Hillary Supporters, Would You Be Willing To Ditch GATS So We Could Have Singe Payer?

[Baobab]

Hillary Supporters, as some of you may know, the United States signed a trade agreement roughly 20 years ago that severely limits our ability to have new public services of any kind by freezing them, and it commits us to a gradual privatization of the ones we have left. There are three newer FTAs in the pipeline that attempt to do the same thing except in a more radical and inescapable manner. We the US are the main advocate of these deals, many other countries dont want them. They are the real reason states cannot have single payer. (Shhhh!)

As well as a great many other impediments. The US is using this deal to create a expectation in the developing world of privatizations and eventually a great many jobs being thrown open for public international bidding. (this is so called "Mode Four&quot

If we dumped GATS and the other pending trade deals like TiSA, TTIP and TPP, we could keep our locally staffed public services and even expand them, and even make them free.


Would you be willing to do that, even though corporations around the world might try to sue us for what is framed as their lost property. It will be far cheaper now than in the near future as soon as the foreign firms come in they wil gain a huge new property right based on the potential value of the market segment which could be tens of trillions of dollars or more in free money we would have to pay just for our freedom.

[brooklynite]

1. The two have nothing to do with each other...

The reason we don't have Single Payer is that conservatives don't want the Government running the healthcare system and their elected representative won't agree to it.

[KPN]

2. So lets break it down:

Would you support single-payer?

Do you support GATS?

[Baobab]

5. GATS is the real reason, Its the "real reason" for dozens of things

Read this paper which explains the health care related problem.

This problem has been written about for 20 years, just unfortunately very little in the US.

Because the US is trying very hard to use GATS as a sort of plan for world services domination.

We want to sell drugs for more and we want to sell insurance, education, and dozens of other things, in other countries as if we were domestic companies. To do that we have to both stop public services which are too efficient, they have too much bargaining power, they make healthcare available to all, basically they pose a threat - they are framed as a trade barrier.

-Also, to trade as a equal in other countries we need to get MFN and National Treatment- to get that we seem to be expected to put something on the table. That thing will eventually be jobs in formerly public service industries. Lots of them.

Where else would we be able to find enough jobs to do that with?

Globalizing them will crapify the lower tiers of health insurance, for example, many patients might be shipped overseas for affordable care, it will crapify the cheaper healthcare to a fairly large extent but also make them more profitable.

Otherwise the system is collapsing because of its inefficiency. Since bernie has lost, we have the hard choices, right? We may have to throw our nurses doctors, adjunct professors, K12 teachers and IT workers under the bus to preserve all of our various tiered systems.

Otherwise the profits are too low to attract highly mobile international capital.

[MrsKirkley]

3. I definitely want single-payer.

Single-payer health care would give the government the ability to control pricing on medical care and prescription drugs. The cost of care and medicine needs to be cut. Currently a Bernie Sanders supporter, but may be Hillary Clinton supporter if she wins.

[Baobab]

6. Sorry, GATS prohibits it because its a trade barrier.

TiSA takes the prohibitions even farther, Education too. For similar reasons.

Instead costs have to be cut by turning it into international trade.

Google "World Competition Day"

Competition will make everybody work for cheaper.

Poorer students will lose public education but have a wider choice of deregulated for profit entities. Many of them in other countries.

Accreditation? Let the market self-regulate.

Banks, GATS limits any regulation of too big to fail banks.

[Corporate666]

8. Not "control pricing" to the extent you might think...

Nobody is obligated to sell anything at a price the do not wish to sell at. They always have the option just not to do the deal.

The biggest 2 factors in the cost of US health care are the cost of hospitals/ER's and the pay of doctors and nurses and other caregivers. Together those 2 factors represent about 2/3rds of health care spending. The last third is a mixture of drugs, insurance overhead, other services (physical therapy, ambulances), medical devices and a few other things.

Hospitals operate on small profit margins, I don't have the study I linked to previously in front of me, but I used the CDC data. Hospitals profit margins are on the order of 2-6%.

The single biggest factor in the price of US health care compared to Europe is the cost of caregivers - in other words, salaries of doctors, nurses, etc. A cardiologist in the USA averages over $500k a year. In the UK it's $135k a year (in USD, less in pounds of course).

The government can't just say to doctors "from now on, your $500k/year salary is $135k/year". It's likely the doctor has malpractice insurance and student debt that far exceed that amount, and at $135k/year he would be losing money. And why should a doctor who has 7+ years of post-college education be told by the gov't that he will now earn less than a manager at a McDonalds? What if the gov't wanted to tell the plumbing industry that from now on, plumbers earn $30,000 a year and no more? It can't work.

Without addressing the cost of malpractice insurance (which requires an overhaul of the legal system and tort reform), and without addressing the cost of education for doctors, we can't make significant changes to the cost of health care.

As far as hospital costs, we would need to model European systems where they have extensive wait times, restrictions on who qualifies for care (rationed care), deny people various procedures and stop doing much of the preventive screening (takes more time to screen a million people for colon cancer than to treat 100 people for colon cancer).





People often get foaming mad when they read the above, but it's just reality. I am in favor of a single payer system that covers necessary care plus a secondary private system that people can pay into if they want a higher level of service or to get coverage for things that the single payer system does not cover - similar to a Canada or UK system. But it's not as simple as just having the government take it over and thinking costs will get in line. It would bankrupt the country in short order unless we made massive, huge changes to some of our biggest industries along with implementing single payer.

[Baobab]

10. The US via TPP is trying to make such price controls on drugs by governments FTA-illegal.

http://www.bilaterals.org/?what-the-trans-pacific-partnership

This is what they seem to be encouraging, not a good thing!

http://www.pharmamyths.net/_market_spiral_pricing_of_cancer_drugs__120860.htm

[Jitter65]

4. You do realize that the only "single payer" out there is the Federal government?

No such thing will ever happen in the USA. As close we can get would be public option,

[Baobab]

7. Did you know that public can't be optional?

For tons of reasons, it breaks when its not, but one of the most important is the GATS one, It has to be the only game in town and free, no money involved at all, or its CLEARLY GATS-illegal.

Read the paper i link below in my sig..

There are a bunch of other reasons too.

[Baobab]

9. The federal Government alredy pays around 2/3 of every health care dollar

because the health insurers are SO good at dumping people when they get sick.

That third is around the waste added by the insurance system.

(not really counting a bunch of other big things at all so the savings would likely be even larger- for example, the stitch in time saves nine effect)

[djean111]

11. Baobab, they really do not care about anything except Hillary.

Not about issues. Just electing Hillary. That is the end unto itself.