It's been awhile since you wrote this, and I'm terrified that this wasn't a bigger topic at the time, and people seem to have pretty much forgotten it.
If something this barbaric was just breezed over and forgotten, and the people involved never self reflected, and still think of themselves as virtuous, I'm terrified of what's coming in the future.
Covid has shown to me how Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were able to happen.
A great blast from the past, I had not got to yet.
You were wrong, yes, but you are so correct now.
The other thing about single payer, that many look at wrongly is, it's not "the people" that are making those lofty and saintly care decisions - they're just getting fleeced and told they're saving someone from illness, or death - basically it's the medical version of carbon credits/taxes or recycling.
As you know, it's the regime that decides - and since most conservative regimes don't usually push for socialized medicine (not out of altruism- but they don't), then it becomes clearthe marxist regimes are applying the DEI/ESG metrics.
Yes falling afoul of the agenda, on any issue can get you taken off the transplant list or the chemo treatment schedule - you were already actively on/engaged in.
And while they sit on their hallowed thrones, meting out care, the scales are always going to be weighted.
Unvaxed white kids with a congenital heart problem get's denied treatment or like in Canada and the UK - has to wait months or years to be considered or seen - but the trans-anything wants a jiffy-pop penis, vagina, breasts additions/removals and they're seen in a day or week tops.
And "the people" pay.
I once read an article about the UK NHS (this was 10-15 years ago) and the interviewed gov official said they should be a lesson to America. Their healthcare system at the time was so in meshed with public employment (I want to say in the 60th percentile), that if they tried to privatize or revamp it, it would devastate their economy and so no one will ever touch it. Way too many normies in that life boat, who understand what would happen. Some further understand, that they let it grow beyond their control to kill it - mistake!
We are heading that way. Whether Trump has another 4 years or not, the time after that will be a runaway train toward all these social and societal program cliffs.
Among other things the scamdemic was a tolerance test and a tyranny bar setting measure. We failed the test, as a whole and their bar has moved a few more notches, in favor of the tyranny.
Sorry, but I don't find this concern a compelling reason to reject some form of single payer in the US, even though I share a lot of your concerns regarding the politicization of medicine and especially the response to COVID.
First, you don't discuss at all the fact that essentially every developed country in the world provides some form of universal healthcare (maybe they aren't all technically "single payer", but you don't seem to distinguish between the two in this essay. If you would be okay with a form of universal healthcare that wasn't "single payer," perhaps you should specify that). With the possible exception of COVID, I'm not aware of any of them who ration healthcare based on political beliefs. This seems extremely relevant to the question of how big of an issue your concern really is.
Second, and more importantly, you seem to assume that any "single payer" system would mean that the government could punish you by restricting access to certain types of healthcare. But while that would certainly be possible *when using government insurance*, there's nothing stopping the creation of a single-payer system in which people are free to purchase private, supplemental insurance on top of their government insurance. That private insurance could provide coverage for anything that the government was unwilling to provide. As far as I am aware, this is in fact how it works in places like the UK and Canada.
Third, you ignore the fact that the US has extremely strong protections, through the First Amendment, for political dissidents to express their views without being punished by the government. And those protections extend to the provision of government benefits. For example, while the government doesn't have to provide you a driver's license, it can't take away your license because it disagrees with your political viewpoint. If the US government ever created a single-payer system, I have very little doubt that the courts would strike down a law that conditioned provision of government healthcare on citizen's having the correct political beliefs.
On September 9, 2021, the president of the United States did his best to have me fired from my job because I would not enter a room, remove part of my clothing, and have my body injected with the medical instrument of his choosing, against my will and without my consent. He only didn't succeed because of a combination of my switching teams so that I wasn't working on any government contract and brave people suing in response. We got lucky that time I do not trust that we will get lucky every time. That plus the Supreme Court Justice I quoted saying that if the government is paying for it, it has the right to dictated tell me that we are far outside the realm of protection of freedom being the primary concern. The president and the Supreme Court justice I quoted have both said the quiet part out loud. I am merely choosing to believe them and listen.
