Isn't universal healthcare that all people and communities have the same access to healthcare? India's population is 1.3 billion and this says it will cover 500 million people. So, it doesn't cover all people and communities. It covers some part of the population.
Let's say Obamacare covered only a specific section of US what would have happened then?
To clarify my stand here, I am in favor of Universal Healthcare but not this.
Edit: I saw your edit on agriculture later. So, let me count that out too. We should do everything to support agriculture but the whole policy is skewed towards grains and every bump happens helps to ingrain the fact that grains good but vegetables bad. Do we really want that? So, I am in favor of a policy which works for all and not for specific sections which at least Indian laws tend to do.
Universal healthcare is cast as a 'populist' measure in the US. But if you look at data of cost of healthcare for nations applying universal healthcare vs those who do not in developed nations, India might rationally look at it as an economic efficiency measure.
Agricultural supports also can be looked at with a political filter, but the US provides government back agricultural insurance as a positive economic measure. Otherwise there may be a dwindling population of farmers and farming companies and increased food instability. One could argue about private vs publically funding these stabilization and boosting measures but it's much simpler/stabler to provide some forms long term guarantees via gov't policy than hoping a private market does it and does it correctly (without wiping out or consuming their customers). Are all these measures the same? No, but you have to look deeper than populist bad, private markets good.
I don't understand why we don't have Universal Healthcare? Every other first world country has it. They also spend a lot less money than us. We should borrow what works best from around the world.
Remember, universal healthcare != socialized healthcare. The US has “universal food”, as do most developed nations. In these countries, food isn’t just “free” for everyone.
I think the article is a good example of why universal healthcare would have to remain in place when UBI is implemented. UBI is unlikely to be enough to afford quality healthcare.
The fact that it works in many other countries doesn't mean it will in the United States. Agreed that it successful in many other countries like Canada, UK and France but if you look closer there are a lot of factors that will work against universal health care being successful in the United States. To see if this will work you also need to look at failures. Take India for example government health care in India is awful for the obvious reason, population.
United States population is growing at almost the same rate as India. We also have a new immigrant population every year. We also have the most expensive form of health care thanks to the system that rewards bad doctors. Given this if one were to start universal health care for everybody it would just mean a lot more taxes for all of us. Which is fine with me if I knew that it would work but these issues that I stated above cannot be solved by throwing in more money. There need to be a change in attitude of health care providers towards the business. It might be rewarding them for now but in the long run it is self destructive.
HSA like the earlier comment made on the thread is step in the right direction but it is mostly optimal for younger people. Also even in places like India people have come up with novel ways to solve this problem (http://iaimtomisbehave.org/2009/06/04/healthcare-doctors/). There are alternatives out there we should consider before taking this big step towards universal health care.
Universal health care I'm not so sold on, but the possible options aren't just (1) universal health care and (2) the incredibly awful system the U.S. has.
I'm an American living in Switzerland, for example, and here it is simply the law that you must have insurance. And since the government is guaranteeing income for insurance companies there are controls on how much money the insurance companies are allowed to make (from time to time they even have to send checks to their customers because they made to much money!). Since their profits are capped there is no incentive for shady practices like telling every person who claims "no" knowing full well that around 50% wont know enough to push it further as you see done in the US, South Africa, etc.
This is a good point - and something ignored by some advocates of universal healthcare (I'm partial to the idea of universal healthcare, but would like to see more honest debate of the issue).
New Zealand is incredibly beautiful, I just wish I could go back. The US healthcare system suits the rich quite well. The companies that the rich people work for tend to offer significantly better plans that cover a lot of what you hear a bunch of people complain about. High earners and C-suite execs typically get offered a different plan then the rest of the proletariat do. They can cover the out of pocket costs just fine, and cover the elective procedures themselves. They generally have access to better doctors as well just based on location, flexibility with working hours, plans that will pay for them, and/or it being easier to handle the out of pocket costs.
