Single-Payer Health Care: America Already Has It | 5 Minute Video
Could a single-payer, government-run health care system work in the United States? We already know the answer, because America already has single-payer, government-run health care. Author and commentator Pete Hegseth explains.
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Script:
Would a government-run, Canadian-style health care system work in the United States, a nation of 320 million people?
Well, we already know the answer. Just ask America’s veterans—they’ve had government-run health care for decades.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (known as the VA) runs the largest hospital and health care system in America. The VA employs over 340,000 people—twice the size of the Marine Corps. And it has a $180 billion annual budget, making it the second largest department in the Federal Government. Only the Department of Defense budget is bigger.
The VA is a true single-payer health care system. It runs over 150 hospitals and 1,400 community-based clinics across all 50 states. The doctors, nurses, administrators – everyone that works for the VA – is a government employee. The system actively serves some 7 million patients—one-third of the 21 million veterans alive in the U.S. today.
Sounds impressive, right?
But for the past few decades—and especially for veterans of the war in Vietnam, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where I served—the VA has been an abysmal failure: inefficient, bureaucratic and sometimes deadly.
Among veterans, horror stories about the VA abound. These stories were tragically brought to light in 2014, when whistleblowers in Phoenix revealed that 1,700 veterans there had waited an average of 115 days just to receive an initial appointment. According to the VA’s official policy, that wait time should have been no more than 14 days.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Phoenix VA then lied about it, releasing falsified waiting lists to the public to cover its tracks.
Phoenix turned out to be the norm, not the exception. The VA’s inspector general found systemic problems across the country.
In Fort Collins, Colorado, for example, clerks were instructed to falsify records to show that doctors were seeing more patients than they actually were.
In Columbia, South Carolina, delays in diagnosis and treatment directly led to the deaths of multiple patients. The VA program there had nearly 4,000 backlogged appointments despite a $1 million grant earmarked to reduce delays.
And in the VA’s hospital in Pittsburgh, in 2011 and 2012, there was an outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease that officials knew about for more than a year before informing patients. At least six veterans died as a result.
The Obama Administration’s own Deputy Chief of Staff, Rob Nabors, revealed that VA health care has a “corrosive culture” with “significant” and “systemic failures.”
The politicians’ response to this debacle? Spend more money — a lot more money. The VA’s budget has almost doubled since 2009. They’ve hired 100,000 new people in the past decade. Wait times have actually gone up, yet not one administrator was fired for the wait-list scandal.
For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/videos/single-payer-health-care-america-already-has-it
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Shows that government sucks at everything they do.
This is so scummy, competition would not make the va better. Why? Bc healthcare is a credence good so the person "shopping" wouldnt know if the care hes getting is good unless he dies, this isnt an economic thing its a psychology things. The dunning kruger effect where a person with little to no knowledge on a subject acts with a high amount of confidence. Imposter syndrome which is the opposite of the dunning kruger effect where a person with a lot of knowledge on a subject doesn't act confident in their skills. Also the placebo and nocebo effect where a person feels symptoms of treatment and medicine even if their just sugar pills, all of which shows that a person that does not die at their clinic could go to different healthcare centers and not know if their good or not.
Health care system makes sense in Chile. Flat tax of 7% of ur check whether ur a butcher or a CEO. You're fully covered.
Nobody is advocating a single payer, single provider system like the VA. What world do you live on?
Are private insurance companies designed to provide care for the patients or profits for the investors?
When Trump got covid he got airlifted to Walter Reed a government run hospital I don't think he complained about the care he got.
Well said, Pete. As a veteran I have strongly avoided using the VA because of numerous stories I have heard from other veterans about VA medical services and treatment. America should be ASHAMED of how it cares for its veterans after those veterans have given so much to and for America.
Of course, the twisted irony of the situation is that this video explains how universal healthcare could work in America. Why not just have this proposal for every single US citizen? Everyone is insured and doctors still actively compete for your business.
Okay so if America already has single-payer healthcare then why can't it go the universal route like canada? That's all I want to know. Because last time I checked, Obamacare was implemented about 12 years ago and it only made our Healthcare system even worse now than it was before and it's really frustrating to see me and my family members always paying for our health insurance. So yeah I really think it's time for a change and have a single payer system.
Now imagine you cant escape it as easaly as you can in the US.
Greetings from Sweden
My Great Grandfather dislocated his knee in WW2, he never went to the VA. He heard to many horror stories from the 40s – the 00s when he passed.
Wait happens when a VET has a condition or treatment a hospital is unwilling to cover or raises the prices to a level vouchers cannot fully cover?
