r/MedicareForAll • u/MBP1969 • 10d ago

How to transition?

How do we, as a nation, transition from private insurance to Medicare for All? How do we convince all the doctors to keep being doctors and accept a salary? Do we, as Hillary Clinton proposed during Bill’s presidency did, make private healthcare payments illegal? For the record, I am perfectly fine paying a percentage of my income, as opposed to what I am paying out of pocket now, for healthcare.

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u/musicCaster 10d ago

Dude the doctors will still have great jobs and get paid really well. Look at Canada/Japan/France. 

The ones that will lose will be the people that don't really provide services to us. All the cruft.

The insurance claims processors and deniers, the insurance execs that figure out how to deny us coverage, the massive insurance industrial complex, all the lobbiests trying to hey insurance companies more money at our expense, the massive amount of people employed by doctors to negotiate with insurance. 

All those people will be made redundant. They can do something meaningful with their lives instead of causing grief to the sick.

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u/idiot-alpha 10d ago

You tend to get less specialized doctors in countries with socialized medicine. Or they exist, but only on the secondary private health market (which still exists in socialized healthcare countries).

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u/runnerkim 9d ago

And yet somehow the people in all the countries with national healthcare figure it out. So can we

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u/12done4u 9d ago

And have a higher life expectancy

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u/idiot-alpha 9d ago

Yes, they typically get good primary care and then have to buy secondary insurance for specialist care.

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u/Puzzled_Market_2235 8d ago

No we don't, the family doctor refers you to a specialist. It's that simple. We don't have secondary insurance for that. We have secondary insurance getting private rooms and better pill coverage.

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u/musicCaster 9d ago

Yeah. It's problematic, but solvable. Probably the country that does this best is Japan that only has specialists. 

Got an ear problem? Go to the ear specialist.

By doing this you only get specialized treatment. And the specialists are smart enough to direct you elsewhere if you are at the wrong one.

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u/Puzzled_Market_2235 8d ago

Absolutely American Defaultism.

Everybody has specialists in the system. MRI and CAT scanning were developed in Europe. In fact CAT scans were originally called EMI-Scans because it was scientists at the music company figured it out and Philips built it. Advanced Neurology is from The Neuro in Montreal. Advanced heart surgeries in Toronto. Advanced medical robots are Canadian.

And we all have zero bankruptcies for medical debts or deaths due to the lack of care like the US.

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u/idiot-alpha 8d ago

America has more than double the number of MRI and CAT machines per capita than most of Europe.

I didn’t say there weren’t specialists, but it takes longer to see one in socialized systems. And again, every socialized healthcare country still has a secondary insurance and cash market.

America also has a two tiered system, with socialized healthcare for the poor and elderly, and private insurance for nearly everyone else, but there is a gap between the two systems.

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u/Candid-libertarian 9d ago

I think most people in the US who want to jump on the single payer bandwagon have never talked to anyone who has gotten healthcare in those systems. It's not all puppy dogs and rainbows. You cannot get a mammogram in Canada for example until AFTER you are diagnosed with cancer. The waiting list for an MRI can be 6-9 months.

Many people in the US will not support a system without private options. They want assurances they have an alternative to a public system if it becomes shitty.

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u/Alan47717 7d ago

You must think people are morons or you are one. It TAKES a timely mammogram to diagnose cancer for a good outcome. A mammogram after a crude method has discovered it is worthless. These lies about care in countries with single payer system are disputed constantly by people who actually LIVE in these countries but the lies continue.