Posted by Tina
Neil Hamilton of the Express (UK) is singing the blues about their single payer health care system. A few of the lyrics that plague Mr. Hamilton’s soul:
1. The NHS is the last Soviet-style nationalised industry. It gobbles up a sixth of all Government spending and is exempt from “the cuts” because it is such a political hot potato.
2. With 1.7 million employees it is the fifth largest employer in the world behind the US Department of Defense, the Chinese military, Walmart and McDonald’s. It costs us 125billion a year, which equates to 80 per cent of all income tax revenue.
3. That means the average family is paying 8,000 a year for nationalised healthcare.
4. The NHS does not provide an equal service to all but instead treatment depends on where patients live, their income, age and, crucially, who they know. The many appalling scandals of mistreatment of the elderly are a national shame.
5. Princess Royal Hospital in Bromley cost 118million to build yet the total bill to the NHS eventually will be 1.2billion.
6. A 12.7billion patient-record computer system was recently scrapped after years of delays, technical difficulties, contractual disputes and rising costs.
7. Healthcare must be accessible to all but it need not be delivered by a monolithic State monopoly. As usual, politics is the problem, not the solution.
Will single payer healthcare come to America within five years, six years, or maybe ten? I don’t know, but I do know that unless Obamacare is overturned before the end of the year, single payer is coming.
Single payer healthcare is the end game in the Obama/Pelosi/Reid strategy.
As Mitt Romney has indicated we will have to rid ourselves of the architects of Obamacare if we hope to be rid of Obamacare…and its single payer tentacles.
WASHINGTON — The last thing House progressives want is for the Supreme Court to strike down President Barack Obama’s health care law. But if the high court rules Thursday that some or all of the law is unconstitutional, progressives are ready to renew their push for the model of health care they wanted all along: the single-payer option.
“It’s easy to see it’s a good idea,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told The Huffington Post. “It’s the cheapest way to cover everybody.”
Ellison said all 75 members of the caucus have already signed onto a bill by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) to create a single-payer, publicly financed, privately delivered universal health care program. The proposal would essentially build on and expand Medicare, under which all Americans would be guaranteed access to health care regardless of an ability to pay or pre-existing health conditions.
The Supreme Court just released their decision on Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), and their decision is that all components of the law – including the individual mandate requiring citizens buy private health insurance – are upheld and declared constitutional.
This decision does not end the fight for expanded and improved Medicare-for-all. We know that our community members’ health needs will not be met by the ACA.
We already have the infrastructure in place to create a national single-payer system by simply expanding Medicare to everyone, and excluding private health insurance companies.
I told you…THEY NEVER STOP!
“And I’m standing at the crossroads, believe I’m sinking down.”
Here are seven EXCELLENT reasons the national health service in the UK, sucks. Can you point us to one of the dozens of Western Democracies where single-payer works?
Why not? There a scores of them.
Why are you unable to find anything good about single-payer. Are you just not interested in truth?
Please tell us you love the truth and you will bring it to us. If you can’t, I know someone who can–if you have the courage to print the truth . . .
Live long and prosper, searching…and continue in your quest. You may get a clue yet.
“Will single payer healthcare come to America within five years, six years, or maybe ten? I don’t know, but I do know that unless Obamacare is overturned before the end of the year, single payer is coming.”
I think single payer is coming no matter what, it’s just a question of when. Pretty much every other industrialized nation has single payer at this point. Eventually, the U.S. will have it too; this strikes me as an inevitability, regardless of who wins the next election. Do you disagree? Do you think we’ll find a better system, and that single payer health care will never happen in America? I’m just trying to get a feel for what the end goal is on your end of this fight. Right now your position, as with many conservative positions, seems short-sighted and naive to me. It’s like the opposition to gay marriage; it’s obvious to my generation that this is going to happen sooner or later, it’s merely a question of how many more people have to suffer needlessly before it finally happens.
Chris it may be that there is no way for you and I to discuss this.
Consider the excerpt from Healthcare Now above, “We know that our community members’ health needs will not be met by the ACA.”
I thought the ACA was going to fix this. Was that a lie?
Even after this you seem unwilling to consider the downside of your favored plan and you refuse to consider the historical record about other big government solutions. You refuse to consider warnings about negative effects to the system. You refuse to seriously consider that a few simple changes to the private system could bring healthcare costs down considerably making healthcare and insurance within the reach of most citizens and that simple reform of current safety net programs would make them workable and sustainable. You seem not to value the concerns expressed by doctors about what this means to their practices. It doesn’t seem to occur to you that people will continue to suffer and may suffer more under the ACA. You also seem unconcerned about the added costs of the bureaucracy…that expense never goes away, it grows, and it doesn’t deliver healthcare to anyone. It doesn’t seem to occur to you that this country cannot sustain the programs we already have and it doesn’t occur to you to ask how will we pay for this.
It seems to me we are at an impasse in terms of discussion.
“It seems to me we are at an impasse in terms of discussion.”
Well, yes, that tends to happen when one party doesn’t respect the other enough to respond to specific, direct questions.
Does the court term “Asked and answered” sound familiar?
Respect is an unusual choice in this circumstance.
To sell this scheme to take over the healthcare industry the President lied to the people when he insisted the mandate wasn’t a tax. He lied when he said costs would come down. He lied when he said we could keep our insurance and doctor. A small cadre of Democrat activists legislators wrote the final bill behind closed doors. It was not brought to the floor for debate meaning that most members of Congress had no input. At least three Democrat legislators had to be bribed into voting for it to get it passed.
I would call that legislation without representation! I would call that lawmaking by deception and manipulation.
The Democrat Party leadership deserves zero respect, Chris, and the duplicitous nature of the wording of this bill is such that it deserves the condemnation it is getting.