California's single-payer bill dies

Just look towards how the VA or operated and how many problems people have it and tell me you want to force that experience on everyone.

People want healthcare to be magically free, that’s not how it’ll be. People who now pay almost no taxes and choose not to buy health insurance because they can’t afford it and their other life choices will suddenly be taxed quite a lot for “free” health insurance.

A problem is a lot of American healthcare companies give away medicine and the results of their development to export at low cost, basically whatever they can get and then make up their profit in American markets. There is also a whole lot of waste and inefficiency and not enough pressure to fix it. Many changes need to be made to lower costs and can be made in many ways, but i simply don’t trust the government to do so by giving them all the money to spend, because they already demonstrate they’re bad at administering medical payments.

Not to mention issues many countries have with their social medicine programs, if you’re not just a fan and look objectively, there is definitely a tradeoff.

> Among the public overall, 63% of U.S. adults say the government has the responsibility to provide health care coverage for all, up slightly from 59% last year. Roughly a third (37%) say this is not the responsibility of the federal government, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted July 27 to Aug. 2 among 11,001 adults. [1]

If you read the post from Pew, you'll find that Dems overwhelming support this policy, while it is Republicans who do not, Republicans who are overwhelming older [2]. So, over time, there will be more support for this policy as the roughly 1.8 million voters per year over the age of 55 age out of voting cohorts.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/06/02/the-changing...

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/05/feature-forum-costli...

https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/americans-chall...

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/why-is-healthcare-so-...

Not even the wealthy get better healthcare with their dollars.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...

> GummyBearDoc writes:

> I want to push back on the assertion Scott made that "Certainly rich people in America get good health care." After he published this book in June 2020, Ezekiel Emmanuel published an article in JAMA IM (link: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...) called "Comparing Health Outcomes of Privileged US Citizens With Those of Average Residents of Other Developed Countries." He wanted to test the commonly stated trope that a feature of the US healthcare system is that the rich here get the very best care in the world. To do that, he looked at outcomes across six benchmark diseases (heart attack, colon cancer, breast cancer, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and pediatric acute lymphocytic leukemia). He compared outcomes for white people in the 1% of richest counties in the US, 5% richest counties in the US, and average outcomes in 12 rich countries (i'm not going to type them all out but they're places like Australia, Canada, and Germany). The results were...not so great for rich Americans!

> While rich people in the US do better than average people in other rich countries with breast cancer, RICH children in the US have outcomes worse than AVERAGE citizens in 11/12 of this group of rich countries. Rich people in America have about the same outcomes after heart attack that average people in other rich countries have. In other words, in most cases, you're about as well off having a heart attack being the average bozo in France (for example) as you are having one in one of the wealthiest counties in the US. I was pretty shocked when I read this paper.

> The reason I think this is important is because I think it's extremely politically useful sometimes to be able to claim that rich people in the US get great healthcare! People like to imagine themselves as more privileged than they are, and think that, if and when they get sick, they'll have access to this incredible care. So we should reframe from "average care in the US is shitty but care for the upper echelons is the envy of the world" to "average care in the US is shitty, and also in the upper echelons we are about the same as the average person in America's peer countries."

Emphasis on the last paragraph.

> The stakes were especially high given that Gov. Gavin Newsom, who campaigned for governor on the promise of single-payer, has been notably uninterested in the bill

Just watched this seemingly highly relevant video yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw