Kristie Bruce
Jul 30, 2017 · 3 min read

When you get single payer, it will still belong to the oligarchy, sold to you at 10x the cost of what fair market value is. Of course this will be a slight 30% discount to what your’e currently paying, but the usual suspects will still reap the lion’s share of profits.

Every plan which has been floated over the last few decades in the slow march toward the American Socialized Medicine Plan has always included the major insurers as the managers of any such program. Currently those insurers are making zero or negative returns on underwriting. They don’t care though, because although they may be losing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars now annually on that side of the business, they are reaping billions in profits on their investments in the companies that they are both invested in and make the bulk of their payouts to. Those would be Big Pharma™ and the biggest of diagnostic equiment and supply manufacturers.

The gravy train isn’t quite over yet. They’re not quite ready to let go of the current model, because everyone’s not positioned correctly yet. As it stands, there are far too many hospitals still open in this country to maximize profits in a socialized system. Those must be severely cut back to make this work out the way they’d like. So for the past decade, the combination of Medicare Core Measure fines and the effects of the AHCA have been slowly but surly bankrupting hospitals in rural and poor urban communities where the bulk of their patients are either covered by Medicare or Medicaid. This is now starting to really crush a lot of suburban hospitals, leading to buy-outs and consolidation, the closure of tons of clinics in the aftermath. Patients are already having to travel further for services and it will continue in this manner until about 1/3 of facilities no longer exist.

When this level of closures if finally achieved, then and ONLY then, will socialized medicine be offered up by the government as a solution. It’s a way of rationing care preemptively. It will end up cutting out a substantial portion of the true waste in the system, which by most estimates is almost 60% of total health care costs. The meat on the bone though will still be fully made available for the companies who already reap a huge portion of the profits today and their bottom lines will barely be effected.

The ultimate results will be long wait times for proceedures and diagnostic studies that we see in myriad socialized medicine systems. You won’t be getting your MRI or CT scan next Tuesday, it will be sometime in the latter part of the year. Plus as is already happening in the NHS, the assumed non-compliance of patients (i.e. smoking or obesity) which is now being used to deny care there, will in this country be expanded due to already existing Medicare guidelines for care which the hospitals are currently being fined for and shifted to the patient. We already have a laundry list of infractions costing hospitals hundreds of millions in fines for events which many times are completely unavoidable, leading to readmissions at end of life. These are for diagnoses such as congestive heart failure, COPD, pneumonia and cardiovascular disease. It doesn’t matter that readmissions for these diagnoses at end stage are often times completely unavoidable. However, Medicare Guidelines assume that these readmissions currently are due to the hospital’s failure to adequately educate these patients as to their proper self care post-discharge. Eventaully the patients themselves will be the ones penalize.

    Kristie Bruce

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