FACT: Single-payer health care will never happen overnight in our country as a result of Dennis Kucinich passing his bill or Bernie Sanders finally knocking some sense into his colleagues.
FACT: Single-payer health care can happen over the course of this decade if the blue states keep putting pressure on big-profits insurance with state-run public options and single-payer schemes.
Single-Payer health care will arrive in America by gradually strangling the big-profit insurers to death at the state level -- otherwise known as the "death by a thousand cuts" model for obtaining real universal health care.
As the media has reported, Vermont is proposing a real single-payer system to take the place of ACA and Connecticut is proposing to complement ACA with a robust public option called SustiNet that will eventually cover 1/3 of the state's citizens. As you can imagine, the bastard CEOs running big-profit insurance companies in Hartford are pretty grumpy about the whole public option in Connecticut thing.
What's the reality, though? You have two liberal states with liberal governors and legislative bodies that will be pushing these public plans into place...and soon. That's two fewer states in which big-profit insurers can screw over the public. You better believe Aetna and CIGNA aren't going to stay in the Connecticut or Vermont markets with effective public plans in place. Aetna is already running scared in Colorado.
This brings me to the plan to bring single-payer to the United States by forcing the big-profit insurers to endure "death by a thousand cuts." Follow my logic through 10 steps:
1.) Small states like CT and VT demonstrate that public insurance options are popular, effective and save money.
2.) Big-profits insurers leave those tiny states, but don't really care because they can still fuck over people in New York and California. They're nervous, though, about losing even those small markets. The folks on Wall Street are starting to get nervous...
3.) New York, Illinois and California pass robust public options (ala Sustinet) or single-payer systems (ala Vermont). Now, the big-profit insurers are really scared.
4.) Big-profit insurers start pissing their pants now, but stay in those states as they are large and some idiot Republicans still think private plans are better.
5.) Purple states see they can solve their budget problems by creating public options or single-payer programs.
6.) As more and more people abandon big-profit insurers in New York and California, they pull out of those markets.
7.) Texas and other states realize they're idiots for continuing big-profit insurance insanity and follow the lead -- yes, I don't think this is unreasonable -- of California and New York.
8.) Big-profit insurers realize it's not sustainable to keep "doing" for-profit medical insurance in the United States and they stop, instead focusing on selling "supplemental plans" to those who want private hospital beds and the like -- just like they do in the UK and Europe.
9.) Eventually, all of these de facto public options and single-payer schemes in the states are quasi-federalized into a kind of "Medicaid for All" program, which pays higher rates than the current program.
10.) Our long national nightmare with cruel, abusive, immoral, and unethical big-profit insurers is OVER. Single-payer care for all Americans is achieved within the confines of so-called ObamaCare.
We have FREEDOM!
Of course, there are other "logic trains" one could follow to arrive at single-payer health care in the United States (for example, a successful single-payer effort in California would do much to speed the demise of the big-profit insurers), but the central idea is the same: we must get single-payer health care by forcing the big-profit insurers to endure "death by a thousand cuts" and ultimately cry "uncle" as they retreat from their horrid role as the central financing mechanism for this nation's health care "system."
Support CT's SustiNet, California's single-payer effort, and Vermont's single-payer initiative.