If you really want to solve it, and have the political willpower, you just do it over time. Nationalize all hospitals and insurance companies, and continue to run them as they currently are, and slowly streamline systems over decades, and don't hire replacements for retirees.
What would healthcare-centric revolt look like? You would need to apply pressure to specific congressional representatives, who support a specific ideology and don't believe in universal healthcare (A Crowdpac campaign has funded close to $4 million dollars to challenge Susan Collins when she's up for reelection due to her supreme court vote; that most likely won't scale). I could of course see rouge elements of such a movement using violence (not condoned!), but there has to be something legal that puts fear into Congress to act.
Merge all the regional monopolies into one big national hospital monopoly, with all the drug buying power that brings. Then get the Trump/Clinton Care bill passed that controls insurance prices and regulates this new 'National Health Service' as the hospital monopoly might be called.
I have suggested, in another comment, directing the money to states rather than hospitals.
We don't need to take the narrow view that hospitals are the only way to do this. Let the states run the show, let them take the money, and let them use the money for social services, or to reimburse hospitals for vaccines, or whatever else that will make a positive impact.
Next idea is to have the government exert more control on the health care providers; their rates are many times higher than that of e.g. Canada, for example. Why is that? Because they get away with it. That's the other problem to tackle.
There's plenty of money to make it happen, it just has to be taken from the 60% of the total budget currently being spent on the military - military which doesn't help the country itself at the moment.
Put the Surgeon General in charge of it and conscript all healthcare professionals into a uniformed US Health Service. Uniforms would make the best political cover.
They can tackle it in other ways. US government can setup hospitals and employ doctors. It can be free of cost.
Build more nuclear plants, no one from the right will oppose it.
Perhaps conscript some doctors and pharmaceutical manufacturers under penalty of fine or imprisonment. Don’t let them go until they provide the health care we each and all deserve.
An easier first step would be to force all healthcare and hospitals to be non-profit, and never enter the stock market. Shareholders want profit, and an easy way to profit on healthcare is to deny benefits.
As someone with multiple "pre-existing conditions" who cares for a stroke survivor (my wife) and a stage 4 chronic kidney disease patient (my mother-in-law,) I suggest we do the following:
1. make private health insurance illegal
2. pass a Constitutional amendment allowing every human the unlimited and absolute right to buy, make, modify, and sell medical things including importing and exporting those items.
It is cheaper just to buy things than to use insurance. The stock holders need to loose all of their equity then go to prison.
So clearly healthcare in the US is fucked end to end. Has anyone (government or private sector) tried or proposed some sort of trial hospital where we just clean-slate redesign and evaluate the whole thing?
*Probably would need to be government as would need exceptions from tons of laws.
IMHO You need to make it legal to open and run a hospital (hospitals are basically local state-granted monopolies like cable companies). You make it legal to offer differential pricing. You decouple healthcare from employment. You allow employers to offer more than one insurer.
Most of what we need to do is just remove the monopoly rules.
Well, they can't deny emergency care to a human being who is about to die/in critical condition, can they? So lets start on that common ground - They do already have unequivocal obligations in the current system. Now from that end of the spectrum to the other end, say perhaps an elective purely cosmetic surgery that is non-essential (agreed, this is subjective) we can find some middle ground, can we not?
As a practical matter of policy, the government can incrementally build the path towards universal coverage. By identifying problems in the outcomes of the existing system, and using various common-sense priorities to draft legislation, this can be done in a slow and sustainable manner. There are various proposals out there drafted by people far smarter than I. Its not that I think any particular one is a silver-bullet, but the current system where people go bankrupt due to medical costs is very alarming. We need to start somewhere if we are to tackle this problem.
I totally get the fear of creating yet another entitlement program, and how hospitals will possibly milk the government, but the current system isn't working, people are quite literally dying and/or having their lives be destroyed due to medical costs, so it about time we did something. I've seen some of this damage first hand and its terrifying to think it could happen to people I care about or even myself.
Or start our own “people’s hospitals” or even insurance (there should not be insurance schemes IMO)
Or maybe not pay existing hospitals/ insurance companies
I do not know how else to “try”
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