General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Bernie Sanders talks universal Medicare, and 1.1 million people click to watch him [View all]Sophia4
(3,515 posts)form even now.
Here is an article that discusses the problems that Vermont's relatively tiny population cause when it comes to accessibility and costs of healthcare. The population in Vermont is under 700,000. Vermont is an example of a state that would need to work with surrounding states in any event, whether we are talking about private insurance companies or a single payer system if it wants adequate healthcare.
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/2017/03/12/high-costs-few-options-vt-health-care/98685848/
I saw a clip of Hillary dissing single payer healthcare saying it would never happen. She was quite negative about it and not very gracious on this topic either. Sorry to hurt your feelings, but I saw what I saw.
A lot of Democrats support single payer. But most Americans have no idea what single payer means. Many think it is government healthcare in which it is the government rather than an insurance company that denies your healthcare. That was not my experience.
My youngest daughter was born with terrible allergies. Her skin was broken out when she was born. I remember that the obstetrician right in the delivery room commented about how the rash would go away. It didn't. This was many years ago, and my primary care physician wanted to get a medication from the United Kingdom that had not been fully tested for my daughter. It took a couple of weeks if I remember correctly, but she got the experimental medication (something sort of homeopathic) and it worked. I think I had a better chance of getting that experimental medication on a single payer system than I would have had here with an insurance company thinking not just about the lack of official approval for the medication but about the insurance company's own profits when considering the approval.
So I had a wonderful experience with single payer. The doctors are much more in charge of the system than they are here. Here, the profits of the insurance company are always at stake. While that might seem to be an incentive to give better care to patients and certainly more preventive care (if you think about it logically), that has not been my experience. I am on the Kaiser program because I think in my opinion that system is as close to the single payer system as possible. The doctor seems to be more in charge than are the isolated primary care doctors out there that fight with insurance companies on behalf of patients in a rather helpless, disorganized way.
That's my experience anyway.