This highlights yet another reason why I think your analysis is wrong: The very incident that seems to have changed your thinking on single payer (and I'm sorry it happened to you) happened *even though we don't have a single payer system*. You're worried about the government imposing politically motivated medical requirements (either requiring people to get certain medical procedures or preventing people from obtaining them). But *the government already has the power to do those things*. The government already can force you to get a vaccine. And the government can already ban certain types of healthcare (e.g., abortions). Neither power requires the government to be providing single payer healthcare! And, again, even if the government did try to manipulate people politically through a single-payer system, it's highly likely that any system implemented in the US would allow people to buy private insurance on top of any government insurance which could provide for care the government was unwilling to pay for.
I'm not sure how anyone can watch what happened since March 2020 and have their confidence in the resilience of the institutions increase, but you appear to have managed it. I watched Americans lose everything, including 2/3 of all small businesses shuttering (nearly all for good, last I read) and I no longer trust that the government will refrain from doing anything it can, or from trying to do what it can't *yet*. I don't want the same government that worked with old Twitter to silence people like me to decide that I don't get to see my therapist or get new hearing aids or any of the other things it could decide if it was my healthcare provider. I'm not going to be persuaded that it wouldn't do that. I watched far more unlikely things happen already.
But again: You could chose *not* to use it as your healthcare provider, and buy private insurance that would provide for therapy and hearing aids if the government chose not to provide those things for you based on your political beliefs.
I am truly amazed that you continue to have faith that the same government that violated the constitution left right and center because of a respiratory illness can be trusted to set up some kind of system (to replace the system that produces the most medical innovations in the world) that preserves freedom. Part of me is really jealous of you. I really would like to see the world as you apparently do, as after the last four years you are entirely willing to trust that the government would take away just a little bit of freedom, and not absolutely all that it could. They can inject their vaccine into my cold, dead arm, and I will never support putting any member of the government between me and my therapist, nor trusting them to set up a system that won't do exactly that if they take over even more of the 1/6 of our economy that healthcare makes up.
Nor do I find "you have a good income, so you could afford to bypass the system and not have your medical freedom taken away" a reason to support it.
This is an essay about my changing my mind, and you're not going to change my mind back. Not on this. Not after the last four years. I’m done; have a great weekend.
I'm not expecting you to respond to this, and I respect not wanting to get into a debate with some random person on the internet. Clearly COVID was a really traumatic experience for you, which I totally get. Contrary to what your assume, our government's COVID response had a massive effect on me personally that probably mirrors your experience in a lot of ways. Leftist and liberal responses to COVID are probably the main reason I went from being extremely left wing to much more conservative over the course of the COVID regime.
Nonetheless, your response of "government bad" just isn't responsive here. You say that you don't "find 'you have a good income, so you could afford to bypass the system and not have your medical freedom taken away' a reason to support" single payer. But isn't that the system we have *right now*? Do you advocate dismantling Medicaid/Medicare (because those people who rely on them for healthcare are at the whims of the government and could have their "medical freedom" taken away)? If you don't advocate dismantling them, then your position is incoherent--you support government taking "medical freedom" away from poor people/the elderly, but not those who can afford private insurance. If you do advocate dismantling Medicare/Medicaid, then the new system would be "if you don't have enough money, then too bad--no hearing aids/therapy for you, regardless of your politics." Is that really better than the risk that the government might try to unconstitutionally restrict someone's healthcare based on politics? (An attempt by the way that would almost certainly be struck down by the courts, which, contrary to what you have said, in fact did in many cases protect people's Constitutional rights during COVID--it just takes years for litigation to be resolved. See the Supreme Court's ruling about closing down churches during COVID, for example.)
Reading three years after the fact, but kudos to you for actually humbling yourself and admitting a personal error. You're setting a sorely-needed example. May your tribe increase!
