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'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

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Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My man, this is the Raspberry Pi guy, Jeff Greeling. He lives in St. Louis, MO.

He is a god, and we mere mortals.

For those like me, who also had no idea:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/about

He is impressive.

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#55
post #37
post #3

>Allen is herself a casualty. While she used to pay $487.50 a month, her new healthcare plan, with reduced coverage, has monthly premiums of $1,967.50. Brutal. Meanwhile the White House calls it all "fake news".

Guy from Poland here. What happened to ObamaCare? I thought you got finally a primary healthcare for all?

You comment sounds like snark but I understand if you don't know what Obamacare is.

(And I'm not an expert so hopefully people will correct any mistakes)

"Obamacare" was never healthcare for all. It is a GOP healthcare plan that heavily subsidizes private insurance. (Because free markets) And the current affordability crisis is the result of letting the government subsidies that help people pay for their Obamacare coverage lapse.

On a positive note: Obamacare (aka the ACA-PPP) did put some restrictions reasonable restrictions on the terrible things insurance companies used to do. For example, drop customers for "pre-existing conditions", impose lifetime payout maximums, etc.

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#56
post #7
post #3

>Allen is herself a casualty. While she used to pay $487.50 a month, her new healthcare plan, with reduced coverage, has monthly premiums of $1,967.50. Brutal. Meanwhile the White House calls it all "fake news".

It's always cost ~$2k a month, the only difference is the previous administration thought everyone else should be "temporarily" paying for her plan. I feel like we need a perpetual PSA here that moving money from person A to person B obviously doesn't make anything cheaper.

As a supporter of single payer(or really, anything else), I support this move. When half the nation is on subsidized healthcare they aren't so likely to care about costs.

Now, you have a lot more angry people, and hopefully that leads to real reform, because what we have now is unsustainable, even to upper middle class families.

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#58
post #49

One thing that I’ve been trying to understand about this discourse: Is the sum of the increase in costs some people are now paying greater than the subsidies that previously existed? In other words: was there always a massive bill to be paid here, but it was just previously socialized and hidden in the form of taxes/ public debt? Or does the act of subsidizing it actually decrease the total?

Yes to both. High costs were previously partly hidden by subsidies for some consumers purchasing individual or family policies on state ACA exchanges, and now many of them will be forced to pay something closer to the true market price. But just like with college tuition, when the government throws money at a problem that ends up causing costs to explode without permanently improving affordability.

Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

#60
I have some questions but I don't want to offend anybody. Aren't there any methods to contract the healthcare to lower the prices down? I heard that in UK they have some requirements that the prices must not go higher than... For a given type of service. Also I read a lot of articles that giving a tablet to a hospitalised person costs 20-50 bucks and people are generally running away from ambulances to not pay
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