Many advocates of the school voucher system forget that private schools are allowed to restrict students with learning disabilities. Those students are often the most expensive to educate, driving up the costs of education. Private schools can have less funding and better academic performance since they aren't required to educate those students that cost more to educate but don't perform as well academically.
Just asking.
nice ratio. btw, inefficient, bureaucratic and sometimes deadly also accurately describes the health insurance scheme in the U.S.. i'm a gulf war I vet and have used the VA for 26 years. my experience has varied from excellent to bad depending on which VA facility i've used, but i haven't had to pay money for any of it.
“Give me Control of a Nation’s Money Supply and I care not who make its Laws!”
– Mayer Amstel Rothschild
“If the people ever come to understand their system of Banking, there would be a Revolution by morning!”
– President Woodrow Wilson
“If we ever allow private banks to control the issue of Currency,
First by inflation,
Then by Deflation,
We’ll all be broke and homeless on the Continent our Forefathers Founded!”
– Thomas Jefferson
Audit the FED.
No one is asking for VA type single provider system. I thought this would be about a true single payer system like Medicare, where there is a choice of provider and the provider would have to compete in the market. This presentation is an amateur show.
How about this one: VETERAN HEALTH CARE VOUCHERS for all veterans (and that of their families and dependents).
Single-Payer means the government funds, but doesn't control healthcare[1]; it's "Single-Payer", not "Single-Planner".
The VA fails because it's Gov't managed, but Medicare For All still lets private agencies manage healthcare, it just cuts out the middleman of private insurance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_healthcare#History_of_the_term "Single-payer healthcare refers to health insurance provided as a public service…it does not usually refer to delivery of healthcare services."
Waiting times are a bit of bogal because not every operation is as urgent as a bullet wound.🤯🤯it needs a system based on order based on human needs and therefore honouring the right to adequate healthcare.
I agree on your solution..many competition low the prices and good quality..example in my country before only rich can afford braces but now even middle class or below middle class can afford braces because of many competition of dental clinic…
https://youtu.be/4lc8aqj9fq0
Look, at 3:30 he explains how a single payer healthcare system could work in the united states. Why not just use the voucher system he proposes for ALL Americans?
Hillary Clinton won 41.5% of nh white females and 30.5% of nh white males.
23.2, Hispanic origin. If you exclude MENAs, those numbers go up a bit.
Prager U is so annoying 😂
3:32 That sounds a lot like single-payer healthcare …
In Canada, private healthcare exists. Only insurance is public. And Canada still has private insurance in addition to the public insurance!
The VA is not single payer. The VA is single payer and provider. Medicare is single payer
I think you are spot on. I am a Veteran who only has VA Health Care. A lot of improvement has occurred in the primary care area. I can usually get seen that day if I am sick, and I can get an appointment with my primary care doctor in two wees or less. The problem is with specialty care, like cardiology or vascular. I had PAD and I had to wait so long to get to see a vascular surgeon, two years had gone by. Now instead of an angioplasty and a stent, I need a bypass graft …. that took another 6 months. Two and a half years to get something fixed that would have been done in 60 days in the private health care system. Sounds very similar to the stories I here about Canadian health care.
Vouchers are literally the best way that the government can help people get anything 👍. Give everyone $5,000 a year per student, and watch as trickle schools thrive uber a free market system 👍
This is finally a realistic and irrefutable argument against Medicare for all in America.
There has to be a transparent limit on what people are charged. The consumer needs to know the cost ahead of time and have the ability to shop around.
Not to mention the atrocious VA hospital construction in Aurora, CO. That thing sunk billions of dollars over budget (I for one suspects someone lined their own pockets), opened late, and had to be saved by the Army Corps of Engineers because it was build on unstable ground. Even then, I doubt it'll stand very long without continuous repairs.
I just don’t trust our government. They’re incompetent and shady as hell. I agree our healthcare is too expensive but I think that can be fixed with freer market.
This is what they need to do with health care and Education.
Even assuming all of his points are fair, this is a condemnation of a public option, not a single-payer system, as it's a public option for veterans. And this argument is not even one that makes sense. He says the system would improve if the veterans had the choice of where to go for their healthcare, as it would give the government competition. He then goes on to say that 2/3 of veterans don't use the VA, so clearly the VA does have competition.
Furthermore, a voucher system that would allow veterans to go to any hospital they so chose, is actually far closer to what a single-payer system would actually entail than the VA is. A single-payer system would mean that everyone was ensured at the point of service, regardless of what hospital they chose. So he basically uses a public option as an example of single-payer, claims a public option would be problematic for the lack of hospital-to-hospital competition, and then describes single-payer as the better solution.