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There is no way to make it as affordable as everyone wants. One way to somewhat lower costs actuarial lay speaking would be to require everyone to purchase from the exchanges (including those who already have insurance) to get the pool as large as possible.
A second way to cut costs is to severely limit what is actually covered. Cancer care would need to be denied due to its costs. Possibly even limiting dialysis, heart surgeries etc on people over age 50.
I don't see either option becoming acceptable here.
Single payer. everyone pays just like Medicare just like other countries.
So monopolies in the private sector are bad because they invite a sort of tyranny over the individual, but a government bureaucratic monopoly over the health care of 330 million people is just fine eh?
Medicare and Medicaid are paying out $60 billion a year in improper payments. I know that seems like chicken feed in the trillion dollar era of Obama, but it's still a hell of a lot of money in fly-over country.
There is no way to make it as affordable as everyone wants. One way to somewhat lower costs actuarial lay speaking would be to require everyone to purchase from the exchanges (including those who already have insurance) to get the pool as large as possible.
A second way to cut costs is to severely limit what is actually covered. Cancer care would need to be denied due to its costs. Possibly even limiting dialysis, heart surgeries etc on people over age 50.
I don't see either option becoming acceptable here.
We could use Obama's "just take a pain pill" rules, where bureaucrats look up a patients age, and determine they are statistically dead already, so there will be no wasting money on treatments for them.
The key question is why are we paying twice as much on a per capita basis as any other developed country?
One of the primary reasons for this is the gross inefficiency of our healthcare system. Actually, that should be systems .... Medicare, Medicaid, VA, multiple insurance companies in multiple states, etc. etc.. The system is horribly fragmented and incredibly bureaucratic. 25% of our healthcare dollars go on admin. Some hospitals have as many billing clerks as they have beds. I went for a simple cardiac stress test at the local hospital and ended up with 6 separate invoices. How crazy is that?
The second problem is that the government regulates to benefit the health care industry rather than the consumer. That leads to higher prices and promotes monopolistic behavior by insurance companies, big pharma and healthcare providers. It also means that risk is transferred from the insurance companies to the taxpayer or premium payer. So people who cannot afford insurance or cannot get insurance get treated anyway and it is you and I who pick up the tab.
You do not have to go to a British or Canadian style system to have reasonably priced healthcare for all. Countries like Switzerland and Germany also have a health insurance model. The difference is that it costs them half as much. It is about time that we took the ideology out of health care and started getting pragmatic about it. Right now we are spending 18% of GDP on it. That isn't sustainable, it is a huge economic drag and it makes us increasingly uncompetitive with other countries.
Yet,not one person,heck not even congressman,has offered an alternative.
I haven't read Ted Cruz plan yet.
Does he even have a plan?
I'm not sure I can think of any other way.
The current system cannot stand,however. It was broke.
As an Rn,I see the failures of the current system all the time.
As a 24 year old,there was no way in He** I could afford a $425 private plan?
No way,no how.
i would've ground all the old people into a meat-paste, and fed them to welfare recipients.
or "PLAN B", which is grinding all the welfare recipients into a meat-paste, and feed them to old people.
Remove the right to sue and replace it with insurance. Medical care has known risks, including human error, that's what insurance is for, to assume risk. Let's create a new type of insurance separate from regular health insurance that you buy before the operation to protect you, the patient, from malpractice error. It would be sort of like plane crash insurance, a one time payment for a particular care event, or series of care events. If error is proved you get paid for whatever amount of insurance you bought. I would think a smaller 100K policy just for malpractice events would be fairly cheap, around $50 or something.
It could be voluntary for larger amounts, and perhaps mandatory for at least a 100 K policy so everyone gets compensation when errors happen. The rates would be based on the track record of the care provider, so you the patient could get a good idea beforehand how good the care provider is, by looking at the rates. This new insurance would be a much more efficient way to compensate people for malpractice, bad doctors would be forced out and no doctors would have to buy malpractice insurance. Doctor shortages would disappear and that part of the equation would be solved.
There were over 150 messages posted prior to yours. I find that people tend to get more abusive in the responses when I call them out on their own specific comments, so I make general overview observations whenever possible. Sorry if you thought my comment was directed at you.
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Originally Posted by JulieT726
I don't feel that at all. I don't want to see anyone suffer.
Again, there were over 150 messages posted prior to yours so I'm not responding to your message - not at all - but I want us both to acknowledge that many of the people who oppose economic justice in general, and healthcare justice specifically, don't actively "want" to see anyone suffer. Rather many of them range from seeing such suffering as a justifiable evil, or as something that they personally don't or shouldn't be expected to care about. From the high-level view of things, what underlies objection to ACA, for example, is callous disregard for others, with deliberate malice toward others a very rare thing.
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Originally Posted by pnwmdk
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What I find most interesting about this thread is how some folks have worked so hard to avoid answering the question in the OP, making up excuses and rationalizations without actually coming out and saying that their preference is effectively for less affluent people to suffer from inadequate healthcare and the ramifications thereof.
Wrong.
What I wrote was correct. You apparently didn't like to see it posted and so you tried hard to make it seem like you had something worthwhile to say in response, even though you apparently didn't.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pnwmdk
It is SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE FOR EVERYONE TO HAVE EVERYTHING.
No one has said that everyone should have "everything". ACA is about basic healthcare, not "everything". There's even a specific definition, "Essential Benefits", that outlines the boundary between what is basic healthcare, and anything beyond that definition - the difference between Essential Benefits and "EVERYTHING" - is not that which ACA seeks to provide affordable access.
Even though you doggedly work to try to avoid admitting that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pnwmdk
It is immoral for those in power to choose who gets what and who has to pay for whom else.
Your attempts to twist things to make the selfishness and avarice that you support sound moral are laughable. You want to believe that antisocial behavior can be excused - it cannot. Even though you want it to be.
What percent increase in taxes would you expect to meet the costs? $90 a month that the elderly pay won't cut it.
Given the premiums, medicare payments, and taxes we pay now, I'd say it wouldn't cost any more to do a UHC. My spouse used to work for a very small, 5 person, company. It was even harder for small businesses then, 20-30 years ago, than it is now for them to get decent insurance. His boss spent a lot of time on insurance issues, and we were constantly changing policies. Sometimes the only doctors we could use were 15-20 miles away. One day I asked DH if he thought the boss would rather just pay a tax (as is done in Germany and several other countries) and be done with it. DH thought that would be the case.
The "elderly" on Medicare have paid into medicare for years, as well as paying premiums now. Check your next paycheck for your Medicare deduction.
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