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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMore States Are Proposing Single-Payer Health Care. Why Aren't They Succeeding?
The Democratic presidential primary might feel like a lifetime ago, but one important storyline in that race was health care specifically single-payer health care, or the policy that the government should offer universal health insurance to everyone in the country. The nomination of now-President Biden, who opposed single-payer health care during the primary, has put single-payer health care on the backburner nationally. But that hasnt stopped the issue from impacting state legislators, who have introduced more single-payer health care bills in the last few years than ever before.
Health care policy researchers Erin C. Fuse Brown and Elizabeth McCuskey tracked the number of unique single-payer bills introduced in state legislatures across the country from 2010 to 2019, finding a sharp uptick in bills introduced since 2017. During each of those three years, at least 10 single-payer proposals were introduced, according to Brown and McCuskeys research, for the first time since 2013. In total, state legislators proposed more single-payer bills from 2017 to 2019 than in the previous seven years combined. And for 2021, weve identified 10 single-payer bills that legislators introduced across the country, from liberal states like California and Massachusetts to more conservative ones including Iowa and Ohio.
What do all these proposals have in common? Theyve all universally failed. In fact, Vermont, the only state that managed to pass single-payer health care in 2011, ended up shelving its plan three years later.
It makes sense why single-payer advocates have tried to take these fights to the states. States have traditionally been seen as the laboratories of democracy, and some advocates of single-payer health care have argued that liberal states could provide unique opportunities to advance single-payer health care. But as Ill explain, passing single-payer health care at the state level is next to impossible, as states are particularly limited in how they can allocate federal and private health care funds. There is, however, evidence that Americans may have an appetite for a public option, or government-run health insurance that people can opt into at the state level. Three states (Colorado, Nevada and Washington) have already passed a public option. Its not single-payer health care reform, but its possible that we might see more states adopt their own public-option reforms.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-states-are-proposing-single-payer-health-care-why-arent-they-succeeding/
House of Roberts
(5,120 posts)to forfeit all payments of Medicare and Medicaid, but the workers still have to pay into FICA Medicare.
There's always a way Republicans pervert anything so it won't work.