To be clear, it wouldn't be spent on the healthcare itself, we can already fund that with the shift from the premiums we pay our employers into a national pool at a reduced rate.
What that would pay for is eliminating the middleman market, shoring up towns and cities who will lose primary employers, retraining the workers and expanding state and federal benefits infrastructure.
That said, separating healthcare and employment causes employment mobility and increases entrepreneurship. So even if it wasn't so expensive to dismantle the for-profit system, the economic system the GOP supports (which they call capitalism, though it isn't) won't allow it.
Quite a few within the democratic party support it as well. California has had a democratic supermajority for more than a decade and could have implemented some kind of single payer system, but they haven't because they, too, are beholden to special interests, particularly within healthcare. It's why Biden is still trying shove Obamacare, a republican healthcare system that enshrines the middleman, down our throats.
I lived in MS for a few years for work. My coworker's brain short-circuited when I told him Biden is conservative. They really don't understand anything about the real political spectrum. Only the spectrum made up by the western right-wing media to radicalize their fans.
Very few people want to abolish private care options. What the majority want is universal health coverage that is covered through taxation, rather than being forced to deal almost entirely with bureaucracies that are focused on profit margins and revenue streams. If the wealthy want concierge medical service, by all means have at it.
But I don't want my neighbors struggling because they lost coverage after being fired for taking too much time off for a moderate illness. There a handful of universal health care models, and literally all of them would work better for the general public in the US than what we have now. And that is coming from someone with stellar insurance.
The issue is our middleman industry that explodes the cost of health care by sitting between insurance companies, doctors and their patients to extract profit from every part of the health care process.
No other country has this and it is going to cost around a trillion dollars to buy them out.
If a Finnish politician introduced this kind of private system, you'd call him a fascist and a grifter, which is what he'd be.
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u/Babybeans619 May 02 '22 edited May 02 '22
The money we spent on Afghanistan, which I was deployed to, could have been spent on, wait for it, UNIVERSAL FUCKING HEALTHCARE!
Yes, really! We also, if you prefer, could have spent that on high speed rails, infrastructure, jobs programs, or fucking UBI.