791–800 of 1001 posts
It's crazy that universal health is the political third rail in most modern countries but for the opposite reasons In most of the world it's the policy that cannot be touched, just in Europe, Canada and Australia its _existance_ is invoilable, in the US the _introduction_ seems to be the unwinnable war
The NHS can NOT be meddled with whatsoever.
Complete political suicide.
Legislate transparent pricing for all medications and procedures first. Paying 40 dollars for lozenges in the ER is insane. Right now the system has an opaque pricing structure which makes no sense. Force hospitals to expose API's with transparent pricing.
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If people voted for universal healthcare we could get it done. The issue is that there’s a sizable, significant voting population that votes against it
My question is why a sizeable portion of the American (and greater Western) public seemingly votes against their interests?
The solution is to have both a) mandatory voting and b) a voting holiday. This is done in many other democracies around the world, and it works. Personally I would prefer term limits and age limits for congress, the president, and federal judges. Diane Feinstein, Ruth Bater Ginsberg died in office. Mitch McConnell is working on it. We have age limits for lots of professions that require high performance - political leadership should not be an exception. But of course to make any of these changes young people have to vote, but they're mostly busy being poor and doomscrolling to block out the pain.
There are a lot of people making a lot of money on the inefficiencies of the US system. They won’t give up their revenue streams without a fight, and they are filthy rich on the backs of sick people. You better believe they will play dirty.
If someone shoots some more CEOs, they'll have a change of heart. (A lot of people are going to be very mad at me about this comment, without having the awareness to understand that this is the inevitable conclusion to, "You wanna play rough, ah?!"ing people's access to life-saving treatment. Please grok that we can preclude any more assassinations by cutting profits and letting people get the care they need.)
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> Force hospitals to expose API's with transparent pricing. Unless you're uninsured (which is a whole separate clusterfuck), the hospitals aren't the ones who decide how much you pay for any service - the insurance companies are. The sticker price that hospitals charge is almost meaningless and is intentionally high because it's used as the starting point for negotiations, which always bring the price down (never up)…
It should be illegal to charge different prices for the same thing to different customers.
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this is a great example. What a horrible human... https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article...
This is a top-level example but you do not have to look at the top, really. The whole private insurance system is a scam at every level. I mean: I immigrated to US couple years ago, and I can tell you that any hospital visit, or a diagnostics, such as CT scan or ultrasound are 15-20x more expensive here than in my home country (which is in the EU). Funny thing is: if you tell the hospital that you do not have an insu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If people voted for universal healthcare we could get it done. The issue is that there’s a sizable, significant voting population that votes against it
My question is why a sizeable portion of the American (and greater Western) public seemingly votes against their interests?
-The US has had a lot of success by letting businesses run pretty free. This has produced some of the largest and most powerful companies on the planet.
-The conservative party traditionally has been suspicious of a powerful, centralized government
-In the US, there is a common thread of "government workers are impossible to fire" as well as a common thread of "government moves at a snail's pace".
In light of just that, there are many people who would prefer that healthcare is run by a private industry, as private insurers are enormous companies in the US. Everyone knows Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, or Kaiser Permanente. Many people give a benefit of the doubt that companies are doing things efficiently. Additionally, health insurance companies in the US have a requirement to spend a certain % of their revenue each year on medical care, and will sometimes send out small refunds when they simply cannot suppress costs in certain other regions of the company enough to keep their spending at the right rates.
Beyond this, states may provide additional benefits, and many do (some with the help of federal funding, even). You may find someone in one state where they are suffering greatly, while someone in an identical economic situation in another state is not suffering at all. It's easy to convince the first man to vote for a better healthcare situation. It's hard to convince the latter.
I could go on for ages, but this is getting long. There are like a billion reasons.
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If someone shoots some more CEOs, they'll have a change of heart. (A lot of people are going to be very mad at me about this comment, without having the awareness to understand that this is the inevitable conclusion to, "You wanna play rough, ah?!"ing people's access to life-saving treatment. Please grok that we can preclude any more assassinations by cutting profits and letting people get the care they need.)
If people voted for universal healthcare we could get it done. The issue is that there’s a sizable, significant voting population that votes against it
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fix the principal/agent problem by decoupling health insurance from employment by not having health insurance be paid for with pre-tax dollars.
I 100% want it decoupled from employment. But it doesn't magically make very sick people capable of comparison shopping either.