In Case You Missed This... Confirmation On What Many Of Us Believed Re: The Publc Option Fight

[joshcryer]

138. I really don't see a distinction. You're "paying the man" either way.

If you had single payer as soon as you got a job, you'd have to pay the single payer tax (which would be progressive, but it'd still exist).

The "universal gas tax" and "requiring everyone to buy gas" analogy is silly, assuming that "gas is health care." Insurance companies do not provide health care, they group pool healthy and sick people, and the healthy people pay for when the sick people get sick. Single payer would act just as insurance would, without the for profit motive. The for-profit motive is highly limited by HHS medical loss ratios, and thus HCR will eventually lead to the death of the insurance companies as they are unable to stay profitable or as citizens demand a non-profit option through the states or through the government inacting it.

Social Security was shit when it was enacted. We can complain about the crappy aspects of HCR and push for it to be improved. But as it stands now it isn't going away, and one of the strongest tools it has is the mandate, which can be convincingly turned into single payer relatively easy. (Private group pools get put into public group pools which then gets put into a progressive single payer pools, each time incrementally simplifying the overall system, and moving around employees to do all the paperwork and whatnot.)

If "gas" is "a group pool of individuals who pay into a system of health care" then, no, there's no real difference between a "universal gas tax and requiring everyone to buy gas."