WHY SINGLE PAYER WON’T WORK….A lot of people seem to think we should just junk the current healthcare system, forget insurance companies, and implement a single payer system.
There are many problems with this approach. The biggest is that it will never work in America. You may not like it ? you may like the Canadian system better ? but Americans are simply never going to endorse a Canadian style single payer system. That is a pipe dream. As long as we hold on as hard as we can to a single payer alternative, we only empower those pushing medical savings accounts and marginalize our views.
There are also large differences beteween the USA and Canada ? like 10 times the population. Another is that they are much more egalitarian than Americans are. Again, we may not like this, but if we are trying to solve a problem we have to work within the ideological constraints of the United States, not try to create a utopia that will never be achieved here and act as if it exists.
Finally Canadians believe in good government, Americans are suspicious of government. The Canadian system is not one single payer, but one for each province run by provincal governments. Do you trust individual states to be able to run a health care system for their citizens? Seen what happened to Medicaid when we tried that in the USA ? do you want to repeat that?
