411–420 of 431 posts
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In my country people are already complaining about a 300 euro deductible (my mom has a chronic illness so she hits that every year)... I surmise that either Americans are all rich and have 40k in savings that they can lose with no sweat or America is hell for anyone not rich
It's the latter.
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Nor should it strive to be a market. Healthy markets can only exist where demand is elastic. If the choice is between dying to kidney failure or enduring life-crushing medical debt, you bet I'm going to do anything it takes to get that transplant. And therein lies the problem: You *cannot* have healthy markets in healthcare. Period. Demand for healthcare is fully inelastic. Anyone arguing the opposite is either profi…
I think this is actually an opposite problem. For kidney failure in particular, you can check the insane amount USG spends on end stage care. The demand for healthcare at the limit exceeds any reasonable supply. Healthcare spending across counties goes up pretty much with disposable income. There are massively expensive interventions that could give someone close to death few extra months. Healthcare has to be ration…
In a society that values McDonald's staying cheap and Coca-Cola superbowl ads, maybe this is true, but it's not a universal rule at all. On the other end of the spectrum from kidney transplants are regular checkups and ability to walk into any doctor's office to get your flu/cold checked out. Rationing healthcare at these stages is only going to make it worse as people wait until they need an emergency room visit to get care.
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Hospitals are also quite good for giving birth, because human bodies are extraordinarily bad at giving birth. As fun as it sounds to go back to 25-50% infant mortality, I would prefer we keep this in hospitals and do cesarian sections and other interventions when necessaru.
Will somebody please think of the children !!?!?!?!
It's also very expensive to be underdeveloped. Simple things go from given to impossible problems. Things we take for granted, like sanitation, because insurmountable obstacles. Just ask any developing countries.
Less infant mortality is good, actually, because I like living in a developed country. I don't want to burn our tax payer dollars on burning baby corpses. I don't want to burn tax payer dollars on a stupidly volatile economy because everyone is dying all the time.
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Based on what? Why even leave this comment if you’re just going to say “would likely be worse off” without giving literally any evidence or even suggestion of why. Insurance is a pool. The bigger your pool the more you spread the risk/load. It’s brain dead simple. Medical care is a human right, beyond that. Nothing about our system makes any sense and it is built to pad so many pockets in entirely opaque ways between…
I think it's telling that people are shocked at the assertion I just made, which is not complicated or outlandish or hard to understand and is in fact backed up by referendum and attempted implementation results for state-level programs. I think two big things are happening that fog people's understanding of this issue: First, there's a widespread belief that M4A is popular, based on public opinion polling. The probl…
I’m still not seeing how or why it has to be worse. This just seems like an assumption you’re making. Also sure the exact existing policy you have won’t be available by definition because the system has entirely changed but once again if you want private insurance you will still be able to get it, as is the case in other countries with socialized medicine.
Also really don’t see why you would say that the polls that say people want socialized medicine are rigged and not-representative but the polls that you’re saying show that most people with private insurance are happy with it are accurate. Not really sure how that stands to reason.
I really feel like the argument you’re making here boils down to M4A is bad because it has to be worse and people who have private insurance now are happy with their plans and could only have them replaced with something that would be worse. Or even more simply: Change is scary so I guess we’re stuck with the current system and actually people like it so don’t rock the boat.
Also the median income for someone with employer provided healthcare is 120K? I’m going to need some data on that. Also you’re then cutting out everyone with marketplace insurance which is 24 million people.
More people are poised to lose Medicaid and my marketplace insurance plan, if I chose to accept it for next year was going to cost me 6X for the monthly premiums and require co-pays I don’t have before as well as much larger copays for ones I did.
I’m going to be completely honest. I don’t care if people making 120K/year are upset if their visible cost for healthcare is more obvious or not. From 2024 census data 41.2% of households made above 100K annually. That number becomes roughly 33% when you step it up to $150K/year and drops to something like 12% when you get to $200K/year. By the time you get to $400K/year you’re at like 3%.
Also households as a unit isn’t necessarily representative of the distribution of people within them.
I reject the idea that government system are inherently bad and so we can’t have them. I reject the premise that the wealthy will be forced to have worse healthcare to subsidize the majority of Americans. I absolutely reject any notion that our private healthcare as it exists is efficient, affordable and the superior system.
