A few thoughts on healthcare

Some professors at Harvard Medical basically said that single-payer is the only viable option in the face of the failure of the Massachusetts model for healthcare. (I've said this before.) This is similar to what I wrote to a friend who is a recent med school grad in an email last Christmas Eve:

It may be a long conversation to get into the pros and cons of different policy approaches, and I certainly am no expert. I do however consider myself a quasi-informed citizen, and as such am willing to stake out a few opinions:

1) I think that going to a single-payer system (government) for routine health care is the optimal long-term strategy. It may be that the industry gets fractured between primary care and specialized medicine, the latter still requiring insurance and therefore remaining problematic in the sense that it isn't "universal" and its costs may remain too prohibitive for direct payment from patient to physician. I think insurance is more a problem than a solution when it comes to health care, and I say that as someone who has had a fair share of bullshit to deal with for fairly minor matters.

2) Apropos (1), since the vast majority of health care concerns, if addressed early and well, don't require a specialist I would think that nurse practitioners would be fine in working in such a system alongside generalists). With the reduced burden in terms of insurance/paperwork/bullshit that a single-payer system brings, the cost of this policy would be far less than a lot of people realize and a lot higher in quality through preventative and diagnostic expansion.

3) The costs for insurance for specialized medicine should plummet if primary care was provided for with tax dollars. Specialists like you and your wife may end up becoming should still thrive if the single-payer system applied only to primary care as a more pervasive and effective primary care system would make it easier on you as well.

4) In addition, one would think that insurance could get "lean and mean" and your side of things (providing specialized care) would probably grow in efficiency as well because a lot of the hassle and bullshit could get dealt with at the primary level.

I wrote him in response to this article by Ezra Klein about the crisis of primary care in America.