Mario Is Missing, obviously.

That's not going to happen.

It's been this way my entire life and probably long before. Most things here work this way.

There's a public / socialised system, and then a private tier in addition. Education is the same, public funded institutions which are free up to university, or private schools as an alternative.

3 years ago my partner fell pregnant with twins, our first children. It was a complex pregnancy for a range of reasons. We had to relocate to a major city 5 hours drive away, and we were there for 3 months. The specialist team was the best of the best, and the things they did to land two happy and healthy twins was just miraculous, honestly. My partner was in intensive care for 4 days and the kids were in the premature infants ward for 2 weeks. This was all under the public health care system. We didn't pay a dime and even got reimbursed for the apartment I rented while I was there.

Since then with a young family we decided to get private health insurance. The insurer is a not-for-profit, so of course there are employees to be paid but everything paid goes towards paying benefits. There are for-profit insurers, but ofc they're competing with the not-for-profit ones which keeps it real. it's the same dynamic with the private hospitals that the private insurers are paying - yes there are private profits but the existence of the healthy public system keeps it reasonable.

The essence is that one entity is dealing with payments for hospitals, doctors, specialists, etc. The "single payer" would be an organ of the federal government that collects a portion of tax revenue and is billed for services. The term implies that the government is not itself providing any services.

That is weird. I always thought it was weird to go to the GP and horse around where you pay $x and get $y back from medicare, more like multiple-unnecessary-payers IMO. I guess if you invented a new system now it wouldn't be so daft.