Agree. The grass isn't always greener on the other side.
Choice is indeed the sticking point in government funded health care. What are the rules? Who gets to decide? What if your viewpoint or choices aren't mainstream? What if the institutions that protect minorities can't be trusted? Etc. etc. Hence, yes, our flawed health care system is better.
Plus, single payer isn't free, it's just funded differently.
I think the best approach would be for the government to offer voluntary insurance that takes more or less anyone, subsidized by taxes, with the usual open enrollment period to deter freeloading, etc. This program would allow the effectively uninsurable to be insured. Private insurance could then take only the remaining/not absurdly sick people, and I suspect it would thereby be both profitable and cheaper.
Remember all the flak that was given to Sarah Palin when she used the term, "Death Panels?"
She wasn't wrong. It was Stewart Varney who said the most important part out loud. "There's not enough healthcare providers to treat everyone. As a result there has to be system that limits access. Right now, it's insurance and money, but with single-payer it's arbitrary." Or something to that effect.
I wrote a lot over the years about socialized medicine. I have to put some of those old posts up on Substack.
“Justice Kagan said: ‘the government is paying for the medical services so they have the right to dictate details of those services.’ ”
The government pays for nothing with its own money. Because it doesn’t have any money of its own. The only money it can use is that which it confiscates from the relatively few remaining people who work for a living.
“Holly, Holly, Holly. You’re being an alarmist.”
There’s a difference between an alarmist and sounding a necessary alarm. As I’m sure you know, you are doing the latter.
In the presence of a “raging fire,” an alarm is what is needed.
So true. Same reason many people I know are hesitant about school choice. I live in rural Wyoming and there is a large home school population. Many are afraid that school choice where the money follows the child would cause the government to get more involved in accepted curriculum. It's a tough subject because I think school choice could be a good thing, but anything big government touches they manage to make so much worse.
Congratulations. I hope Big Daddy Government takes excellent care of you. I prefer my freedom. And you can take your attitude to hell. Fuck off.
You articulated this very well.
It's been awhile since you wrote this, and I'm terrified that this wasn't a bigger topic at the time, and people seem to have pretty much forgotten it.
If something this barbaric was just breezed over and forgotten, and the people involved never self reflected, and still think of themselves as virtuous, I'm terrified of what's coming in the future.
Covid has shown to me how Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were able to happen.
A great blast from the past, I had not got to yet.
You were wrong, yes, but you are so correct now.
The other thing about single payer, that many look at wrongly is, it's not "the people" that are making those lofty and saintly care decisions - they're just getting fleeced and told they're saving someone from illness, or death - basically it's the medical version of carbon credits/taxes or recycling.
As you know, it's the regime that decides - and since most conservative regimes don't usually push for socialized medicine (not out of altruism- but they don't), then it becomes clearthe marxist regimes are applying the DEI/ESG metrics.
Yes falling afoul of the agenda, on any issue can get you taken off the transplant list or the chemo treatment schedule - you were already actively on/engaged in.
And while they sit on their hallowed thrones, meting out care, the scales are always going to be weighted.
Unvaxed white kids with a congenital heart problem get's denied treatment or like in Canada and the UK - has to wait months or years to be considered or seen - but the trans-anything wants a jiffy-pop penis, vagina, breasts additions/removals and they're seen in a day or week tops.
And "the people" pay.
I once read an article about the UK NHS (this was 10-15 years ago) and the interviewed gov official said they should be a lesson to America. Their healthcare system at the time was so in meshed with public employment (I want to say in the 60th percentile), that if they tried to privatize or revamp it, it would devastate their economy and so no one will ever touch it. Way too many normies in that life boat, who understand what would happen. Some further understand, that they let it grow beyond their control to kill it - mistake!
We are heading that way. Whether Trump has another 4 years or not, the time after that will be a runaway train toward all these social and societal program cliffs.
Among other things the scamdemic was a tolerance test and a tyranny bar setting measure. We failed the test, as a whole and their bar has moved a few more notches, in favor of the tyranny.
