For decades – and especially when President Obama got serious about passing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) fifteen years ago – every time the highly controversial and heated debate over the public option and single-payer health care was brought up, it was immediately shut down by Republicans, mainly because of the “Socialist” connotation associated with them. The inherent laziness in this approach drives us C R A Z Y!

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Over the years, we have taken a hard look at both the public option and single-payer health care and, based on the facts, neither of these ideas are the way to go. That said, although these are not solutions we ultimately landed on, we learned a ton about the health care system from researching them, and we're convinced this newfound knowledge made 1787’s health care plan stronger and more comprehensive than it would have been otherwise.

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Making decisions based on nothing more than an ideology makes zero sense. Why in the world would we take any potential solution off the table without fully checking it out, simply because the supposed philosophy behind it makes us uncomfortable? 

 

We admit that, before doing research, we always associated the public option and single-payer health care with the Soviet Union and, being good capitalists, both concepts made us plenty nervous. But this reaction had to be based on a preexisting bias because, until a few years ago, we didn’t know what the heck they even were.

 

Let’s please, please, please not allow preconceived notions and past prejudices to prevent potential progress. We have lost the luxury of making uninformed, snap judgments about pivotal issues. We don’t know about you, but we'd rather be called a Socialist than stupid.