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6 tweets,
2 min read
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Most countries with universal govt-run health insurance also have private supplemental health insurance. Canada is the outlier, but iirc not even their egalitarian zeal extended to “ending private health insurance.” This is a misleading formulation of the policy choice.
“Although a majority of Canadians hold some form of private health care insurance -- most commonly obtained as an employment benefit -- private insurance finances only 12% of health care expenditures in Canada“ chepa.org/docs/working-p…
The policy choice, in any practically conceivable implementation, is not “ending private health insurance” but giving everyone public health insurance (or, more conservatively, an opt-in to public insurance) and thereby reducing private insurance’s role in or share of the market.
If you want to make it sound scary, I suppose you could ask folks if they want to bring the private health insurance system that currently exists in the US to its knees.
Canada’s policy, as I understand, restricts private insurance from paying for the same services that everyone’s public insurance funds, in an effort ensure *equal access* to core services. But the other part of the market is far more than just nose jobs.
Anyways, JMart’s first tweet says Bernie makes no bones about ending private health insurance and his second one describes Bernie’s vision of its ongoing role. People are gonna get confused.
