Urban Institute analysis of Sanders Single Payer Plan: May 2016

[andym]

94. Delivery of care will not be disrupted if universal healthcare is engineered carefully

By taking into account the potential problems, they can be avoided. Just like it's possible to get around the problems building electric cars that Tesla solved, when others claimed it was too difficult.

In fact, the Nation article you presented supports just this idea that universal health care can be achieved-- it clearly states that the current bill is not a detailed roadmap, which basically means it can't be analyzed accurately! Yes, the details need to be carefully crafted, but nobody is saying it can't ever work, or will require 20 years like you did. Anyone with political savvy knows that Medicare for All will look differently from how it being proposed by the 16 Democratic Senators or by Rep Conyers.

From the Nation:
"Harold Pollack, a University of Chicago public-health researcher and liberal advocate for universal coverage, says, “There has not yet been a detailed single-payer bill that’s laid out the transitional issues about how to get from here to there. We’ve never actually seen that. Even if you believe everything people say about the cost savings that would result, there are still so many detailed questions about how we should finance this, how we can deal with the shock to the system, and so on.”

Achieving universal coverage—good coverage, not just “access” to emergency-room care—is a winnable fight if we sweat the details in a serious way. If we don’t, we’re just setting ourselves up for failure."

They are not saying a successful roadmap is impossible! Nobody has said that it won't require a lot of thought and economic modeling to get it right. As I already suggested (but you ignored) one way to prevent disruption is to leave a regulated version of the current system intact while the transition is made-- I'm pretty sure that will be a real component of any proposed detailed bill-- in fact, it's not excluded that some highly regulated version of the current system continues to exist in parallel with MFA.

Given the brainpower behind the effort and the desire the succeed the problems can be worked out. As for the end result being a multipayer universal health care system like Germany, I don't think that is excluded. The absolute key as I wrote earlier is that the needle has been moved-- universal health care/single-payer is on the table, and if enough political will is exerted a universal health care plan will be enacted someday (after 2020 no doubt, given political realities). By pushing the needle to the single-payer extreme, the path to a workable solution is more probably as each potential problem is recognized and addressed and the legislaton adjusted accordingly.