Sorry, but I don't find this concern a compelling reason to reject some form of single payer in the US, even though I share a lot of your concerns regarding the politicization of medicine and especially the response to COVID.
First, you don't discuss at all the fact that essentially every developed country in the world provides some form of universal healthcare (maybe they aren't all technically "single payer", but you don't seem to distinguish between the two in this essay. If you would be okay with a form of universal healthcare that wasn't "single payer," perhaps you should specify that). With the possible exception of COVID, I'm not aware of any of them who ration healthcare based on political beliefs. This seems extremely relevant to the question of how big of an issue your concern really is.
Second, and more importantly, you seem to assume that any "single payer" system would mean that the government could punish you by restricting access to certain types of healthcare. But while that would certainly be possible *when using government insurance*, there's nothing stopping the creation of a single-payer system in which people are free to purchase private, supplemental insurance on top of their government insurance. That private insurance could provide coverage for anything that the government was unwilling to provide. As far as I am aware, this is in fact how it works in places like the UK and Canada.
Third, you ignore the fact that the US has extremely strong protections, through the First Amendment, for political dissidents to express their views without being punished by the government. And those protections extend to the provision of government benefits. For example, while the government doesn't have to provide you a driver's license, it can't take away your license because it disagrees with your political viewpoint. If the US government ever created a single-payer system, I have very little doubt that the courts would strike down a law that conditioned provision of government healthcare on citizen's having the correct political beliefs.
On September 9, 2021, the president of the United States did his best to have me fired from my job because I would not enter a room, remove part of my clothing, and have my body injected with the medical instrument of his choosing, against my will and without my consent. He only didn't succeed because of a combination of my switching teams so that I wasn't working on any government contract and brave people suing in response. We got lucky that time I do not trust that we will get lucky every time. That plus the Supreme Court Justice I quoted saying that if the government is paying for it, it has the right to dictated tell me that we are far outside the realm of protection of freedom being the primary concern. The president and the Supreme Court justice I quoted have both said the quiet part out loud. I am merely choosing to believe them and listen.
This highlights yet another reason why I think your analysis is wrong: The very incident that seems to have changed your thinking on single payer (and I'm sorry it happened to you) happened *even though we don't have a single payer system*. You're worried about the government imposing politically motivated medical requirements (either requiring people to get certain medical procedures or preventing people from obtaining them). But *the government already has the power to do those things*. The government already can force you to get a vaccine. And the government can already ban certain types of healthcare (e.g., abortions). Neither power requires the government to be providing single payer healthcare! And, again, even if the government did try to manipulate people politically through a single-payer system, it's highly likely that any system implemented in the US would allow people to buy private insurance on top of any government insurance which could provide for care the government was unwilling to pay for.
I'm not sure how anyone can watch what happened since March 2020 and have their confidence in the resilience of the institutions increase, but you appear to have managed it. I watched Americans lose everything, including 2/3 of all small businesses shuttering (nearly all for good, last I read) and I no longer trust that the government will refrain from doing anything it can, or from trying to do what it can't *yet*. I don't want the same government that worked with old Twitter to silence people like me to decide that I don't get to see my therapist or get new hearing aids or any of the other things it could decide if it was my healthcare provider. I'm not going to be persuaded that it wouldn't do that. I watched far more unlikely things happen already.
But again: You could chose *not* to use it as your healthcare provider, and buy private insurance that would provide for therapy and hearing aids if the government chose not to provide those things for you based on your political beliefs.
I am truly amazed that you continue to have faith that the same government that violated the constitution left right and center because of a respiratory illness can be trusted to set up some kind of system (to replace the system that produces the most medical innovations in the world) that preserves freedom. Part of me is really jealous of you. I really would like to see the world as you apparently do, as after the last four years you are entirely willing to trust that the government would take away just a little bit of freedom, and not absolutely all that it could. They can inject their vaccine into my cold, dead arm, and I will never support putting any member of the government between me and my therapist, nor trusting them to set up a system that won't do exactly that if they take over even more of the 1/6 of our economy that healthcare makes up.
