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I understand exactly how it works and I stand by my previous statement, its a minimum of about a 50% increase in my out of pocket cost
In other words, you would massively benefit as your out of pocket costs are just a fraction of what you really pay for health insurance (you pay for the employer part, you pay low rates at younger ages, you pay deductibles, you pay co-pays etc).
The only problem with the free market is you have hundreds of thousands of people who are running companies that are not of interest in serving the people. Since they MUST profit to survive... something has to give, either serve less people or more expensive healthcare and/or both.
If you were the government, the last thing you'd want is either of those scenarios which is what is happening right now. So Uncle Sam of course is going to come down on the healthcare industry since free-market healthcare has had it's longest run in any industrialized country.
I do not know of a single country with a successful free market healthcare system.
Liechtenstein is one of the smallest countries in Europe with a population of about 37,000. They could have embraced any model of heathcare. They chose Universal Healthcare and a private insurance mandate. Both employees and employers pay for it.
There is one hospital and it's public. Healthcare providers are free to set their own fees arrangements with insurers. The population is free to seek healthcare in Switzerland and Austria when needs exceed the ability of the in country system to deliver. Private insurance picks up the tab.
No two countries do Universal Healthcare the same.
Healthcare is the topic here. Healthcare. A product that should not cost a wealthy earner more than a poor earner just because people like you say they can afford it. What you advocate is wealth redistribution to poorer classes. I don't advocate for the same. End of story.
That means you dont support flat taxes. That means you support 0.1% tax rate on the rich and 5% tax rate on Joe Sixpack for the same service.
Location: Live:Downtown Phoenix, AZ/Work:Greater Los Angeles, CA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DRob4JC
When I mention college education, I am talking about the cost of the entire "industry" - which has exploded.
Why does it cost so much - wherever you go?
The first I went to college was 1986 to a mid-level 4 year school. I lived at home - the tuition was $960 for 16 credit hours. $60 per credit hour. I graduated in 4.5 years with $5,000 in student loans.
My wife went to the same school (stayed on campus for all 4 years), graduated, and got her master's degree at a major school in the northeast. All of that ended up being $40K in student loans.
$40K will get you maybe two semesters on average right now at a decent 4 year school.
The prices in the industry of college education are high because the government has driven the costs up industry wide - public and private.
I understand that tuition is cheaper - but how much is the true cost per student? How much is the state subsidizing the school to bring the tuition costs down? At does that makes the cost (the tuition + the subsidy per student) less than the private university?
The same will continue to happen with health care.
Wrong, healthcare and college have gotten more expensive than other goods due to Baumol's Cost Disease. Both are high demand goods that are labor intensive (meaning can't be automated). While automation has helped other fields increase their productivity, allowing wages to go up without affecting inflation; education and healthcare have not benefitted from these productivity gains at all.
BUT.... wages still have to increase to attract talent. So in the case of education and healthcare, the only way to increase wages is to increase the price and pass it on to the consumer. Otherwise, if wages in healthcare and education had stayed in line with productivity, qualified people would just become stock brokers or some other profession rather than doctors or teachers/professor's.
Who do you think gets the profits? The shareholders. Guess who the biggest US equities (stock shares) investor is?
The top 1% own pretty close to half of all stocks. Its not the average senior on 401k as you always try to claim.
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