“Seriously, it’s amazing how much trouble the Democrats will go to in order to not have a ‘single-payer’ healthcare system.” — Djur
In many other industrialized countries, including our “neighbor to the north”, you’ll find demonstrably effective healthcare systems (variations on the ‘single-payer’ theme) that seem to work absolutely fine, or at least roughly fifty thousand dozen times better than our current system in the U.S. Yet for some unfathomable reason (or, well, quite frankly because our political system is profoundly broken and special-interest money always supersedes public interests and needs, and private insurance companies have a shitload of money), our politicians are doing everything possible to avoid adopting anything resembling any of these systems.
It’s like if they were setting out to build a car, and they looked at the general composition of a motor vehicle, and then decided “nah, fuck it, let’s put eighty wheels on it and make the engine out of wood and butter.” Then, when the whole thing inevitably breaks and is about a hundred times as expensive as they anticipated, as anyone with half the goddamned reasoning skills of an ear of corn could have predicted, they end up wondering what went wrong.
Meanwhile, instead of eliminating private insurance — the single-most fuckawful and destructive business model that has ever been birthed from the minds of bloodsucking, rent-seeking, sinister shitwads like some monstrous, sentient, peanut-encrusted, gluttonous turd that can only be fed with the desperate, the dead, and the screams of horrified children — we develop some bafflingly complicated welfare system to ensure its continued survival, at the expense yet again of the American people.
In fact, insurance is so much worse than rent-seeking behavior, because it’s basically rent-seeking directly at the expense of people’s lives and safety. And instead of simply financially benefiting from a transaction without contributing anything to it (which is the general definition of ‘rent-seeking’), they benefit from a transaction while doing whatever they possibly can to interfere with the transaction actually being carried out successfully, meanwhile taking your money to pay people to ensure that this interference is successful and you are denied the service you’ve been paying for.
Of course, the Democrats’ half-assed attempts at “healthcare” which are really just thinly-veiled corporatist accommodation and kowtowing are all doomed to failure. Likely it’ll be a lateral move to a system just as broken as what we currently have, and in the end, nothing will be accomplished and people will still go without the necessary medical treatments they so desperately need. Republicans and liberal economists will point to it as vindication that government programs don’t work. And years from now, when the subject of socialized healthcare is once again broached, everyone will say “but we TRIED that and it didn’t work”, even though we really didn’t try — we made the car with eighty wheels and a wooden engine.
