171–180 of 363 posts
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Why SalesForce? How tall is SalesForce Tower?
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when has California's government recently shown any capability to successfully implement big projects or spend tax payer money efficiently? How is the high speed train project coming along?
This is my thought, as well. When your private insurance company stinks, you find a new insurer. When you're forced to pay the government for health insurance, you're stuck without options. Health insurance isn't one of the services that I trust the government to be able to run well. They don't have a particularly great track record where efficiency, customer service, and speed are concerned.
So your comment only covers less than 10.5% of people at the moment... a little more than the number of people who have no health coverage (a good portion not out of real choice).
And that does not even cover how horribly this sort of market functions: you never know how good or bad your coverage actually is until you go to use it for a particular problem, and then you don't really know that until it is over and you are maybe bankrupt. Health insurance is the worst place to try and use market forces to regulate it... well maybe after military, fire, and police...
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Looking at housing availability hard to believe there is an actual net outflow from CA
There's an outflow of people willing to produce value, and an inflow of people ready to consume it. It will work just great until suddenly there's not that many value left to feed all the hungry mouths. And then the mouths will take pitchforks and go raid the nearby granary because that's where they think the food is. Only to find it empty because the people willing to actually produce food left long time ago. USSR h…
Looking at California's continuously rising GDP, it is hard to believe that value producers are leaving to be replaced with leaches. More likely, conservatives have been leaving the state, but since they live in more rural areas anyways (i.e. the red parts of the state), it hasn't dented the state's GDP much.
> It will work just great until suddenly there's not that many value left to feed all the hungry mouths. And then the mouths will take pitchforks and go raid the nearby granary because that's where they think the food is.
Ah, is your statement more about immigration from Mexico to support California's huge agriculture industry? If that is the case, then I agree: ever since Trump cracked down on illegal immigration and then with COVID, it has been really hard on Californian farmers.
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38% decrease in people moving to California 12% increase in residents moving out of state last year. In San Francisco Bay Area, it's even more stark. There was a 45% decrease in entrances from other states to the Bay Area and a 21% increase in residents leaving for other states.
"last year" I'd hope most of us know better than to try and make arguments like this about once-in-a-hundred-year historical anomalies.
Other states are seeing the exact opposite.
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If you want an extreme example of how bad a single payer system can get, look at Canada. Not only do we have a single-payer system, we've actually banned private pay of any kind for "medically necessary" services. The net effect is predictable - Canada consistently ranks very poorly in international health system comparisons. We have far fewer ICU beds, doctors, imaging machines, etc. per capita than peer nations, an…
> Y'all actually have one of the best systems in the world, Germany has more ICU beds than the US.
That would be shocking if true, which it does not appear to be.
Germany has around 32K ICU beds. US has around 96K ICU beds.
Germany has slightly more per-capita than the US. (387 vs 294 per million inhabitants)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_...
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The US health care treatments are the best in the world, just the costs are higher than the rest of the world.
Please elaborate on what you mean when you say that US health care treatments are the best in the world.
Last year I was able to choose my surgeon who operated on my knee last year and my total out of pocket expenses were less than $500 for a $20k surgery. In most single-payer health care systems I wouldn't have been able to get the surgery because it was elective and only a partial tear of my patellar tendon.
> to fund a first-in-the-nation single-payer health-care system. This is key here. So instead of paying this out to a private insurance company I pay it in taxes, there by my actual change is net zero, in most cases. I have a feeling most reactions might be headline driven here. I think it’s worth doing the math on how much it costs you in healthcare coverage before really judging a book by its cover here. If my comp…
Do you actually pay that much a year in insurance premiums? I don't live in CA, but I sure don't and my health coverage is pretty good. Keep in mind, this is also just the insurance premium, there's no talk of what co-pays or deductibles would be. In addition, your employer now has to pay more based on their gross receipts and if you make more than 150k a year you are paying even more.
We have good plans too but still have our deductibles which, if I remember right, are around $1,000.
California would increase taxes by $12,250 per household Let's take it at face value this is fact. For my healthcare plan I pay 6k a year on top of what the company pays (more that 20k). Then I pay copays on top of that. It seems perfectly plausible to me that I would come out ahead if the company and I switched from paying about 30k a year in healthcare costs to a single payer system with only 20k a year in costs to…
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Why do you believe single-payer is a bad idea? The model works very well in most European countries.
I suppose you are joking. NHS in the UK has 6M folks on waiting lists for things like cataract surgery, knee replacements etc. The wait time is in range of 18 weeks for many and for 300K+ > 52 weeks. Private providers in the US will see you MUCH more quickly than one year (!!). Some place like Europe are not really single systems. They do work well though in a lot of ways. They will have statutory mandated and the pr…
And for anyone privileged to be able to afford good insurance in the US, you can presumably pay for better private insurance/service in Europe, right?
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The US health care treatments are the best in the world, just the costs are higher than the rest of the world.
While the US does contain some stellar hospitals and surgeons, by broader metrics the US performs poorly. From 2010 to 2015 (before COVID messed with the data), the US ranked 43rd [1] in overall life expectancy. This is behind countries like Cuba and Slovenia, and well behind other rich countries like Japan, Canada, or the UK. Healthcare costs and outcomes can't be separated from each other. The more expensive it is…
For example, I had a knee surgery for a partial patellar tendon tear last year that cost me <$500 out of pocket (insurance was billed $20k) and this surgery wouldn't have been covered by any single payer health care system.