I’m gonna lose my mind with these fucking ghouls calling for a public option or “Medicare for All………who want it”
You know why?? Because I’m fucking living with it here in Ireland, and it’s horrific and it’s killing people.
Here’s the thing – if you have a robust, comprehensive, patient-centred, healthcare worker positive PUBLIC single-payer healthcare system that’s free at the point of access, why would you choose to pay money for a private option?
And the answer to that is…
And as long as private healthcare insurance companies are allowed to scavenge profits off of the misery and illnesses of people, they will use those profits to buy influence in government to create laws and budgets that systematically dismantle and cannibalise the public option into desolation so that paying for private insurance is attractive!!!
And do you know what that looks like? That looks like hospitals getting downgraded from full 24-hour healthcare centres to 12 hour centres, to injury clinics and then closed altogether as services get shifted to one hospital as has happened to Nenagh, St. Johns, and Ennis hospitals, making University Hospital Limerick dangerously overcrowded with ~70 people on trollies in hallways every day with people dying on these trollies because there’s no room to check them into the hospital.
It looks like outsourcing cervical cancer testing to private labs an ocean away for cheap (shout-out to Quest Diagnostics the absolute carrion scum) that return incredibly delayed results (434 tests expired before even being run) during which the cancer has progressed – if they return the correct results at all resulting in 206 women who had developed cervical cancer after having a misdiagnosed CervicalCheck smear test. Of these, 162 had not been told that the initial results were incorrect. 20 of these patients have died. So far.
It looks like doctors taking on mixed payment practises and prioritising private patients over public patients. It looks like a 14-year-old with a broken arm being sent to three different medical centres in three different counties over two days before finally getting her arm set.
This is the result of a “public option” system or a “medicare for those who want it” system. When the private insurance companies are allowed to work alongside the public option, they see every public patient as a potential customer, and in order to compete, they have to work within the government system to promote austerity budgets to the public option so that people choose their product out of desperation.
Do not fall for this! Medicare for All with the abolishment of private healthcare insurance is the only sustainable way forward.