Thread by @Noahpinion

"Americans don't have health care" is one of those things that, if you said it in real life, would cause people to look at you as if you were crazy, but which 1000 people will dogpile you on Twitter if you contradict

The truth is that Americans use lots and lots of health care, they just pay an ungodly obscene amount for it.

And this is not a technical or cute distinction; by far the biggest problem with American health care is simply its high cost, meaning that cost control measures are the most important policy that we need in order to fix the system.

National health insurance (preferably by simply extending Medicare to cover everyone) is the best policy, not because America has a ton of people being denied care who would then be given care, but because a national health insurance system would be able to control costs.

Thus, the correct solution -- national health insurance -- is the one that the angry Twitter people endorse. But the problem is mostly one of cost, not access, and thus we should not expect our national health insurance system to provide much more care than we're getting now.

If we create a national health insurance system under the illusion that this system will simply bathe us in abundant care, then either we'll be sorely disappointed or we'll succeed in creating a system so expensive it breaks our entire nation.

One reason we keep failing to reform our health system is that although everyone knows the current system sucks, people ARE getting health care, Americans DO have health care, and they fear that under an alternate system they would NOT have health care.

Thus, in order to make people feel secure about reforming our health system in the way we need to reform it (national health insurance), we need to assure them that the amount of health care they currently have will not be reduced, but will simply be reduced in price.

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