Yeah dat single payer system tho
It's interesting when you step into the Allo boards and see all these well educated people saying it could never work that way for us. After seeing it first hand I have to wonder what has them so convinced. Their culture is quite similar to ours, both the patients and doctors are happier and clearly they have a better system. Why can't we start copying it?
While I totally agree that we are not actually a civilized country until everyone in this country can afford access to care, the hive of scum and villainy that is Allo does have some good points.
1) People are entitled to care but how much care? If you are a chain smoker your insurance costs go up because you will cost the system more money but not in an equitable single player system. Why should comparatively healthy people pay for other people's mistakes?
2) If you make access to care universal then you have two choices: You increase the supply of care providers to the point where care providers make significantly less than they currently do. How could we finance such a decision with the current state of higher education? Or you live with the fact that people will have massive wait times for primary care. We can't even afford to provide effective and efficient primary care to the currently insured folks in this country and people do not tend to use primary care effectively to begin with (e.g. using the ER for primary care, never going for regular checkups, etc) so how are we going to do
even more with an all-insured system?
3) Even if everyone is insured, how do we convince docs to go to the boonies where they are needed the most without somehow restricting their professional freedom? (The answer is probably we don't and make people serve in the boonies for a set amount of time before they are allowed to fly solo like they do in other countries, my home country included where it's called "doing a rural" in Spanish).
Also the idea of having an increased social burden for financing the most expensive care which can at times be futile (e.g. keeping someone on a ventilator for a year when they have zero quality of life, "doing everything" or a full code on a 90 year old diabetic suffering from cardiac arrest because the family wants you to try everything, extensive interventions on sub-18 week premies, etc.) but that is more of an ethical minefield altogether that requires a case by case analysis to be fair.
Don't get me wrong. I think single payer is for sure the way to go but at the very least we have to subsidize higher education before we can convince smart, young people to give up their lives for low compensation AND high debt. While the reasons I listed above are legitimate, I think they are soluble and the importance of providing equitable care is greater than the values they seem to tout.
