A Quote by Stuart Altman
When a health policy analyst went to heaven, he asked God the same question: 'Will America ever have a single-payer system?' And God said, 'Absolutely. Just not in my lifetime.' I'm afraid that little story is true. Americans just are not prepared to let government be responsible for all of their health care.
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If we were to build a health care system from scratch, single-payer would be the way to go. But we have a very complex health care system in America.
In comparison to the U.S. health care system, the German system is clearly better, because the German health care system works for everyone who needs care, ... costs little money, and it's not a system about which you have to worry all the time. I think that for us the risk is that the private system undermines the solidarity principle. If that is fixed and we concentrate a little bit on better competition and more research, I think the German health care system is a nice third way between a for-profit system on the one hand and, let's say, a single-payer system on the other hand.
Health care is a human right, and single-payer health care will deliver quality, affordable care to every Illinoisan.
We Americans, or half of Americans, think health care is a commodity. Other countries view health care as a social service that should be collectively financed and available to everyone on equal terms. My wife and I just interviewed the German minister of health, and it was an exhilarating experience, because it was a totally different language. It was obviously important that everyone should have the same deal in health care.
Illinois needs a single-payer health care system, and as governor, I will take the steps to get us there.
The United States remains the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all of our people. And yet we are spending almost twice as much per capita. We have a massively dysfunctional health care system. And I do believe in a Medicare for all single-payer system, whether a small state like Vermont can lead the nation, which I certainly hope we will, or whether it's California or some other state.
When I talk about democratic socialist, I am talking about Medicare, a single payer health care system for the elderly. And in my view, we should expand that concept to all people. I believe that everybody in this country should be entitled to health care as a right.
I think the Scandinavian health systems are better when it comes to preventative care than the German system, because in the Scandinavian systems, the government is really more active in defining treatment, goals and defining health priorities. The German system is a competitive system with little government intervention. The price for this is that the government cannot set a health agenda. And the Scandinavian systems have little competition, so you often do have waiting lists. But on the other hand, you then have the government which can push for prevention.
As a single-payer advocate, I believe that at the end of the day, if a state goes forward and passed an effective single-payer program, it will demonstrate that you can provide quality health care to every man, woman and child in a more cost-effective way.
I had a back-and-forth where I asked Donald Trump, is it true or false that he said the government should pay for everyone's health care? He said it's false. Listen, within minutes, we put out a video just contrasting what he said there with video of him just a few months earlier saying exactly the opposite.
There are tax increases throughout this Obamacare thing. It is just an expansion of government for the purposes of redistribution of wealth, and it's being said it's a health care bill to improve the lives of the American people and provide more access to the health care system for the American people who were denied it. It's all a sham. It's all a giant hoax just like this climate change thing is.
If the goal of health-care reform is to provide comprehensive, universal health care in a cost-effective way, the only honest approach is a single-payer approach.
The German health care system is unique in its attempt to combine competition among sickness funds on the one hand and a universal coverage plan on the other hand. Most health care systems are either one or the other, so you either have private insurance and competition but not everyone is covered for everything, or you have a single-payer system. So the ideal types are like the American system on the one hand or the Scandinavian or U.K. systems on the other end.
Germany tries to combine the advantages.
If anything, I don't have to convince the American public that we have a broken health-care system. I think the majority of Americans since they have to go through that health-care system, already know it.
While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system.
Nowadays, a minister of health cannot consider his or her job done simply by looking at the health care system. It's not enough to have a health policy, you need healthy policies elsewhere.
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