In which John discusses the tradeoffs involved in health care reform, and why the 70% of Americans who are happy with their personal health care make it difficult to achieve more than incremental changes in the very expensive, very inefficient health care system in the United States. SOURCES:

First off, subscribe to Healthcare Triage, where this stuff is discussed with far more detail and nuance: https://www.youtube.com/user/thehealthcaretriage

Only 32% of Americans think our healthcare system is good or excellent, but 69% are happy with their personal health care: http://www.gallup.com/poll/165998/americans-views-healthcare-quality-cost-coverage.aspx

Over at the incidental economist, Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt have written a LOT about the quality of U.S. healthcare outcomes compared to other countries. Intros here: http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/the-state-of-us-health-aint-so-good/ and here: http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/how-do-we-rate-the-quality-of-the-us-health-care-system-...

The Kaiser Foundation has up-to-date stats on where people get their health insurance--the ACA exchanges get coverage to about 6% of people, 49% of people get coverage through their employers (or their family's employer), 20% through Medicaid, 14% through Medicare, and 9% are uninfured: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-population/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%...

Healthcare costs in the U.S. are very, very high compared to every other wealthy country, and have been for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States#Overall_costs

A Medicare-for-All program would lead to lower overall healthcare costs in the U.S., but also a lot of job loss (possibly as many as two million): http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/25/news/economy/sanders-health-care-plan/

Even modest reductions in health insurance subsidies--like those proposed in the GOP repeal and replace of the Affordable Care Act--would lead to tens of millions of people losing insurance coverage: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52371

Other topics discussed include the Republican plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the relative modesty of Obamacare as a health care reform, and the benefits and tradeoffs of Bernie Sanders' proposed single payer healthcare system, Medicare for All.

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