About 30 years ago, when the Clinton Administration began looking at how to reform our floundering health care system, the idea emerged for a "single payer" — in this case, the federal government — to provide health insurance for all.

Plenty of wealthy, capitalist nations comparable to the United States — the United Kingdom, Canada — have single-payer models, to overwhelming success. Everyone gets treatment, no one loses their house or car to pay for medical bills and a certain level of health care is guaranteed.

The downside, we were told (by those who wished to torpedo the plan), was that we would get — and here you'll have to imagine a scary, booming voice saying the words — socialized medicine.

Socialized medicine, unlike the socialized fire departments, socialized police forces and socialized school systems we already have and enjoy, was bad, bad, bad.

We would get "rationed care." We'd wait for tests and treatment. Quality would suffer. We'd drown in bureaucracy and paperwork. Doctors would hate it. There would even be committees set up to determine whether someone would get life-saving care — so-called death panels.

Decades after these tactics first were used to gin up electoral anxiety, the worst outcomes they threatened have come true — not in any kind of "socialized" health care system, but one nourished under the wing of unrestricted capitalism.

You've probably seen this in your own life: You've waited interminable lengths of time to see a specialist, like one person I know who couldn't get in to see a cardiologist for three months or another who had to wait months for a GI appointment and then another two months for a colonoscopy.

You've had to fill out interminable forms, acknowledgments and releases, such as the three-page-long one Cigna required for COVID-test reimbursement, recently tweeted out by writer and activist Cory Doctorow.

You've battled with hospitals or your insurance company (or, lucky you, both!) to get some necessary treatment covered or paid for. My husband and I are still trying to iron out some mysterious problem preventing our insurance from paying a $1,000 bill for tests my son had more than a year ago.

You've seen or heard of doctors, infuriated by the way insurance companies manage every aspect of patients' treatment, quitting the profession entirely or giving up on being able to provide the kind of care they know is possible, like one particularly fed-up doctor who tore into United Healthcare when they denied coverage of a nausea medication for a child undergoing chemotherapy.

As for death panels, health insurance companies are already talking about pulling back coverage of emergency room visits they don't deem necessary, causing people to second-guess going to the ER for ailments that could kill them without prompt treatment. If you knew when you were having a heart attack, after all, you'd work in the ER yourself.

My point, therefore, is simple: If we're going to have the bad parts of socialism, why can't we at least get the medicine to go with it?

There'll be nothing to prevent people from getting private insurance if they want it and can afford it. If someone enjoys being put on hold for an hour to talk to a "customer service" representative about why they need their blood pressure medication, they'll be free to keep doing that!

The rest of us, though, can have some stability, some consistency and some reassurance that when we need to see a doctor, when we need a medication, when we think we should go to the ER, that we can.

We will know it will be paid for.

We will know that we won't go bankrupt because we or a family member had the bad luck to get sick.

If we want the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad socialized medicine, we should have it. After all, it can't get any worse than it is now.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Photo credit: HeungSoon at Pixabay