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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

It's politics as well. The Democratic candidate campaigning on maintaining the status quo is leading against the candidate who is campaigning on single payer. There's not much left to do when larger cohorts of voters prefer an inefficient, wasteful system (or a candidate who supports such a system). What we currently have is what people are voting for.

I've tried to make everything stated above objective in keeping with forum guidelines. Personally, I find the situation incredibly demoralizing. Perhaps the outcome of COVID-19 is a demonstration as to why healthcare needs to be fixed.

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IMHO it’s not so much that they prefer the existing system as it is that they fear the unknown. No matter how bad their existing coverage is, they worry that some replacement would be even worse. It’s a downstream consequence of the collapse of faith in our institutions - as bad as things are, nobody trusts Congress to be able to design anything better. So they cling fearfully to whatever they’ve got.

The Devil you know, etc.

I am unsure how you cultivate courage and compassion at scale, but we have never needed it more as a society. Somehow we must get from "I've got mine, f___ you" to "I've got mine, how can I help you?" Otherwise, ruin awaits us.

There's plenty of evidence that single payer polls better than Sanders. Maybe a candidate without his baggage can get it done.

No other such candidate exists at this time. EDIT: We're going to have to keep waiting for older politicians and voters to age out of the system before meaningful policy progress can be made. Sanders is the best candidate if you value single payer.

"You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after exhausting all other options." -- Churchill

No such candidate could exist - Sanders' only baggage is being described as a socialist, they haven't dug up any moral failings or flip flopping or other BS rationales. Any candidate that embraces Medicare for All will instantly be branded a socialist by the MSM and be in exactly the same spot, but may lack the honesty and integrity that Sanders has cultivated.

What baggage? The label of 'democratic socialist'? No Presidential candidate in recent memory has been as devoid of scandal as Bernie Sanders.

The Overton Window has slid so far to the right that such remedies are considered to be radical. Sigh.

Single payer healthcare for all has always been radical in the US. The Overton Window shifting to the left over the last decade is what has allowed Bernie to have any relevance at all.

Has it been? Those 65 and older (Medicare), those on assistance (Medicaid), and current/past military service members (Tricare) all appear to be very satisfied with their single payer healthcare.

I genuinely don't understand why this is considered a radical idea when so many citizens are happy with this public benefit. This leads me to believe that the only cohort who believes it to be radical is that which is to be disrupted by such a policy.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/186527/americans-government-hea...

"Americans' satisfaction with the way the healthcare system works for them varies by the type of insurance they have. Satisfaction is highest among those with veterans or military health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and is lower among those with employer-paid and self-paid insurance. Americans with no health insurance are least satisfied of all."

Yes, they are happy with it just like they are happy with social security income. The radical part (in the US) is suggesting that it should be available to everyone regardless of age (or veteran/military status) without any concrete plans to pay for it.

> This leads me to believe that the only cohort who believes it to be radical is that which is to be disrupted by such a policy.

Then you are being willfully myopic if you can’t possibly envision people who don’t have faith in the government to not cause a meaningful regression in care by destroying the private market. You can both be unhappy with the current opaque healthcare market and not support Medicare for all.

> Then you are being willfully myopic if you can’t possibly envision people who don’t have faith in the government to not cause a meaningful regression in care by destroying the private market. You can both be unhappy with the current opaque healthcare market and not support Medicare for all.

I can't empathize with irrationality. We are at rock bottom. If you refuse the only life raft in sight in the ocean, you have only yourself to blame for the suffering you inflict on yourself and others.

National healthcare has been attempted for generations now: https://www.healthcare-now.org/legislation/national-timeline...

It's been vigorously opposed by the usual suspects, but it's not at all a new proposal.

What we currently have is what people are voting for

We have something similar with respect to climate change policy in Australia - most people in polls and surveys claim to want more aggressive mitigation policies, yet they will just not vote for it.

A complex web of fears and other factors seems to have caused a sclerosis in most of the liberal democracies, and any significant change from the clearly dysfunctional status quo is almost impossible to bring about. Polities that can't respond to changing circumstances are not going to fare well & we clearly have deep troubles in our very near futures.

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