51–60 of 107 posts
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Or how about have national healthcare? Like every other decent country on this planet?
Only after we have explored every other possible solution. This is America, and no socialism is possible; unless you are a homeland security contractor.
What about the police department? Or the fire department? Or the post office?
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The nice thing about making something mandatory is that their is then outrage when people can't afford what they must have. Society can't ignore the problem anymore and must attack it head on. Can't afford insurance? Well, here is a subsidy, or why not just go on medicaid? Can't afford insurance and make $60K a year; well, maybe individual plans should be more affordable...single payer is looking more desirable. Oh,…
What about the unemployed who cannot afford the mandatory insurance - and won't get assistance unless they trek 20 miles across the county (without a car) EACH WEEK to prove they are still unemployed yet looking for work? Seem right? Basically they didn't solve health care costs, they just dumped the cost onto the entire taxpayer base, the same way walmart keeps low prices by keeping their employees on food stamps.
The republicans fought tooth and nail against this because they know that viable solutions to problem (B) are very narrow, and Americans aren't going to want to go back to the have/have not insurance previous state.
But ya, it sucks to have all this political intrigue and drawn-out plans, but that's what happens when the country is so divided on the issue.
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1VlO_qd...
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Only after we have explored every other possible solution. This is America, and no socialism is possible; unless you are a homeland security contractor.
What the hell? State provided healthcare = Socialism?! That's bullshit. What about the police department? Or the fire department? Or the post office?
Any government is, at its core, socialist. Rather than everyone funding their own private army, the state socialises the cost and provides national defence.
For other parts of society, it may also make sense to have everyone pay in to provide service which is to the public good. Police, fire, postal services are canonical examples.
In most countries, health care is also socialised. As is garbage collection, libraries, and road building.
The question - for most reasonable people - is where do you draw the line? Buses are socialised - what about taxis? Doctors are socialised - what about Lawyers, or accountants?
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It isn't really a free market though, it is a fixed market. If it was true free market it would be individual to service, that is why prices are all over the place. We just need to return to individual health care plans, paid for by employees individually (or give them cash health benefits). If your employer paid your auto insurance we'd have the same problem. Not sure how you fix it, maybe by temporarily making it i…
You don't even have to make it illegal for your employer to pay your insurance premium, just take away the tax deduction and watch how fast your employer stops paying.
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Great news, they solved this in a very profitable way. In a few years it will literally be a crime to not have insurance. So cannot afford it? Not their problem - YOUR problem. Yay 'murica.
The nice thing about making something mandatory is that their is then outrage when people can't afford what they must have. Society can't ignore the problem anymore and must attack it head on. Can't afford insurance? Well, here is a subsidy, or why not just go on medicaid? Can't afford insurance and make $60K a year; well, maybe individual plans should be more affordable...single payer is looking more desirable. Oh,…
In the US it does. It will be much more cost-effective for healthy people to pay the penalty each year than to buy insurance. When they need care, they can buy insurance at the normal rate, since it will be illegal to deny them coverage based on a pre-existing condition. This is more than a little bit like shopping for fire insurance after your house has burned down. The primary difference is that politicians have not spent great amounts of effort telling me that I should be entitled to place bets on past events relating to burning houses.
This is why the ACA is such a boon for people that thonk health care should be a free market. It takes the free market ideals and embraces them; the accusations of socialism are more telling of the accuser than the accused. That's not to say that I think health care should be a free market, just that its the goal of the ACA, and the current situation in the US is much less free a market, and due to employer provided…
One good aspect doesn't make it a boon. In my personal experience, the law has made insurance less affordable. I'm in between jobs and bought an inexpensive short-term, high-deductible plan. However, the plan has been deprecated (no renewals after a certain date) because it does not meet all provisions of the ACA.
Last year I had a PPO insurance plan at work that cost $216 per month for a family plan and had very tiny out of pocket expenses. This year my employer dropped the PPO as being unaffordable and switched to a HDHP that costs the same $216 per month for my family plan. Now the plan pays literally nothing for the first $3,000. And then 80/20 up to the first $7,000.
The ACA benefited a lot of people. If you're an older student living at home. If you have a pre-existing condition. If you develop a catastrophic illness. But if you're not in one of those benefited groups then you are paying for those benefited groups.
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But then what happens when they need care when they're not near the company hospital? You'd need to set up company run hospitals all around the state and the country to manage the costs. And suddenly, you've reinvented Kaiser.
Kaiser Permanente ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente ) is a »integrated managed care consortium« (health insurance, I guess). I did not know that.
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The weird thing about having an HSA is that because I pay essentially 75% of a lot of things out of pocket (as long as I'm below my deductible), it often makes sense for me to negotiate and "pay cash" rather than running through my insurance. And yes, the doctors, pharmacies, etc. drop the prices a lot. One of the weird things going on right now is that Doxycycline (a common antibiotic) has gone up in price 10-20x in…
That still sounds like a terrible deal to me. In the UK, I pay around 10% of my salary for national health care and get free care for any problem I might have (and so does my girlfriend, of course). Medication is always exactly £7 (or similar, it might have changed slightly recently) regardless of what it's for.
(and, with an HSA, if I spend less than $3-5k/yr, I get to put that money pre-tax into a Roth IRA equivalent retirement account. I generally spend $200-1000/yr on medical care, so this tends to work out well for me; I don't think I've ever spent more than $1500 in a year. A lot of employers will just give you that money (and pay your premium) if you pick an HSA plan vs. a PPO plan, since it saves them approximately that much in premium)
I'd be willing to pay some premium to cover everyone in the country vs. just myself, and to ensure I would have full coverage regardless of income. I don't think I'd want to pay a flat 10% on all of my income without limit for that, on top of taxes, though. (although, between medicare and 3.8% obamacare surcharge on income and capital gains, it's already nearly 10% up to 100k)
In addition to HSA, what I'd really like is truly universal minimum standard of care -- not quite where the NHS is, but maybe 20% of that -- to cover preventive and "very cost effective" treatments. The problem is while the NHS is able to use QALYs in making decisions, I don't think the US government would be so rational; we'd end up over-covering dramatic diseases and under-covering less dramatic diseases. I don't believe a $500k intervention for an indigent old person with limited benefit should be paid by taxes, since that same $500k could cover childhood immunizations or preventive care for 5-10k people.