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We are headed for a tiered healthcare system, and all of this will be a short blip on the timeline in hindsight.
In the near future you'll see:
Tier 1 cash only for the best doctors and the people who want to pay for them
Tier 2 single payer with private paid supplemental insurance to see Doctors and reduce waiting times for nonemergent care, get nongeneric drugs, or to cover some elective medicine like dental care, eyeglasses, orthodontics, etc...
Tier 3 single payer healthcare for "free" with most people seeing mid level providers like PAs and RNs who are supervised by Doctors.
Once the system is in place they will data mine the fuck out of medical records to reduce waste, provide targeted medical care based on patients with similar history and establish cost benefit analysis of exactly what the tier 3 coverage should cover. Anyone who wants more coverage than that will buy private supplemental insurance for a fee or pay cash. The result will eventually be a much more efficient system with little or no profits on necessary basic medical care and plenty of room for profits on supplemental/elective procedures.
This is an inevitable fact.... The only question is whether it takes us 10 years or 100 years to get there and how bad the lobbyists and politicians fuck it up along the way before the final system is in place.
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