Fox & Friends Poll Designed to Discredit Medicare for All Explodes in Their Face

Fox & Friends Poll Designed to Discredit Medicare for All Explodes in Their Face

They put the poll on Twitter.

Online polls never measure anything about general sentiment, since the poll respondents are self-selecting. Any online poll on a controversial subject simply turns into a horse race between competing activists. In this case, the progressives mobilized their forces faster. In other cases, the conservatives have gotten their own troops to distort results.

No legitimate poll will produce such a result. People are coming around to the concept of single-payer health care, but about as quickly as tectonic shifting. It will be a while before “medicare for all” enjoys 73% approval, maybe a long while, maybe never.

8 thoughts on “Fox & Friends Poll Designed to Discredit Medicare for All Explodes in Their Face

  1. When it comes to health care it pays to be very rich or poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Government jobs usually have good insurance as well.

    There are a lot of market failures in the U.S. system. Part of that as nature mom pointed out is because when your sick or injured it’s hard to shop around for the best price. But even when you have time to shop around it’s not like prices are posted and easy to find. Part of that is because in most cases (for anyone with insurance) the person choosing what provider or service to use is not the person paying and they don’t care what it costs so long as it’s covered.

    The more market competition you can inject into a system, the better that system will be in my opinion.

  2. Long wait times in the U.S.? You mean like the 9 week wait my wife had for a podiatrist? Or the 7 week wait I had for a dermatologist? Or the 11 day wait I faced at my GP for a non-emergent but serious respiratory issue (I went to an Urgent Care facility, not covered by insurance, and paid $1100, plus $630 for the scrip (denied by insurance because it hadn’t been issued by an approved physician).

    Get the fuck outta here with your, “Wait times in England/Canada/NameYourSinglePayerCountry are much worse than in the U.S.”

  3. The biggest improvement from single payer will be the end of people going bankrupt because they got very sick or got in a car accident. Those things are bad enough, without piling on the whole “Hey, you won the lottery – in reverse!” ordeal.

    This is one area where even the most whackadoo free market disciples have to admit that this is not a commodity in the normal sense. The Invisible Hand (except maybe the middle finger thereof) doesn’t stabilize prices. People don’t choose when they need treatment. They most often are forced to make decisions when they are under time pressure, underinformed, and generally least able to operate rationally in their self-interest.

    I had “good” healthcare at a major company. Every year they would bring us in to re-enroll. Every year it was a farcical shell-game. The one option explicitly not available was: give me the same coverage as last year, adjust my rate to whatever the new cost is. People – very smart people – would try to get solid answers out of these weasels. They would get really vague when we tried to pin them down on the simplest, most important things – e.g., where’s the line between an ER visit that is covered and one that isn’t? When we’d try to decide which plan was best for us, their reply boiled down to: well, how sick do you think you’ll get in the coming year?

    Part of Barry’s argument why he couldn’t back single payer is that it would put 2 or 3 million insurance company paper-shufflers out of work. All I can say is – good! Let them find non-bullshit jobs that contribute to the economy. How much of a help it would be to especially small-business owners to just not have to worry about this horseshit any more.

    OK almost ready to climb down off the soapbox, but one more thing – how barbaric is it that paid maternal leave is a “benefit” that companies can optionally provide? In pretty much every other country it’s the law.

    1. Far be it for me to do what Bill Good accused Americans of doing in regards to the Canadian health system, but combining my understanding of economics with my general knowledge of the U.S health care system, I think it do have a point that hasn’t been brought up.

      Unlike the free market fetishists in the United States, my attitude is to misquote Churchill, ‘capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.’ There are a number of ‘market failures’ in capitalism that free market devotees either deny exist (libertarians) or like to minimize (conservatives.) In the case of health care, from what I’ve read in terms of health service delivery, these failures largely don’t exist. U.S wait times aren’t so much a ‘market failure’ as a case of demand exceeding supply.

      I’m sure some of the stories are over-hyped, but as you’ve pointed out, with the related health insurance industry and the prescription drug industry, we see all sorts of market failures arising from businesses trying to cut costs on the backs of consumers in the case of insurance or putting out unsafe drugs or over-selling drugs with over-hyped marketing in the case of the prescription drug industry (pharmaceuticals.)

