I genuinely wish to know

Matt Y. writes:

…the forces of progress are fated to an arduous generational struggle against the health care industry [TC: not just private insurance?] and there’s not much to be done about it.

Now I can understand the view that market forces are doomed to failure in the health sector and that government is the best of a bad set of choices.  That is not my opinion, but I grasp why someone might believe that.  I wish to ask all you single-payer advocates — in absolute terms — how good (bad) do you think it will be?

Let’s rate "the paper clip industry" as a 9 out of 10.  Paper clips are pretty cheap and usually they work.  Let’s rate the better federal agencies as a 6.5 out of 10.  Let’s rate HUD as a 2.5 out of ten.

How will national health insurance do, keeping in mind that U.S. doctors do not wish to have their wages cut, Americans want the right to choose their doctors, and the U.S. is a huge, messy, decentralized, federalistic country with lots of cheats and massive, hard-to-eradicate inequalities at many different levels.

I give it about a 3.  How about you?

And what are your views on the likelihood of today’s flawed system improving without drastic single-payer reforms?

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