Universal healthcare actually means a downgrade in the experience for these people, which is one of the reasons why they don't want it. Yea, they might want to make sure that people don't get sent to the poor house just because they came down with some random disease, but god forbid they have to wait their turn behind some plebe in the doctors office.
In the US, the borked healthcare system is a root cause of poverty. That's where universal health care would help with this. There would be fewer people living hand to mouth.
Honestly, I hope America gets universal healthcare as well. I just don't get "if this is struck down, it'll pave the way for true universal healthcare." I think, logically, that universal healthcare would be more likely without the individual mandate in place. At the same time, politically, this will come as a major blow and be seen as many voters as a court rejection of socialized medicine in the US (even though that's not the conclusion will even draw).
America would benefit tremendously from adopting any of the universal healthcare models successfully implemented by many other countries.
Our existing insurance model is basically a giant racketeering scam. The lack of access to affordable healthcare increases crime, stifles innovation, decreases longevity and quality of life, and has created a breeding ground for lot of the crazier shit we are seeing in America.
I think we see Medicare For All sometime in the next 10-15 years. The first major party nominee for President who embraces it is going to get elected.
I think the reason people here don't have health care is we don't require and provide it, and we make it more expensive than any other country.
60 countries have universal health care. Some have a basic national requirement that all insurance companies are required to cover everyone with no exceptions, and that for the most basic health insurance they are not allowed to make a profit, but can offer supplemental plans. Some countries have a dual models of both state and private insurance providers. Some make non-elder care private and compulsory while elder care is provided by taxation. Some require co-pays, some are free. Some are centralized, some decentralized.
What is clear is that in the majority of modernized countries around the world, they figured out how to do universal healthcare a long time ago, and here we are looking like fucking country bumpkins who can't figure out how to give people a basic public service. One of our many national embarrassments.
In 2016 there were 770,000 people who were bankrupted due to medical costs.
Around 45,000 people a year die from a lack of health insurance.
In every country that has universal coverage reform has started with a push to ask a basic moral and ethical question: should we consider healthcare a basic human right?
In the U.S. we pay 18% of our GDP on healthcare, yet we rank ~ 37th in terms of death due to preventable causes, and 31st in terms of overall life expectancy. If you look at how healthcare works in other countries there are many different systems but what they all have in common is a commitment to provide access to healthcare for all citizens. There are different mixes of private and public, and we have already implemented most of them to some degree:
There are 4 main systems 1. Beveridge (public health care providers and insurance rolled into one, like the NHS in UK): The VA and healthcare systems used for native americans use this system
2. National health insurance (private healthcare providers and public insurance funded by the government, like Canada's system): Medicare was copied from the Canadian system (even the name!).
3. Bismarck Model: (private healthcare providers and mostly private insurance, along with an individual mandate and heavy regulation of insurance companies: this is used in Germany and Japan). Obamacare was an incomplete attempt to move more towards this model.
4 Out of pocket model: (fully private: a non-system used by most poor countries in the world). This is what the uninsured fall back on.
The main piece that is missing is we haven't committed to scaling either systems 1, 2 or 3 in order to provide universal access to healthcare and so we have an incredibly fragmented and complex system with soaring costs. American for-profit insurance companies are bloated by ~20% administration fees whereas in most countries they are non-profit entities with 5% or less.
To back up and sum it all up the fundamental question we need to ask ourselves is: do we want to provide universal access to healthcare?
Let's say Obamacare covered only a specific section of US what would have happened then?
To clarify my stand here, I am in favor of Universal Healthcare but not this.
Edit: I saw your edit on agriculture later. So, let me count that out too. We should do everything to support agriculture but the whole policy is skewed towards grains and every bump happens helps to ingrain the fact that grains good but vegetables bad. Do we really want that? So, I am in favor of a policy which works for all and not for specific sections which at least Indian laws tend to do.
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