I have a buddy who is skeptical of single payer. His main question is:
"Under single payer, how would my fathers private practice work? Would they be government owned? How would they make money?"
It's a fair question I don't have a great answer to off the top of my head. How would I answer that? Is it as simple as government subsidies would cover it?
To start with, it would not be government owned, that's not on the table. Should it be? That's a discussion for another time.
Bernie coined the catchphrase "Medicare 4 All" for a reason. His plan basically extends Medicare coverage to everyone in the country instead of just old people. There are some refinements and adjustments that will probably need to happen along the way, but that's the jist of it.
If you have a private practice, you surely bill Medicare/Medicaid for some portion of your patients (possibly even a majority depending on your specialty). It's basically that same process, but with all of your patients instead of just the old/poor ones who are eligible. I've discussed this with people who work on the insurance billing side, and what I understand is that 10-20% of the effort is working with Medicare who basically says "we pay $$$ for [procedure]" and that's the end of it (just gotta get the paperwork sent over to them), while 80% of the effort is working with multiple private insurances to bill them, negotiate in-network pricing, forecasting what they may or may not pay in the upcoming few years and so on. That 80% pretty much gets done away with under a single-payer model, so you put a portion of those finance people to other work.
The Bernie-style M4A that we want is far more disruptive to medical insurance than it is to medical practice, though there will surely be friction points that will require further adjustment.