471–480 of 1001 posts
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> These are life-changing possibilities, especially for entrepreneurs. I would quit my day job and completely focus on my side business if I didn't have to worry about healthcare.
Then you should consider emigrating to a country with universal healthcare such as Canada.
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> Now the acess to best hosptials is gated by a queue? I mean, yes? Literally the same principle we all learned in kindergarten for how to make access to something fair. You didn't get to skip the line in lunch because your parents had a better job than someone else either.
Sadly, this is a better comparison than you probably intended, because access to school lunch is still not universal in the US. If a child cannot pay, there are some districts that serve cheaper alternative meals that don't meet the normal lunch standards, some that shame children by giving them hand stamps, and even some that will literally dump their tray in the trash.
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>theres an argument for removing private insurance companies in favor of thr government I don't see why you'd need to do that. Just expand medicare to everyone and if people want to also buy private insurance they can. They'd just need to be more competitive and add significant value, which they don't currently do.
And then more and more providers would opt out of taking Medicare at all, so we would quickly end up back where we started.
Actually I thought that was already the case.
The thing studies like this never take into account is the degree to which all of these administrative jobs are corporate welfare. The inefficiency means a lot of people get a regular paycheck for work that is ultimately nonproductive. If you kill off those jobs by eliminating waste there will be millions of people looking for a new job. But the bigger problem is the current system is really profitable for the millio…
* Billing and claims management
* Compliance
* Customer service
* Operations
* IT
You can drive billing all the way down to zero and you're still going to be spending a lot of money on administration just like any large enterprise does. Those jobs aren't really "corporate welfare" and they exist in every system, although the single-payer systems get a bit of a break on them because they can and do trade responsiveness off for customer service (at likely little cost to outcomes, to be fair!)
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UHC proponents are just excessively optimistic about impact on health outcomes.
No, they are excessively optimistic about the financial outcomes. Healthcare should not bankrupt people.
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> Now the acess to best hosptials is gated by a queue? I mean, yes? Literally the same principle we all learned in kindergarten for how to make access to something fair. You didn't get to skip the line in lunch because your parents had a better job than someone else either.
right. my point is last line of my comment. most of the society doesnt operate in the way that you described.
If your objection is to a system that operates differently than the rest of society, it's not clear why the hypothetical healthcare system is more of a bugbear than the very real one that doesn't resemble pretty much any other way that things get purchased. I don't really understand how you think spending time arguing against something that has very little chance of happening based on principles that ostensibly conflict with the actual version that genuinely does exist is a sign that people are not being misled by those with incentives to distract them in that way or otherwise are struggling to reason about an issue logically.
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> There are only two realistic possibilities. Get a Republican to propose some sort of national healthcare or have Democrats fully embrace socialized medicine and not give a shit what Republicans say or think. It's worth keeping in mind that Eisonhower's cabinet argued against the idea of giving the polio vaccine away for free on the basis of it being a "backdoor to socialized medicine". We're over seven decades past…
Would that Obama, Jeffries, Schumer, and others felt the same way!
[0]: edited from "single-payer" to reflect correction to a similar comment I made elsewhere in this thread
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I mean, the original plan for what became ACA was single payer. They didn't have the votes from the moderate democrats though, which is why the "private plans on public exchanges" became a thing instead. You're not wrong at at least for the forseeable future, single payer does seem untenable politically, but I'd argue that dismissing studies like this on the basis that it needs solved before debating it on its merits…
They had 59 votes from Democrats for the public option, not single payer. Public option is to let people choose either a non-profit government insurance plan or private insurers. They needed 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster. Joe Lieberman (Ind-CT) said he would filibuster the public option but would vote for the ACA without it.
I still think this is an important historical detail that seems to go under the radar a lot; if anything, it gives me yet another reason to disdain the filibuster!
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I think a citation is needed for "Americans regularly avoid care ... because they can’t afford it." I think there are other reasons, e.g. they don't like doctors, or it's too inconvenient, or waiting times are too long. I have good insurance and haven't seen a doctor in probably 20 years. I know people who are visiting the doctor for every sore throat, ache and pain or sneeze and sniffle, and that's not me at all.
Here you go, a recent survey: https://www.jgwentworth.com/resources/medical-emergency > The survey showed that over nine in ten (92%) of insured respondents had delayed or avoided medical care because of concern about cost. > In fact, 95% of those surveyed said a medical emergency would likely put them into serious debt even with insurance.
The medical emergency debt statistic is just the usual thing of people not really understanding how medical insurance works.
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Universal healthcare doesn’t happen in the US because a certain subset of the American population would rather have worse health outcomes than guarantee abortions, HIV prevention, and gender-affirming care. Also, ~150M people with employer coverage plus seniors on Medicare fear disruption more than they value expansion.
There's also a racist element (I know that's a politically incorrect word here, but such things happen). People don't want to fund services to the lazy ______s - fill in one or more of many groups toward whom hate is promoted. When a similar bill was voted down years ago, someone I was with laughed and said, 'no way were we paying for healthcare for the Blacks'. It fits the divide and conquer strategy to divide poore…