This isn’t really a fair question because places like Canada and the UK weren’t trying to shift from a bizarre private system tied to employment.
I agree with the premise though. I see no reason America couldn’t shift in one large transition.
The first “Medicare for All” bill was actually introduced in 2003 by John Conyers. The number of co-sponsors has increased over the years.
Medicare for All has always meant a universal, single-payer health care system in which private insurance is restricted. If Buttigieg didn’t understand when he tweeted that, then he didn’t really do his homework.
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I don’t recall anyone saying that they support universal health care but oppose Medicare for All while coming up with an alternative. As far as I know, none of the other possible models for setting up a universal health care system has advanced to the form of being a bill in Congress.
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You don’t have to adopt Bernie’s plan exactly with no deviations to support Medicare for All. For example, I believe the M4A House bill introduced by Pramila Jayapal has some differences.
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https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1804
The meaning of m4a was understood when pete made that tweet. But you already knew that 
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I dont know much about the history in the UK. In Canada another big difference is that at the time we started making steps toward government HC, the whole concept of HC was very different than today. In the mid 20th century the “lack of HC coverage” was perceived as the absence of a local doctor. Our government HC started as a simple thing - rural towns putting “hire a doctor” in their budget. That’s pretty different than trying to deliver modern HC to 350 million people.
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We still have private insurance here in Canada. Baseline coverage is universal though.
The usual conceptions of M4A generally prohibit private insurance from duplicating coverage for things covered by the public health care program, but allow for supplemental private insurance. There are other ways of doing universal, single-payer health care that don’t have that prohibition, but I don’t know of any proposal to do so in the US.
The one thing I don’t hear talked about much is what the plan is for the almost one million people who work for the medical health insurance industry. Do any plans account for their transition to other employment if the US went full M4A?
This obviously isn’t a reason to not adopt M4A. I’m just curious if it part of the discussion.
The government could conceivably hire each and everyone of them at the same salaries and still reduce the cost of healthcare over all by eliminating the x% that get skimmed off the top.
The M4A will definitely indeed need a bunch of bureaucrats that will do the paperwork that won’t completely be eliminated.
Edited to add: As geewhysee says below M4A doesn’t have to mean the end of the private insurance industry. They can still sell insurance that supplements M4A, eg. premium dental plans.
The NHS is single payer and we still have private insurance if you want it.
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Sure but much of the savings will come from reducing this huge infrastructure so most of these people will need to find work elsewhere.
As I said above, we also have private insurance in Canada but it’s a small industry compared to the US.
I’ve seen the estimated job losses as closer to two million and, yes, there are proposals out there such as guaranteeing the salaries of displaced workers for a time and giving them money for retraining.
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I’m not sure you do. (BTW, “hate” is too strong, for at least me personally)
And the bolded here is why I think you’re still confused.
We don’t need exactly Bernie’s plan. Yes, I do think that Pete’s “Medicare for All who want it” plan had flaws. But those are policy disagreements. Much like how I don’t think his Supreme Court reform idea was ideal. But again, it was a policy disagreement that I could live with. Even if I didn’t agree with his plan, I at least gave him points for bringing the issue up in the first place.
Pete pissed a lot of us off to varying degrees because (and I’ll put this in bold), he used GOP talking points to attack Medicare For All in the Democratic primary. I don’t think you’ve ever acknowledged that specifically.
Some of us think that Pete did that to advance his own career. Fast forward one year later, and he’s been offered a cabinet position in the new administration. Is there a connection between attacking Medicare for All, wounding Bernie’s chances in the primary and being offered this job? Maybe. Maybe not. But I don’t think it’s tinfoil hat to see a link here. That’s why people are talking about it.
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They can learn to code.
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Accurate title change
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Universal coverage that financially burdens consumers isn’t an acceptable solution. Obamacare tried to go for a warped version of “universal healthcare” where everyone is forced to pay for coverage, and the coverage you got was often terrible.
It needs to be paid for by taxes, not premiums.
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Looks like Biden is going to pick Miguel Cardona for the Education job. He’s a younger guy that started out as a teacher, working his way up to the admin level in Meriden, CT, a smaller city that’s pretty diverse (relative to other areas of CT). Solid choice IMO. Interesting that Biden didn’t choose the other front runners for the job that were union heads.
He also has an EdD. I wonder how many articles are going to be written about him wanting to be called Dr.
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That’s gonna piss off the teacher unions.
Education sucks. It’s an issue where everyone is wrong. Teachers unions are mostly terrible, charter schools suck resources and enrich scumbags, the property tax funding system screws everything up, it’s basically impossible to fix and one of the most depressing issues this side of health care and gun control.
You mean ineffective, or something else?
I always see teachers talking about how they purchase supplies using their own money, work 70 hours/week, etc and it strikes me that their unions are really dropping the ball. Like, if I was a teacher and my school didn’t provide enough pencils or notebooks for my kids, those kids would not have pencils or notebooks until the school found the extra 75 bucks in its budget.
On the other hand, I once represented an ESOL teacher in a grievance where she was just doing zero of the required paperwork for the state and federal grants that the school received, and it took several years of action plans and employee counseling and the like before they were able to actually fire her. So clearly the union is good at something.
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