I think this is pretty common practice. I get a letter every single year to verify that I dont have any other insurance and they will stop processing claims until I do it. I typically just do the IVR and its only a couple of minutes.
It is, but our country is paralyzed by a political fallacy of "if the market is already so bad, imagine how much worse government exerting any sort of deliberate policy would make it!". And then add in the lobbying process where bills only get passed when some corporate sponsor stands to gain [0], and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. See also the "death panel" meme, as if that isn't a term that perfectly describes the "insurance" racket we've had all along.
[0] eg one of the bullet points of widely celebrated health care reform was making it mandatory to pay the cartel!
We already spend more in the US, per captia, than any other nation on earth on socialized medcine. The reason we don't have universal coverage isn't due to a lack of resources so it has to be either a lack of ability or theft, probably both.
I mean, suppose we implemented single-payer healthcare on the federal level, and then an anti-abortion government got elected? We know empirically that the latter is a realistic possibility.
The anti-healthcare governments that have been recently elected at the state level have managed to outright criminalize reproductive healthcare, making health plan coverage moot. So this would be seemingly less of its own concern than it was say five years ago.
But those anti-health state governments are, at least, limited to their respective states. Which also makes it possible for people to seek abortion and other related procedures across state borders (I know there were some attempts to ban it, too, but none of them became law so far, and in any case this is very difficult to enforce), where the infrastructure remains.
In a scenario where the anti-abortion party takes control of the executive that is running Canada-style single-payer healthcare on the federal level, I could see them 1) defining abortion as "core service" rather than supplemental so that private providers can't offer it outside the system, and then 2) setting harsh term limits and other barriers like doctor approval to make it effectively banned in practice.
(Fetal personhood is another backdoor that can take this even further.)
My general point was that an administrative backdoor isn't really needed since the regressives have seemingly found a legal basis to criminalize reasonable and prudent medical care on its own.
But I do see your point that if the regressives take the presidency but not congress, then the more the government is involved in the more damage they will do. I'm not a huge fan of single payer healthcare, but I guess I accept it as a compromise as it's the only plan that's been put forth to reform the deeply corrupt healthcare system. I personally want less government involvement in individuals' lives in general (and it's necessary to include de facto corporate government in that scope as well). But I've also paused focusing on this line of argument because the regressive movement has used up so much of the air for it, in bad faith.
But really regardless, we're kind of screwed if the regressives take the executive any time before their social-media-fueled nonsense is run out of the mainstream by actual conservatives - that is people who believe in questioning change, not trying to drag us back in time 70 years to some imagined idyllic past.
FWIW I don't think that single-payer healthcare on the federal level is actually a realistic pathway to reform healthcare. There's too much gridlock for anything major like that to pass, and I don't think this will change for at least another decade.
State level feels much more doable. Not only that, but Canada did it that way - IIRC Saskatchewan did it first, it worked well for them, and those results entered political discourse in other provinces causing a domino effect of sorts. Then finally the feds jumped in to regulate the baseline and assist with money to help the poorer provinces keep up. But to this day, it's actually a voluntary arrangement that any province could leave at any point; it's just that even in Alberta ditching public healthcare is such a fringe extreme right position that no politician hoping to have a successful career would seriously contemplate it.
And ofc if you do it state by state, then it doesn't have to be single-payer everywhere, either. We could try that in states with a more socialized political culture, and e.g. the Swiss model in more conservative states, and maybe something like Germany's private non-profit healthcare coops elsewhere. I would probably prefer the latter for myself for the sake of decentralization.
Find me a country with the population, sprawl, and never ending consumption of processed unhealthy poison like the US.
There isn't one. I'm not saying healthcare in America is perfect or arguing that insurance companies aren't rent seeking or that this can't be changed. I'm just stating that the US is the most unhealthy country there has ever been.
"Death panels" sounded absurd in 2009, especially given who is most famous for introducing us the term. In 2023, when I look at Canada's ever expanding MAiD programs, it doesn't seem as absurd.
If you're a government bureaucrat tasked with reducing healthcare expenditures, in a society that's made the determination that suicide is an acceptable medical treatment, you are incentivized to increase the practice.
"Death panels" was absurd because it's a hyperbolic description of what private "insurers" already did. If you're a corporate bureaucrat tasked with reducing healthcare expenditures ...
I agree that Canada's pushing for classifying suicide as medical treatment is worrying. Suicide is a human right, but making it part of the medical system's all-encompassing paternalism is regressive.
In general we need less intermediation between individuals and medical care, not more. And the "insurance" cartel is one hell of an intermediary. The concept of the HMO is a complete failure, and they should be made illegal for their basic anti-competitiveness.
As Steinbeck was (mis-)quoted: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
