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NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers

nysenate.gov

531–540 of 569 posts

Re: NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The young should not pay for the healthcare of the elderly. Why?

I think funding the elderly is a lofty goal, but I don't see a good intellectual argument for FORCING our children to pay for our healthcare. You shouldn't view your child (nor your neighbor's child) as your own personal piggy-bank to extract from when you get ill. IMO our goal should be to hand down resources from parent to child, not the opposite direction. If I made this story a bit more personal and wrote ("I am…

> I am too ill to work anymore, so I drove to my son's house and took $200 off his counter to buy my medication

Maybe it is because we come from different cultures, but I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. In fact, I recently paid for my parent's hospital bills and did it happily.

My country doesn't have universal healthcare, but I'll be happy if we did. At the end of the day, we live in a society, and one of the imperfections is that we end up paying for things we don't like regardless of our opinions. I think healthcare should be a priority...

Re: NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers

#532
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A substantial part of your rent is property taxes. Here. Without determining elasticity, it's impossible to determine how much of that cost is flowing through or how much goes to impact margin.

You're making a pretty fundamental mistake. I am not speculating about the elasticity of rent. If taxes went to 0, would rent go down? Probably not. So what? The percentage of rent that is taxes is exactly the amount paid in taxes by the landlord. Period. It is an absolute number.

>You're making a pretty fundamental mistake

No I'm not. This is pretty entry level econ material. Price elasticity is very well studied and there's plenty of resources to learn more about it.

Re: NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what I’m saying. The norm is that a fairly substantial part of your comp in the US is healthcare provided by your employer. If this suddenly becomes worthless (or rather much less valuable because there’s a single payer system in parallel) but your salary stays the same while your taxes go up, you will lose out big time. It could work just fine if everyone did it. But seems very hard to do just Ny.

The notional value of insurance isn't impossibly high and it would likely loosen up the job market if switching was not complicated by continuing coverage and the risk of not replacing a good benefit.

Sure. But is that achievable over a short period when the experiment is New York only and you’re a large national company? Not convinced.

Re: NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers

#534
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a "high earner" there are a panoply of services that allow you to structure your income, wealth appreciation, or other forms of wealth generation in tax-optimized vehicles. The tax universes at 200k/yr and 500k/yr-2m/yr income look very different.

If we're talking wages here, what are the options exactly? Is there anything bigger than 401(k)? This is ignoring charity, which I believe is available to anyone anyway.

A number of the comments to your post have some vague sense of what's going on.

The key concept is that as you get more wealthy, you will have access to professionals and tax structures that allow you to defer and recharacterize significant portions of your revenue streams into tax advantaged forms. The exact mechanisms change depending on jurisdiction and asset mix.

Advisory services take money to purchase, but their cost, and the cost of various vehicles used to avoid taxes, do not scale linearly with the amount of wealth to shelter.

The panama and various other financial leak disclosure reporting provide a decently accessible area for lay-persons to investigate. If you'd like to see the effects of scale - there's a lot of literature regarding the multi-national corporation side of tax avoidance in academic journals that's easily found via google scholar or sci-hub.

Re: NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers

#535
post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"horrible waiting periods for elective care, and non-emergent surgeries" Same as in the US. Three months is the minimum. Hell, I couldn't even schedule a tooth cleaning with a new dentist less than six months out - I called close to 10 dentist offices.

> Same as in the US. Three months is the minimum. big nope. Wife is booking emergent same day, and depending on the case length and type, 1-2 weeks for most cancer cases, up to a month for a complex deep inferior epigastric perforators flap breast reconstruction surgery which is a long surgery if bilateral; getting that much OR time is a challenge. They'll book for saturdays if they need. Cases that can be done in a…

Way to deny people's lived experience.

I can corroborate the GP's experience of having to book several months in advance for non-emergency care—the fastest medical booking I've had in the past several years is surgery for my cat, which was about three weeks.

Re: NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You paid much more than that. A substantial part of your rent is property taxes. I also doubt you included sales taxes in that number. Then there's more esoteric stuff like tariffs, etc

NY has low property taxes compared to most no-income-tax states

NY has insane property taxes. I pay 11k for a 400k house. I have not seen property taxes so high anywhere else in the country.

Re: NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a Canadian living and working in the US and I’d take the Canadian system any day of the week. I think it’s crazy that your access to healthcare is dependent on your employment.

But it's also crazy that your access to healthcare is based on how the government prioritizes your need of it. I agree with the idea of public healthcare, but not as a legislated monopoly. And that's true for government services generally. Monopolies don't benefit anyone except the monopolist, and competition makes everyone stronger. If the government wants to use it's buying and borrowing power (and maybe even taxat…

> Monopolies don't benefit anyone except the monopolist

For healthcare in Canada, the monopolist is the Canadian people.

Re: NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers

#538
post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Canadian friends and it sounds better than when my older brother had to call their insurance company every months to get their anxiety meds covered because, for some reason, the insurance company lost the paper work for approving them every month. For a year. Funny because it’s just the sort of thing to cause more anxiety in an anxious person. I’d also love hear how many Canadian cancer survivors have to put u…

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4495123

Who here is saying Canadians are perfect? I’m sure it’s easy to find individuals who had a better experience in the US.

Re: NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers

#539
post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and why combined tax rates for the middle class are around 50%. As someone who's lived in the Canadian health care system and the US system - it is absolutely lower quality than what average private employer healthcare plan provides in the US. Even before covid, Quebec's healthcare system was in crisis with packed ERs having dozens of neglected patients on beds in the hallways for weeks... GP access is impossible…

The US already spends more than double what Canada spends per capita. If we had the cost efficiency of Canada's health care system, we could by double the health care without spending more than we already do.

The US spends more because our care is higher quality. If you want to see a specialist for instance, the top of their fields will be here because they can charge what they’re worth.

Re: NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers

#540
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fair" is highly subjective and no one can agree on what that means. Most of us think the fair option is to raise other people's taxes.

"most of us" don't understand the basic concept of marginal tax rates, and "most of us" don't understand the idea of marginal utility. "most of us" have in some form or another been doused in a firehose of "the only good tax rate is a lower tax rate" propaganda generated over (at least) the last 40 years. For a long time, the USA (like many other post-industrial revolution countries) has accepted that "fair" means us…

> the only good tax rate is a lower tax rate" propaganda generated over (at least) the last 40 years.

You lost me here. I guess it’s bad to want to keep my money I’ve worked so hard to earn. Must be that propaganda. Or perhaps the socialism propaganda just isn’t working?

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