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Old 10-19-2017, 06:29 PM
 
661 posts, read 684,994 times
Reputation: 874

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My point is Medicare is a socialist scheme. W Bush signed Republican legislation implementing Part D which had a huge unfunded cost.

So I would like all of the elderly posters here receiving Medicare complaining about having to help pay for other American's healthcare to grow a spine and have some ideological consistency.

But too often it's 'Obamacare is bad because I have to pay for others but Medicare is good because I get it'. Or 'Obamacare sucks and is complicated but I have literally no solutions other than to complain about costs and complexity or to allow a system where tens of millions of Americans cannot get decent healthcare'.

 
Old 10-19-2017, 06:32 PM
 
Location: Living rent free in your head
42,711 posts, read 25,867,327 times
Reputation: 33790
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFlats View Post
1. It's a philosophical issue. Do you believe that people should be required to pay for others healthcare needs. Except for a small slice of relatively healthy lifetime high income earners the Silent generation and Baby Boom generation will not put enough of their pay into Medicare to cover the costs they will incur over their lifetime.

What, you think it's American to ask people to help other Americans who can't pay their own way? Maybe it's more American to let everyone take care of themselves and get government off our backs. Charity will cover the gap.

2. Paul Ryan's wife isn't a billionaire and Paul grew up with modest means. He's super wonky and articulate though so I trust he'll do what's best for all of us.

3. Our crumbling military, yes. Haven't you heard Romney and Trump explain how devastated it became under Obama and how we really, really need to increase it's funding? Especially on weapons programs like the F35 and LCS. Because we might have to fight a conventional war against China or Russia at any moment.
Paul Ryan grew up on SS survivors benefits lol. Charity will not pay for healthcare, period.

Here is how healthcare for the poor would work if they had to rely upon charity

In 2016 American individuals, estates, foundations and corporations contributed an estimated $390.05 billion to U.S. charities.

In 2016 19% of the population was covered by medicaid, 14% by medicare and 9% were uninsured. If you end medicaid and medicare that would leave 42% of the population that would need to have their healthcare provided by charity. There were around 323 million people in the US in 2016, so 135,660,000 would need charity healthcare.

Healthcare spending per person in 2016 was $10,345. So total healthcare for those people would cost about 1.4 trillion dollars

After using every penny contributed to all charities in 2016 there would be a deficit of over a trillion dollars, where will that come from?
 
Old 10-19-2017, 06:41 PM
 
661 posts, read 684,994 times
Reputation: 874
Well 2sleepy I assume some people will have to go without healthcare then. Should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. America!
 
Old 10-19-2017, 06:59 PM
 
661 posts, read 684,994 times
Reputation: 874
Look at all the constructive policy measures and ideas that folks in this thread have contributed! Ranging from 'It's complicated and I have no solutions except complaining' to 'It's immoral to force me to pay for other American's healthcare'.

Quote:
Originally Posted by expatCA View Post
Yep major mistakes are hard to fix and with all the various groups benefiting and arguing about it, no real fix is likely to happen any time soon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by expatCA View Post
The problem has existed since year two of the ACA. It is just getting worse and worse, as while it was a good "idea" it was badly implemented from the beginning. Both sides are making it worse instead of making it better.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CaliRestoration View Post
How can it not be an economic issue when you're forcing people to redistribute THEIR MONEY to pay for others?

You're right though, it's a moral issue as well, and the entire "health care is a right" movement is morally bankrupt because they want to steal other people's money using the government's gun to pay their way. Completely immoral and evil.

It's easy for you to say "blah blah rich people will pay more than their share, I don't care" because you aren't rich. It's not your money. Who is being morally bankrupt here?
Quote:
Originally Posted by CaliRestoration View Post
Lots of people say "Healthcare" is a right. But people who say that usually don't understand what that implies. They think by saying "It's a right" and it magically happens. That's not how the real world works. What actually happens is this.

- Health care becomes a right.

- Now anyone can get healthcare, regardless of pre-existing conditions, lifestyle habits, etc. They just simply get it.

- Now someone has to pay for it. Right? Doctors don't work for free. California was proposing single payer this year, and it got tied up in committee. Why? Because no one on Earth knows how to magically create DOUBLE the California economy over night. But let's say they were stupid enough to let it out of committee, and now you have to fund it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CaliRestoration View Post
It's easy for poor people to vote someone's else's money to themselves, but they never think of the consequences of stagnant growth for 4 decades. No one ever discusses that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shooting4life View Post
You and others talk about Obamacare like it is an actual functional bill that hasn't had all the taxes stripped out of it. Not to mention how the obamacare exchanges are bleeding money. In 5 years almost all the obamacare plans will stop existing as insurance companies have zero reasons to keep losing money on them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shooting4life View Post
I can come up with lots of good ideas if I don't have to worry about paying for them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SportyandMisty View Post
It is actually worse than that. All those non-productive bureaucrats and administrators have a vested interest in keeping the system bloated. None of them would ever attempt to re-engineer the business processes so as to cut out their own jobs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SportyandMisty View Post
a) make more money
b) move to a lower cost area.

Life is all about alternatives.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SportyandMisty View Post
The answer is not "universal food". The answer is to get all the administrative bloat out of the system and return it to what we actually have - an amazingly efficient food distribution network.

