Single payer is coming. It’s just a matter of timing. A doctor friend of mine explained it to me in clear terms recently. He said they should have just expanded Medicare to include those 50 or older, and provided some sort of catastrophic coverage for young people, who tend not to need conventional insurance. It would have cost much less in the long term and still accomplished the goal of covering more Americans.
You got that right!
Oh I agree...single-payer will be here by 2025. The current program is a failure and just sits there until both parties admit they’ve run it into the ground as far as they can.
Oddly, when you go back to the last months of the Nixon administration....this was exactly what he was preaching and discussing. Had Watergate not occurred and he stayed on...we would have single-payer today. I won’t say it’s good or going to fix anything, but we’ve burnt just about every bridge possible now. There’s virtually nothing much left to screw with.
That wasn't the goal at all. The goal was to take over that part of the economy. The number of uninsured is still the same but nobody seems to care about that.
There will never be single payer in the strict sense, just as there isn’t in continental Europe, Canada, or other so-called single payer countries.
The question will be whether you have sufficient resources to get care in what remains of the private system. It may not even be worth it as innovation in health care slows down.