What is the most promising pathway to reach universal healthcare?
Let’s assume we want all people to have health care. What are the steps / methods most likely to get us there?
In the U.S. seems like we’re a long way from that goal. I’m curious about chunking down the big goal into smaller steps. Interested to hear perspectives from other countries too.
It’s cheaper to have free health care than it is to have our current system and more productive for our country, so it’s really just a matter of following through on any of the public health care referendums.
The Medicare for All act has been introduced multiple times since 2003 and is a great intermediary step to true comprehensive health care for all. Another comment linked to that above.
Ah, so a referendum is a direct vote by the population on a given issue - for example a lot of states have passed recreational marijuana referendums, in my opinion at least because a lot of lawmakers didn’t want to to be seen as supporting it, but you can’t get blamed if the public approved it directly.
I’m not aware of any state level referendums on universal healthcare (which doesn’t mean that there haven’t been any) and there isn’t a national level referendum. (Although in googling this to confirm that I found an interesting article about implementing a national referendum)
With the Medicare for All Act it’s been introduced as a bill, but as I understand the process it first needs to be reviewed by a committee and voted out of that committee before the senate or house can consider it to possibly hold a vote. Then it needs to do the same thing in the other chamber of congress. So you can imagine that’s a lot more convoluted process than a referendum, and while voters may ask their representative to pass it, plenty of opportunities for legislators to say, “oops, some technicality or person who’s not me has stalled the process.”
That is not the problem in this country keeping us from public health care. With the money we saved transitioning to public health care away from private health care, we could fund the tuition of as many doctors as we wanted.
It’s not tuition, but rather openings for students and residents. If you want more people to receive more health care, you need more doctor hours. Which means more doctors. Which means there need to be more spots in medical schools and residencies. These are currently scarce.
In the same way other public services are funded, fund the education of your medical professionals like they do in other countries, and you will have plenty of doctors.
Put the money saved by transitioning to public health care to good use.
Yeah, I was gonna say “guillotines” but basically the same idea. At the very least, we’d have to make bribery illegal, but that’s not going to happen while bribery is legal.
What are you talking about? All the first world countries have public health care and it works better than private health care.
Even in the states, public health care would be far cheaper than private healthcare. Anybody who wants private healthcare instead of public health care is brainwashed.
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