201–210 of 1001 posts
Who's gonna tell the doctors and nurses that they get a 50% pay cut?
What about quality of care tradeoffs? In Canada, for example, you are forced to use the government system, and if it doesn't deem you important enough, there is no private option.
We've been down this road. ACA was predicated on studies like this, to no avail (it turns out that intense opposition chips away at it over time regardless of these studies). I'm of the opinion that, if your solution requires perpetual majority control of legislative, executive, and judicial branches, your solution is in fact a campaign slogan. I'm not saying that this is what is happening now , but I am saying that…
These types of studies, and the goals they aim to support, always frustrate me as solving a surface-level problem rather than root cause. The problem with US healthcare isn't who pays for it, its how damn expensive it is. As always there are multiple factors at play, my list would include corruption, lack of legal accountability/responsibility, and a population that is much less healthy than reasonable. Go after any…
It does this by eliminating a very inefficient layer of our current system (insurance companies), and by having there replacement for that (the government) negotiate on drug prices (how much savings there is the reason there are two estimates). Currently insurance companies almost have a negative incentive to push down drug prices (their profits are limited to a percentage of total spending, and most large companies are pushing against that limit).
Most of the cost control pressures in our current system come out of Medicare/Medicade, and this would widen that out to the whole system. That in turn would wedge open the door to pushing on the other drivers of the cost spirals: hospital administration, new expensive drugs that are not worth the additional costs, doctor salaries ballooning, and the broken system between malpractice insurance and dysfunctional enforcement against malpractice.
I can't help but think the picture looks very different now. There is growing awareness that chargemasters can not be secret. LLMs offer a way to overcome the complexity of choosing options, opening doors for real competition. I sincerely hope we can take advantage of this changed landscape to provide better care. Universal health care remains an interesting possible direction, but I now have hope that we can do a lot better within the existing laws.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody, including congress, gives a rat's ass about insurance companies and their profits. The truth is that someone has to approve or deny healthcare. Every universal system does it too, but by government policy instead of corporate decision. After the CEO of United Healthcare was gunned down in the streets for doing that thankless job do you think congress is saying to themselves "hey, maybe we should get into that…
Man I wish I could downvote a comment. This is what you’d see on Reddit. “Thankless job” is a crazy way to describe United Healthcare. No one cares about insurance companies and their profits?? This doesn’t even make sense, so many people rely on insurance and many stakeholders profit off the American insurance system.
I mean, you can do that here. The system just restricts what you can do until you've spent more time commenting.
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ACA has saved tons of lives. Due to the intense opposition, it was not structured in a way that could save money, but rather structured in the way that it could get through congress. Additionally, as somebody who was around pre-ACA, I can not tell you how much better, in every single way, the post-ACA healthcare world is. Pre-existing conditions? Access to healthcare as an individual? These are life-changing possibil…
I lost my individual healthcare plan, and I couldn’t afford the new ones. Remember when they said you could keep your plan? Yeah, that’s the one I lost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Moreover, when the leaders of both parties are opposed to single payer, how in the world do you expect it to ever pass? I don't. However, if I were a betting man, I'd bet on the Democratic leadership to come around well before the Republicans. Not least because a significant, non-zero fraction of their politicians are already in favor of it (compared to the other side, which has close to zero). Without a 60-strong…
> I'd bet on the Democratic leadership to come around well before the Republicans. Jeffries was already around. He supported single payer but now rejects it, so he's moving backward . > Without a 60-strong majority in the Senate, which must necessarily include some Republicans, it'll never happen. Democrats had 60 during Obama's first term. They'll always find a rotating villain to oppose it, Joe Lieberman, Joe mansi…
So what do you propose? Is there a 3rd party that has a reasonable chance of doing it?
Maybe if you flip a few Republicans (to supporting UHC) it might go easier. It'll give their leadership something to think about at least.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These types of studies, and the goals they aim to support, always frustrate me as solving a surface-level problem rather than root cause. The problem with US healthcare isn't who pays for it, its how damn expensive it is. As always there are multiple factors at play, my list would include corruption, lack of legal accountability/responsibility, and a population that is much less healthy than reasonable. Go after any…
No, it’s not a question of who pays for it but who benefits. You could have universal health with zero additional spending by the US government, but all that administrative overhead is someone’s income.
What about quality of care tradeoffs? In Canada, for example, you are forced to use the government system, and if it doesn't deem you important enough, there is no private option.
I think the tradeoff is that in the US, on average one gets to spend about $4000 more per year and live about 3 years less when compared to Canada. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Life_expectancy_vs_h...
We've been down this road. ACA was predicated on studies like this, to no avail (it turns out that intense opposition chips away at it over time regardless of these studies). I'm of the opinion that, if your solution requires perpetual majority control of legislative, executive, and judicial branches, your solution is in fact a campaign slogan. I'm not saying that this is what is happening now , but I am saying that…
ACA has saved tons of lives. Due to the intense opposition, it was not structured in a way that could save money, but rather structured in the way that it could get through congress. Additionally, as somebody who was around pre-ACA, I can not tell you how much better, in every single way, the post-ACA healthcare world is. Pre-existing conditions? Access to healthcare as an individual? These are life-changing possibil…
I would quit my day job and completely focus on my side business if I didn't have to worry about healthcare.