| | | Universal care is only a tiny bit of it. We have a generation of health care workers, esp. specialists, who have every expectation of making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, up towards tens of millions (e.g. surgeons at Swedish in Seattle). And corporations running the show paying huge salaries and bonuses at the top.
That mindset isn't going easily, not until perhaps the last penny from the middle class has been absorbed and the system collapses under it's own top heavy weighting.
Without comprehensive social reform, the system can never function as a means of delivering universal health care. It's just math... there is no freakin' way we could give the kind of treatment other countries do -- we cost 300% of the average of our OECD peers, and we have the next to worst outcomes, without totally blowing out the deficit.
Other countries can do it because they give a crap about people. We do not in the US, not in the end, or else it would look a lot different. Maybe if the march towards facism is beaten back by the people next fall, there will be a tiny ray of hope. But from a structural perspective, I agree we can't get there from here without an exogenous or revolutionary transformation. |
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