      I don’t think we really see this in actual health care delivery. The reason for this though, is what the free market fetishists decry: the existence of malpractice suits. It’s often said that hospitals make sure to give patients every medical test imaginable just to make sure they can’t be sued for malpractice. So, it’s the fear of being sued that ensures that hospitals can’t cut costs on the backs of their patients. Or, it’s the existence of malpractice that ensures that hospital care in the United States is so high.

      So, far from what the free market devotees tell you, it seems clear to me that the fear of malpractice lawsuits doesn’t hurt care, but makes it the high quality that it is. The U.S private health care system takes the best of the free markets: innovation based on competition while the fear of malpractice prevents the ‘market failures’ of free markets. However, as conservatives are quick to point out, having to deal with malpractice drives up the cost of the U.S system enormously.

      1. Oh, hospitals cut costs (or maximize profits) on the backs of their patients all mothershampooing right. If you doubt it, talk to a hospital RN.

        And it’s not so much demand exceeding supply (which a market disciple will tell you inevitably leads to an increase in supply) as SO MUCH of the supply being sucked up into servicing the insurance companies. I know a doctor who just went into business for himself – only takes cash, doesn’t do insurance. He’s happy, his prices are reasonable.

  4. At the risk of provoking an argument, my problem with single payer healthcare is that it all but inevitably turns into the Veteran’s Administration (VA). The only really possible single payer would be the government and you see the wonderful job it does caring for our veterans. Single payer means no competition and an entrenched bureaucracy with civil service protection.

    Britain’s National Health Service has reportedly greatly improved in recent decades. But people in Britain still have to wait far longer for non-emergency care than we wait in the U.S. You might say, well improving the National Health Service becomes a campaign issue and the people will not accept VA level care. There is truth in that. But at the same time, without alternatives, people can have diminished expectations and might accept that it is normal to wait a month to have a stent put in place, simply because it takes that long for everyone. Though I think the rich and powerful still find a way to jump to the front of the line.

    1. The rich and powerful will always have power. Legally or illegally, there is always a separate market that exists outside of the national health care systems, even the most successful ones like Norway and Canada. Rich people can employ their own personal doctors, or bribe surgeons, or fly off to Switzerland, or get experimental drugs directly from the source, or whatever they need to do to get first-class treatment. Health care will never be completely equitable under any system, not even full-out socialism, because the most powerful people in any society exist above and/or outside of systems. A society can only do what it can in order to give everyone access to adequate care. It is not doomed. Canadians seem to be very pleased with their system.

      I share your fears about government participation. The VA program is a disaster, but then again, Medicare seems to work pretty well, and insurance companies even manage to profit by offering supplemental or “advantage” programs to Medicare recipients.

      1. Canada is actually just one of two or three countries in the world that does not legally allow an alternative, in most cases, for services that are covered under the Canada Health Act. Of course, many private health care providers have been operating on a black or grey market basis in Canada for a long time.

        In Britain, as in all nations in Europe a parallel private health service is completely legal. I don’t know how many British citizens choose to use this parallel service

        In Canada, the major exception is that those who receive health care under the various provincial workers compensation systems are treated separately and, if the news stories are true, workers compensation often uses the private health care providers to provide treatment.

        As to the rest, I have no idea where the idea comes from that public and private systems can’t coincide. At the time of the Obamacare debate, Nate Silver wrote an excellent piece on the differences between single payer and government run health care, pointing out that they are in fact, two separate concepts.

        Here in Canada, there is even a great deal of private insurance, contrary to what many believe, for, obviously the many services not covered under the Canada Health Act (dental care, most prescription drugs) and outside of the hospitals, the people who work in the public health care system are all private business owners (the medical doctors) or private employees, they are just mostly paid by the government.

        There certainly are problems with the public system in terms of wait times for non-emergency care, but for emergent health care, the system is excellent for most people. My understanding is that except for those in the U.S with the ‘gold plated health insurance’ there can be long wait times as well. In most cases, probably not as long as in most places in Canada I’m sure.

        Long time media commentator Bill Good actually commented on some of this in his editorial today ‘A Minute with Bill Good.’ (August 1)

        https://www.news1130.com/audio/minute-with-bill-good/

        “I’m frequently amazed, amused and annoyed at the lack of knowledge displayed by many Americans who, despite that lack, have strong opinions about Canada’s so-called ‘socialized medicine.’

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