Returning to the real world, imagine if we made health care delivery as efficient as the food distribution system. Instead of consuming $10,000 to $12,000 per person in health care expenditures, we might only consumer $3,000 per person --with the same or better quality.
 
Old 10-19-2017, 08:25 PM
 
18,172 posts, read 16,232,213 times
Reputation: 9325
Quote:
Originally Posted by 2sleepy View Post
"The low-wage worker earns 45% of the average wage, while the high-wage worker earns 160% of the average wage. The tax-max wage worker earns at the taxable maximum for Social Security every year. Take year 2013 as an example, a low-wage worker's annual salary is $20,308, which is at the 38th percentile rank among all U.S. individuals with incomes; the annual salary of an average-wage worker is $45,129 and is at the 70th percentile rank;2 $72,206 is the annual salary of a high-wage earner and is ranked at the 86th percentile; and a tax-max wage worker earns $113,700 in 2013 and is at the 94th percentile rank among all U.S. individuals with incomes. "

The first of these differences is in restricting Medicare benefits to Part A. This assumption permits a consistent comparison of how much benefits can be expected from taxes paid. Since payroll taxes don't fund Part B and D, it is simply unfair to consider whether payroll taxes are sufficient to cover a part of the program that other sources fund.

My payroll taxes more than paid for part A benefits I will receive from medicare, feel better now?
LIFETIME TAXPAYER CONTRIBUTIONS AND BENEFITS OF MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY - Guo - 2017 - Contemporary Economic Policy - Wiley Online Library
Mine too, so I am also helping someone else by paying for theirs and I am not complaining about it. And I still pay hundreds of dollars every month in Medicare insurance including both parts AND payroll taxes as well, which also goes to help others.
 
Old 10-19-2017, 09:22 PM
 
Location: So Ca
26,573 posts, read 26,433,288 times
Reputation: 24510
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFlats View Post
1. It's a philosophical issue. Do you believe that people should be required to pay for others healthcare needs.
Yes, I do. We're all paying for others' healthcare, including those who don't have health insurance; the cost is built into our premiums. To me it's no different than paying property taxes, much of which goes to public education (unless you want an uneducated public), long after one's children are grown/regardless of whether one has children/when one's kids attend private schools.

Quote:
What, you think it's American to ask people to help other Americans who can't pay their own way? Maybe it's more American to let everyone take care of themselves and get government off our backs. Charity will cover the gap.
Really? Shall we get rid of FEMA? How about telling people to fight their own forest fires? (Take a visit to Santa Rosa and let those residents tell you what it's like to lose everything.) Let the people affected by recent devastating hurricanes just pull themselves up by their bootstraps? I don't think so. And "charity" won't begin to cover the gap.

Quote:
Paul Ryan's wife isn't a billionaire and Paul grew up with modest means.
Janna Little Ryan is a former lawyer and corporate lobbyist, and an heiress by means of her grandfather. She grew up with a very comfortable lifestyle as the daughter of two trial lawyers. And Paul Ryan's first priority is his own self interest.

Last edited by CA4Now; 10-19-2017 at 09:35 PM..
 
Old 10-19-2017, 09:49 PM
 
Location: Living rent free in your head
42,711 posts, read 25,867,327 times
Reputation: 33790
Quote:
Originally Posted by expatCA View Post
Mine too, so I am also helping someone else by paying for theirs and I am not complaining about it. And I still pay hundreds of dollars every month in Medicare insurance including both parts AND payroll taxes as well, which also goes to help others.
well said
 
Old 10-20-2017, 11:30 AM
 
Location: Paranoid State
13,044 posts, read 13,779,448 times
Reputation: 15837
Quote:
Originally Posted by pgrdr View Post
The Affordable Health Care Act is not the problem. It’s how the private sector is being allowed to get around it that is the problem.
Of course the not-ACA is the problem. It did nothing to address the root cause that the underlying price of health care services is too damn high -- that's why it is a problem.

In this country people consume $10,000 per year of health care services -- therefore the insurance must cost $10,000 per year plus administrative overhead plus profit. There just is now way to get around the arithmetic on that.

So, the only way to make things affordable is to change that $10K per person per year in health care services. If it were driven down to $5,000 per person per year, then the insurance would drop to $5,000 per person per year plus administrative overhead plus profit.
 
Old 10-20-2017, 11:34 AM
 
Location: Paranoid State
13,044 posts, read 13,779,448 times
Reputation: 15837
Quote:
Originally Posted by pgrdr View Post
That’s true of all medical practices now, but those admin staffs are required mostly to deal with all the added bureaucracy and interfering of the insurance companies.
Very true -- that is part of the long-term decline in the productivity of health care. One might think a government-based single payer system would have less bureaucracy than insurance companies, but the history of government flies in the face of that hope.
 
Old 10-20-2017, 11:38 AM
 
Location: Paranoid State
13,044 posts, read 13,779,448 times
Reputation: 15837
Quote:
Originally Posted by shooting4life View Post
Like I said, the courts founds it unconstitutional.

The ultimate end goal of this is to bring democrats to the table to negotiate on a fix to Obamacare.
Democrats have absolutely no interest in fixing Obamacare. The Democrats are all taking a knee.
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