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It may become easier to reform healthcare if/when people see that PPACA doesn't Ruin Everything Forever.

• zanny 13y ago
  The kind of sentiment that breeds that ignorant opinion is propegated by those that don't want to see single payer because it hurts their profits. The health insurance / for profit hospital / big pharma lobbies are aburdly massive, and like many (most nowadays) industries, they abuse their wealth to exploit faulty political process to see what they want instituted brought into law and to keep advances that invalidate their profit centers from being legal.
  • jaibot 13y ago
    If you have a plan to fix the entire American political system, I will happily listen. I just spent 2.5 years working tech in US politics and it did not fill me with optimism. When you have eliminated the implausible, whatever remains, however distasteful, must be endorsed.
    • mjn 13y ago
      I recall even Ted Kennedy somewhat later in life commenting that not reaching a compromise with Nixon's health-care proposals in the '70s, flawed as they were, was one of his major regrets, because the end result of holding out for proper reform was that here we were decades later, and nothing had gotten passed at all. The Nixon proposal is an interesting one in retrospect. In some ways it's "left" of PPACA, despite at the time being opposed by Democrats, who preferred a real public plan and criticized Nixon's as a sellout to insurance companies. Although it wasn't single-payer, one of Nixon's proposed compromises would've actually included a public plan as an opt-in possibility (but not the default), reminiscent of the "public option" that more liberal Democrats unsuccessfully tried to include in PPACA.
  • tzs 13y ago
    Single payer is not necessary to have a good health care system. Proof: Switzerland [1]. [1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/countries/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/c...
    • phaemon 13y ago
      That link gets UK healthcare wrong. There is private insurance in the UK too, and you can directly buy private treatment. We have a mix of both. Most people do without because the NHS covers everything they need.
      • tptacek 13y ago
        There is a relatively insignificant amount of private coverage in the UK; something like 5bn versus 110bn in public coverage, and the NHS is a very large component of that 5bn (as a buyer) as well.