Nor do I find "you have a good income, so you could afford to bypass the system and not have your medical freedom taken away" a reason to support it.
This is an essay about my changing my mind, and you're not going to change my mind back. Not on this. Not after the last four years. I’m done; have a great weekend.
I'm not expecting you to respond to this, and I respect not wanting to get into a debate with some random person on the internet. Clearly COVID was a really traumatic experience for you, which I totally get. Contrary to what your assume, our government's COVID response had a massive effect on me personally that probably mirrors your experience in a lot of ways. Leftist and liberal responses to COVID are probably the main reason I went from being extremely left wing to much more conservative over the course of the COVID regime.
Nonetheless, your response of "government bad" just isn't responsive here. You say that you don't "find 'you have a good income, so you could afford to bypass the system and not have your medical freedom taken away' a reason to support" single payer. But isn't that the system we have *right now*? Do you advocate dismantling Medicaid/Medicare (because those people who rely on them for healthcare are at the whims of the government and could have their "medical freedom" taken away)? If you don't advocate dismantling them, then your position is incoherent--you support government taking "medical freedom" away from poor people/the elderly, but not those who can afford private insurance. If you do advocate dismantling Medicare/Medicaid, then the new system would be "if you don't have enough money, then too bad--no hearing aids/therapy for you, regardless of your politics." Is that really better than the risk that the government might try to unconstitutionally restrict someone's healthcare based on politics? (An attempt by the way that would almost certainly be struck down by the courts, which, contrary to what you have said, in fact did in many cases protect people's Constitutional rights during COVID--it just takes years for litigation to be resolved. See the Supreme Court's ruling about closing down churches during COVID, for example.)
Reading three years after the fact, but kudos to you for actually humbling yourself and admitting a personal error. You're setting a sorely-needed example. May your tribe increase!
Agree. The grass isn't always greener on the other side.
Choice is indeed the sticking point in government funded health care. What are the rules? Who gets to decide? What if your viewpoint or choices aren't mainstream? What if the institutions that protect minorities can't be trusted? Etc. etc. Hence, yes, our flawed health care system is better.
Plus, single payer isn't free, it's just funded differently.
I think the best approach would be for the government to offer voluntary insurance that takes more or less anyone, subsidized by taxes, with the usual open enrollment period to deter freeloading, etc. This program would allow the effectively uninsurable to be insured. Private insurance could then take only the remaining/not absurdly sick people, and I suspect it would thereby be both profitable and cheaper.
Remember all the flak that was given to Sarah Palin when she used the term, "Death Panels?"
She wasn't wrong. It was Stewart Varney who said the most important part out loud. "There's not enough healthcare providers to treat everyone. As a result there has to be system that limits access. Right now, it's insurance and money, but with single-payer it's arbitrary." Or something to that effect.
I wrote a lot over the years about socialized medicine. I have to put some of those old posts up on Substack.
Here's one:
http://winduprubberfinger.com/blog1.php/2014/03/27/as-i-have-said-over
“Justice Kagan said: ‘the government is paying for the medical services so they have the right to dictate details of those services.’ ”
The government pays for nothing with its own money. Because it doesn’t have any money of its own. The only money it can use is that which it confiscates from the relatively few remaining people who work for a living.
“Holly, Holly, Holly. You’re being an alarmist.”
There’s a difference between an alarmist and sounding a necessary alarm. As I’m sure you know, you are doing the latter.
In the presence of a “raging fire,” an alarm is what is needed.
So true. Same reason many people I know are hesitant about school choice. I live in rural Wyoming and there is a large home school population. Many are afraid that school choice where the money follows the child would cause the government to get more involved in accepted curriculum. It's a tough subject because I think school choice could be a good thing, but anything big government touches they manage to make so much worse.