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I think it's telling that people are shocked at the assertion I just made, which is not complicated or outlandish or hard to understand and is in fact backed up by referendum and attempted implementation results for state-level programs. I think two big things are happening that fog people's understanding of this issue: First, there's a widespread belief that M4A is popular, based on public opinion polling. The probl…
Sorry but I reject this thinking. You’re essentially saying that Medicare for all is bad because it’ll seem to cost more because the way the money works isn’t obscured so people will be mad and that it has to be worse than their existing policies. I’m still not seeing how or why it has to be worse. This just seems like an assumption you’re making. Also sure the exact existing policy you have won’t be available by def…
What I think is funny about this is, if I had left a one-line comment saying "this CEO's story about his health insurance costs tells me we all need M4A", nobody would have blinked. Instead, I made a somewhat skeptical observation about it, and got messages demanding I "show my work", or like this one, about how you "reject my thinking".
If people understand and strongly support the policy, they should probably make a point of not being totally bumfuzzled by arguments about it!
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Sorry but I reject this thinking. You’re essentially saying that Medicare for all is bad because it’ll seem to cost more because the way the money works isn’t obscured so people will be mad and that it has to be worse than their existing policies. I’m still not seeing how or why it has to be worse. This just seems like an assumption you’re making. Also sure the exact existing policy you have won’t be available by def…
I didn't say Medicare For All was bad. I said a large cohort of existing insured people would be worse off under it. Those are different claims. Whether or not I think it's good has nothing to do with whether or not what I said was correct. What I think is funny about this is, if I had left a one-line comment saying "this CEO's story about his health insurance costs tells me we all need M4A", nobody would have blinke…
Regardless if you’re not willing to support your argument that’s fine, but at the same time if you’re going to put something out there and and then be upset if other people being skeptical of your skepticism then I don’t know what to tell you.
I still don’t really see how anything you’ve offered necessarily means people who currently have employer provided private insurance plans will be worse off. I especially don’t see it because people with incomes like you proposed the median income for households with employer provided insurance plans often have employer provided private insurance plans in countries that also have a public health system.
I guess maybe here is the meat of it and what matters. How are you defining worse off? Are you defining it based on quality of care/outcomes or in a financial sense? Either way seems pretty speculative to me but I’d be interested to know which (or both) of those you think makes them worse off.
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> The quality of health care in the US is significantly higher than anywhere else in the world. Simply not true. Infant mortality and under-five mortality rate (U5MR) are one of best simple indicators of the quality of healthcare. USA's mortality is x3 (!!!) of the countries on top. This puts USA around place 50 in the world, worse than Russia...
It's obesity, mostly
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My monthly mobile internet usage is 5-25GB. And this is me working from home using wifi, having cheap internet (slow, but unlimited) and barely being outside. Phone wifi usage is 150-250GB/month.
Well, I have to wonder what you are doing on your phone. I don't restrict my usage at all outside of video and audio streaming, so I'm befuddled as to how you use 10-50 times more data than I do. Last month, 429MB used: 107 YouTube music 91 Google maps 70 Firefox 22 Amazon Miscellaneous other small amounts WiFi usage 26GB I don't doubt that you use a lot of internet, but that amount is far away from a "requirement to…
Also, since I live in Europe, I don't use car (otherwise would obviously not able to watch videos during travel), but public transportation. And using mobile internet is normal, nobody cares to ask for cafe wifi or to even type it in despite being visible on the wall. This is very freeing. Perhaps more than Americans can imagine, since the limits are internalized. Analogy would be the freedom Americans feel, after they move to Europe and realize that they don't have to worry about becoming broke due to sudden health problems. This is a constant worry that Americans have, but the extend of which is fully understood only after the shackles have been dropped.
Like, a lot of people here don't even have a separate internet connection at home, but are simply using their phone's shared internet with their laptops. That's how normal it is. And these "no limits" contracts are what allows the change in behavior to FULLY utilize the technology, without the need to limit oneself.
A lot depends on how one understands the word "participate". I mean, is eating the diet of only oats, eggs and protein powder enough to "have eating needs met" or is the requirement limit at "balanced food diet, with cost not influencing decisions"?
In my opinion requirement can be rephrased into "can fulfill all the phone/internet needs, without limits, without restricting oneself". So in this sense your internet requirement is 26.5GB and we have to look at the price of the phone connect that would provide at least this much at full speed.
Nope. Only in your s-hole country. We don't have this problem here in Europe.