You GOTTA have insurance

[Gareth J]

My favorite thing about single payer is when people spout off that it's free. No, you fool, it's not free. You pay for it with taxes.

I don't believe there is a single person in the UK who would say its free.

It's free at the point of delivery. Which is actually the point.

How much we pay in tax for the NHS is discussed constantly in the UK.

Even its harshest critics, wouldn't adopt the American model. It's far, far, too expensive, and wouldn't match what we have at the moment.

Preventative care is a primary factor, something we could do better at.
The positives is that it reduces infant mortality, reduces serious medical issues in later life, and has improved life expectancy.
The improved life expectancy is a double edged sword. As people get older, the likelihood of requiring medical care increases. So potential costs increase. This is the area that causes constant debate and discussion.

The area we need to improve is the care in the community for the older member of society. Medical intervention is excellent. If we could improve the community care, it would reduce the need for medical care and reduce costs. But it is easier said than done.

 

[BRT]

Actually many people think it is free, they just don't understand how "free" things from the government work. Just like they don't understand that Trump was talking about human smugglers when he said "coyotes" in the debate. Never underestimate how stupid people can be, if you think someone can't be that stupid you are wrong!

And for a lot of them it is free. They are producing little or nothing and paying nothing in taxes. Healthcare is free.

 

[lexvil]

I don't believe there is a single person in the UK who would say its free.

It's free at the point of delivery. Which is actually the point.

How much we pay in tax for the NHS is discussed constantly in the UK.

Even its harshest critics, wouldn't adopt the American model. It's far, far, too expensive, and wouldn't match what we have at the moment.

Preventative care is a primary factor, something we could do better at.
The positives is that it reduces infant mortality, reduces serious medical issues in later life, and has improved life expectancy.
The improved life expectancy is a double edged sword. As people get older, the likelihood of requiring medical care increases. So potential costs increase. This is the area that causes constant debate and discussion.

The area we need to improve is the care in the community for the older member of society. Medical intervention is excellent. If we could improve the community care, it would reduce the need for medical care and reduce costs. But it is easier said than done.

Logan’s run.

 

[boulderjohn]

I grew up in a family of firefighters, and I was for a while a volunteer fireman myself. I did a lot of reading about the good old days of the last century, before socialized fire departments became the norm. In cities with private fire departments, you frequently did not pay for fire protection until your house was on fire, at which point private fire departments would race to the scene, and the one that got there first would get to fight the fire and charge you for that service. It would likely be a hefty bill, which you would, of course, pay even though you likely lost your house. In some cases, fire departments would send a fast vehicle ahead of the crew with a barrel that would be placed over the top of the fire hydrant, meaning the department that owned the barrel would be the one fighting the fire, even if they arrived 15 minutes later than another department.

Then came the idea of a fire medallion, which was a kind of insurance. You would pay a specific private fire company an annual premium, and if your house caught on fire, they would come and fight it. You would have a large medallion on your home so that if competing fire departments arrived first, they would see the medallion and know they were not supposed to fight that fire. If your company was too busy to respond to your fire, then your house would burn down, even if there was another company there ready, willing, and able to put the fire out.

All of that is gone now, and even small rural fire departments (like the one I was in) are socialized, with all their costs paid by local taxes. That's socialism, and we seem to prefer it to the old private enterprise approach.

 

[Gareth J]

All of that is gone now, and even small rural fire departments (like the one I was in) are socialized, with all their costs paid by local taxes. That's socialism, and we seem to prefer it to the old private enterprise approach.

I think Americans still equate socialised facilities with communism. I guess McCarthysim still impacts on the American physci. The amount of damage he did to the USA, maybe he was a Russian infiltrator!

I always find it strange that a country that was built by having groups of people stand to gather to protect themselves, socialised structures. Shuns any thing that is labelled socialised.

It sometimes surprises me you have fire departments, police departments and a military. All are the results of a social contract between citizens to pay communally for a service because it is the most efficient way to provide that service.

 

[Darnold9999]

Healthcare here by and large is free, in the same way you drive on your roads for free, have the fire department fight your house fire for free, send your kids to school for free, visit your local park for free or have the police pull you over and give you a speeding ticket for free. Yes you pay taxes for those things but when you need them they are there and you don't need to open your wallet to access the service. Nobody thinks that any of those services are actually free, we all pay for them collectively because the benefits of collectively paying for them far outweigh the collective costs of paying for them on an as needed basis, or having some kind of private insurance that is not available to everyone. Nobody thinks that this system is perfect either, healthcare and who gets what level of service and how to allocate scarce resources are a constant topic of conversation and politics here. Note that a politician that advocated, getting rid of the current system and moving to a private system has exactly no chance of getting elected. Which is not to say there are not people that would like to move to such a system, it is to say that they are in a significant minority among all stripes.

 

[boulderjohn]

This is all the result of a very conscious effort, which has been openly explained in the past, to make certain words toxic. All you have to do is repeat bad things about the specified word over and over and over and over and over again. Eventually, people don't understand the actual meaning of the word, and they don't know why it is bad. They just know it is bad.

I was a child in the midst of the cold war, and the nastiest of those words was "commie." When we got mad at friends, we called them commies. I had no idea what a commie was, but I knew they were everywhere, and we had to be afraid of them. My grandparents lived a heavily forested quarter mile away from our house, and when I walked home after dark, I was in fear that there were commies hiding behind the trees, ready to pounce on me.

We don't even have to have a clue what the word means if it sounds like one of those fear words. A couple decades ago one of the people running for office was an minor actor and a member of the Screen Actor's Guild. His opponent got a lot of mileage telling his audience that his opponent was 'An admitted, card-carrying thespian."

"Socialism" is such a word today. Most Americans have no idea what it means, and they have no idea how much of our lives, parts that they dearly love, are pure socialism. Over the years we have seen many pictures of people holding up signs saying things like "Keep your socialist hands off of medicare!" When you intentionally use a word like this to invoke fear, your goal is to prevent honest debate by spurring mindless anger in your audience. It is a nefarious tactic, and when I perceive someone is intentionally using the term that way, that usually ends the discussion for me, because I know this person is intellectually dishonest.

 

[boulderjohn]

BTW, this may amuse some people. The height of the cold war in America was also the height of the American interest in folk music. Folk music artists mostly played music from "the folk," that is, songs of unknown origin which have existed in many versions over decades, like "Midnight Special" or "House of the Rising Sun." Some were original songs written in that style. These songs were often about the poor, the downtrodden, etc, Martin Scorsese's documentary on the early years of Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, has an interesting segment in which a government film warning people about communism included how to tell if someone is a communist. One of the signs was that they frequently play guitar.

 

[Jcp2]

This machine kills fascists.

 

[Storker]

My favorite thing about single payer is when people spout off that it's free. No, you fool, it's not free. You pay for it with taxes.

I don't think anyone in this thread has claimed that it's free. It's free at point of use. Which is not the same as "free". Like fire services, police etc. Besides, it looks a lot as if it's cheaper overall.