No. of Recommendations: 4
Hang on a sec...(cleaning out ears)...are you saying we *need* to provide employment for legions of redundant paper shufflers, who do nothing productive, at the expense of everyone else?
No, because I'm not talking about redundant paper shufflers. I'm talking about the people who actually provide the medical services. Nurses and orderlies and lab techs and all the people who actually do the work in the health care field.
Insurance companies - or in this conversation "redundant paper shufflers" - serve the same purpose for advocates of a single-payer health care system as "waste, fraud, and abuse" does for conservatives who want to slash taxes. It's a magical - and mythical - pot of money that they posit so that they can argue for what they want without having to confront any trade-offs. For conservatives, the magic WFA money pot lets them argue that they can get huge amounts of tax cuts without having to reduce government services. Because if their tax cuts actually reduce government services, there would be a political backlash. So "waste, fraud, and abuse" let them have both the tax cuts and government programs.
For single-payer advocates, insurance companies (or paper shufflers or some other needless bureaucrats) fill the same role. They let advocates imagine that there's a way to dramatically cut health care spending without reducing the compensation to people or institutions they care about. All those hard-working nurses and orderlies and lab techs I mentioned, many of whom are union members in the SEIU holding solid middle-class jobs. If you reduce health care spending by 60%, then all those people have to get paid less. Or some of them have to get fired when you reimburse the hospitals or clinics they work at 60% less for all their treatments. There isn't a magic ball of money that's just being 'wasted' on things or people no one cares about that you can tap into. The money goes for people working in the health care sector to have solid well-paying and often middle-class jobs doing important work to help people.
That's what Vermont faced. There wasn't enough money to: i) give everyone a top-flight health care plan; ii) set taxes at a level that it was just taking money out of one pocket into another; and iii) not slash health care compensation to ordinary people working in the sector. You can't have all three. And the voters will never support abandoning any one of those three. Especially since they've been told over and over again that there's this magic ball of money (called "insurance skim" or whatever) that obviates the need for hard choices. Since there's no magic ball of money, and no support for the steps that have to be taken without the magic ball of money, there's no single-payer health care. And everyone gets to just blame "JC's," rather than face the real problem....
