Single payer healthcare is a no-brainer

SpaceCricket79, I am in general agreement with the basic premise of your OP (as my 'like' indicates) but I see certain flaws in the practice of maintaining a public and private option in parallel (and in the funding sense). As an European, I do not wish to appear to be telling Americans how they should run their health care systems, so please take my comments simply as information.

In my understanding, Single Payer and Universal Health Care may be, but are not always, the same thing. For example, Single Payer could be achieved by having a single giant private insurance company which, by mandate, handled all insurance payments, whereas most Universal Health Care is funded by taxpayer contributions - taking the form of a levy, or incorporated into income tax. So we need to be clear as to what we are discussing.

My experience, in the UK, and in Australia, has been of Universal Health Care, funded by income taxation. Despite rumours to the contrary, both the NHS and the Australian Medicare, are satisfactory systems - the Australian system appears to be better in terms of waiting times, but falls down due to the tyranny of distance (the Australian continent being larger than the Continental United States,) and is thus ranked considerably lower than the NHS by the WHO.

One of the problems of running parallel funding systems being that the funding base is reduced by two systems essentially in competition with each other. What the Australians do is make Medicare contributions mandatory for all taxpayers, but allow additional private health insurance for those who want additional (but non-essential) benefits - such as private rooms in hospital, and hot and cold running nurses. The Medicare contributions are at a modest rate, but pro-rata according to taxable income, and provide a good revenue base with which to fund the system. This means people on low incomes pay no Medicare Levy, but people who earn millions pay a substantial sum. I believe most Universal Health Care systems across Europe are variations upon this theme. They are all ranked higher than the present private system in the US, and they all cost considerably less per person.

But I reiterate that I make these comments purely for information - how Americans run their society is their business.

 

But according to what you stated, it was the publisher who demanded they be removed - so you're saying the publisher of 1984 is censoring its own books? That makes, no sense.

 

No, the publisher didn't put in a DMCA request, but a royalties request. And instead of paying it out of pocket for their own mistake, they removed the book from the Kindles. and reversed the charges and credits.

That on it's own isn't bad. What's bad is that they are capable of doing electronically what they aren't capable of doing with the physical analog. Nobody can argue that the publisher is censoring, they just want their due royalties. What Amazon was doing was censoring to avoid paying royalties.

 

Its not much different however ,in principle, as what Germany and Switzerland have government oversight using private parties it may be different in the ACA but the government has controlled medical care by regulations for a long time. At the state and national levels. The ACA may need work but is at least an options supported by the insurers and other parties at least they are at the table, like I said Hillarycare died due to special interests.