California’s chance for universal health care

It would save taxpayers trillions.

“American exceptionalism” usually refers to Americans letting themselves off the hook for the sins they condemn in others (mass incarceration, death penalty, voter suppression, book burning, etc). But there’s another kind of implicit exceptionalism, practiced by elites in service to the status quo: the belief that Americans are exceptionally stupid

Nowhere is this negative exceptionalism more obvious than in American health-care debates, where the cost of providing universal healthcare is presented as a bill that Americans cannot afford, without mentioning that Americans pay far more for private healthcare already, and that universal care would represent trillions in savings.

https://twitter.com/speakerryan/status/1023946525796429824

American private health-care is wildly inefficient. America pays more for care, and gets worse outcomes, than any other high-income nation in the world. America’s private health care system is a bloated, bureaucratic, monopolistic mess. One in three US health-care dollars is spent on private administrative overheads — paper-pushers muddling through corporate red-tape.

And that’s only the tip of the bureaucratic iceberg. US private health-care companies impose an even greater…