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Comment by petegrif | Hacker News Reader

The health system in the US is a total mess. Single payer is the only sane way to go. That too will be imperfect and ragged but it is provenly absurdly cheaper - practically all advanced industrial countries are single payer and all spend far less as a percentage of their GNP - as in half to a third - whilst covering everybody. The admin savings are staggering, the drug costs are lower etc etc.

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We've eliminated the possibility of Single Payer in the US, and the reason for this is stupid: Nobody on the left can criticize the ACA anymore. Due to our ridiculously partisan shitshow that we've got going on, any criticism by Democratic Party politicians of the ACA will bring a shunning from the party leaders. The only thing they are allowed to do anymore is gloss over the ACA's failings with flowery language, and say they want to "improve" it.

But you can't "improve" the ACA into single payer. You can only get single payer by starting over from scratch.

The pathetic thing is that a public option, the original plan, could quite easily be improved into single payer. And despite the largest Democratic majorities in both the house and senate for several decades, with a sparkly new progressive Democratic president that campaigned primarly on health care reform, they couldn't pass it. It seems the Democratic party has something to learn from the Republican party on how to get shit done.

Single payer is considered socialism by half the population due to decades of Republican rhetoric.

That's because single payer IS socialism. The problem is that not all socialism is bad :) .

We have single-payer here in my country, and anecdotal evidence is that it works incredibly better than healthcare in the U.S. for 99% of cases (the U.S. is far better at treating complicated health problems, but at staggering costs).

I wouldn't go that far, personally. Well, with respect to the "old guard" of Democrats, yes.

But Bernie Sanders' position on health care was essentially single payer (https://berniesanders.com/medicareforall/). And he did quite well, particularly with the younger voting bloc.

From a perspective of "the left" overall, I think the seeds for single payer might be a little stronger than you think. That's especially since opinion polls seem to indicate single payer systems are fairly popular. (http://www.gallup.com/poll/191504/majority-support-idea-fed-...)

Whether enough political will can be built up to get past the perverse crony capitalism inside the health care industry, that's another question.

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