Originally posted by Cow Poke
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But Vermont’s single-payer dream fell apart when the state figured out how much it would need to raise taxes to finance its new system. Vermont abandoned the government-run plan after finding it would need to increase payroll taxes by 11.5 percent and income tax by 9 percent.
Currently, California, NY city, NY state, and the Dems at the Federal level all seem to be looking seriously at various possible plans to create medicare-for-all systems with various coverage levels and funding structures.
This seems to me to be an obvious sensible move, as internationally most developed countries successfully use the equivalent of VA-for-all systems (e.g. the UK, NZ) or the equivalent of medicare-for-all systems (e.g. Canada, Australia), with the vast majority of European countries using either of those two systems and delivering healthcare at a much cheaper rate on average than the US. The use of a regulated private healthcare marketplace of the Obamacare style is much rarer, and as far as I am aware the only two Western countries to have successfully implemented such a system are the Netherlands and Switzerland, and resultant healthcare is expensive in those countries compared to those who have VA or Medicare for all equivalent systems.
One of the best comparative analyses I've seen, that features interactive graphs for digging into the international data, is the 2017 Commonwealth Fund healthcare comparative analysis. Of the 11 advanced countries healthcare systems they analyse, they find the UK's implementation (a VA-for-all type system) to be the best overall (also one of the cheapest, costing only just over half of what the US spends), and Australia's implementation (a medicare-for-all type system) to be very close to it (and is slightly cheaper than the UK's system too). The US's current system ranks the worst of the 11 countries in most of their categories and overall, as well as being about a third more expensive than even the most expensive system of the other 10 countries.
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