouldn’t even have to pay for essential services like healthcare. If it’s a matter of life or death, the state should be taking care of its citizens.

marbro 2y ago
If you rely on the state to take care of you, you'll die. Only fools rely on the government. Smart people take care of themselves.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Denvercoder9 2y ago

Because there is a non-zero chance that at some point you'll need a medical procedure that is, even at non-inflated cost price, more expensive than your net worth in order to survive; and society considers it unethical to let you die in that case. With the same reasoning you're not actually the single payer for your food, and food stamps exist.

PMunch 2y ago

Because unlike food and housing health is something that can hit people very unevenly. Imagine walking down the road with a copy of yourself, everything in your life is equal, you earn the same, eat the same, same genetics, etc. All of a sudden a car hits your copy and leaves him with a broken leg. The car sped off and the driver is never caught. Now through no fault of his own your copy has potentially huge medical bills whilst you do not. The concept of insurance and government paid healthcare is simply to distribute these costs. Everyone pays a little, but when you need healthcare you get it. Of course the current US system is quite broken so you end up paying a lot and still not getting healthcare when you need it. The government has a lot more tools to regulate prices of healthcare and no runaway capitalist drive to make money which makes them far more apt at providing such basic services as healthcare.

mrtracy 2y ago

This would work very well for medicine/procedures which are known to work very well, to both doctors and consumers. This includes medicine which is already OTC (pain relievers), but also probably anything they can do at an urgent care: x-rays for broken bones or sprains, throat cultures, antibiotics (drug resistance is complex for this but people generally know they work). Where costs will inevitably get complicated are: 1. emergency medicine, where the purchaser is in severe pain or possibly unconscious. 2. conditions without cures, or possibly even well-established treatments, and there is thus active experimentation and disagreement Both of these are unpredictably expensive to an extraordinary degree, and the second category is sometimes rare enough that economies of scale don’t come into play for individual conditions. I think government coverage of emergency medicine, aka ERs for severe injuries, is relatively uncontroversial due to its nature of treating unconscious patients. However, that other category is very large in modern medicine. It includes all chronic conditions without cures, for which many options are available and improved techniques are constantly sought - and it includes complicated conditions where treatment has risks involved, which is basically a huge range of surgeries. The problem in these areas is that the consumer does not have adequate understanding of the efficacy of what they’re buying, yet they’re driven to buy it strongly by pain and suffering. They are likely to want to do whatever a doctor or hospital tells them to do. What is needed here is a consumer advocate with medical knowledge to keep prices consistent. In the US, this is provided by a mixture of regulation, medical malpractice lawsuits, and insurance companies. Insurance companies are now failing in that role, but removing them entirely without any sort of replacement is going to leave the courts as the major vehicle to manage the costs - that isn’t a system renowned for efficiency.

DanHulton 2y ago

Just like you're single-payer for your emergency fire services, your police services, your road maintenance, your food supply health inspection service, OH WAIT. =) Health care is yet another of those services where society as a whole does better if everyone's needs as a whole are considered and taken care of together. It is definitely frustrating for those who have more and wish to pay more to get better care, but heck, it's still a better deal in that case. There are all kinds of diseases that have been eradicated (or are on the way out) due to a broad social program to first discover and then distribute the cure. Paying for the very best leprosy care yourself pales in comparison to never catching it.