Single Payer would be great if you can trust the uh, payer. But our government is delightfully corrupt, so I'm sure a lot of people with more rare medical conditions would end up with worse treatment than they can get now.
In my country, we have a single payer - the NHS - and we also have private insurance which people can buy, or more commonly be given as a perk by their company, on top of that.
Result? Everyone gets generally great healthcare, nobody has to worry about bills if they get in an accident or fall seriously ill, and people who fetishize "great customer service" (mostly shorter wait times for certain things, though they don't have facilities to handle nearly as much as the NHS does) can get what they want too.
Is it actually corrupt? I hear a lot of hot air about the USG being corrupt, but I almost never hear about quid pro quo scandals... just politicians asking for money because their constituents demand expensive campaigns. We don't like what the government does sometimes, e.g. NSA etc, but I think we have an honest disagreement with them on the best way to protect the country (though they use shady tactics to get their way).
Essentially, it looks to me like government is incentivized to do their job, and most of the problems are due to the way people vote (though gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement schemes like voter ID are a big problem). The soon as voters change their tune, politicians flip on a dime. I've seen it time and again.
So that said, I'm tired of this corruption meme. Can we talk about implementing good systems instead of assuming other people are out to get us?
Single payer manages to function in plenty of countries with worse corruption than the US. The US is one of, if not the only rich country without a universal healthcare system.
Is it better that the majority who have common ailment get easy and very cheap treatment, at the cost of having a more expensive treatment for rare ailments?
Maybe we should outsource much of our government operations to people from western Europe. I propose a new law that only people from Iceland are allowed to run for Congress!
