CommentsWELLNESS - All Single Payer Healthcare systems existing in every other developed country in the world are cheaper than our present United States insurance companies run systems,
where one-third of ever dollar spent on healthcare actually goes to an insurance company's "administrative costs" and not healthcare. Our neighbor to the north Canada runs its single-payer system at a government- not insurance company- administrative cost of 3%.
The costs of medical care and drugs under a government run single-payer healthcare countries is determined and regulated by the government- not by the exclusively for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical companies, that extort as much money as desperately sick people can be coerced into paying, since they have no alternative.
Single payer government run healthcare for all works better, precisely because everyone- young and old, sick and healthy- are in the same healthcare system pool, which brings down the average costs per capita, because the young are less likely to incur expensive medical procedures.
While people might like their present doctor, I have yet to meet anybody who likes their present medical care insurance company. Under Medicare For All, all physicians and medical care givers would be obligated to take payment from this single-payer system.
Countries like France with its government run single payer system of medical care costs about half of what Americans pay for an objectively verifiable inferior system of healthcare. France has twice the number of doctors per capita, since they don't artificially limit the number of doctors admitted to medical schools or residencies.
And under the French system and others like it, when a reasonable number of patients are seen in a timely manner without often having to wait months like here in the States, they don't get as sick as Americans that often have to wait a month just for an appointment with their primary care physician, only having to then wait more months to see a specialist, who might then just say to them, "Gee, I wish I had seen you earlier, when we could've done something, but now your condition is terminal."
While the rich pay more taxes in Single Payer Healthcare countries- as it should be- all French on average live longer than Americans, don't get as sick, and have physicians who actually know who they are, instead of having a U.S. doctor who sees 30 patients a day, without the time to review your chart or meaningfully know who you are.
And contrary to the misinformation regarding medical care costs, purposefully based on presently inflated medical care insurance company costs, the French system actually costs half as much as the American system. But it is hard to get this message across in a purposefully dumbed down society, where I heard some terminally ignorant guy say, "I don't want the government messing with my Medicare."
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second-generation teacher at LAUSD.)
