Swanson, if you got a better reform idea than "socialized medicine," pitch it to Trump & Republicans because they got no answer to the right-wing conservative idea of the individual-mandate system known as Obamacare.
The answer is people paying for their own care. Yes, I know the problems that come with that and it’s still the best system
Good luck with telling that to the voters with those astronomical prices for healthcare and overpriced premiums of health insurance with lousy coverage.
Both problems were actually caused by govt. as long as insurance has to cover something the price of it gets to stay high because there are tons of customers who can now pay for it. The premiums for the insurance went up because of the absurd requirements the govt put on coverage (no prior existing exemptions)
And I could get behind that, except a) it'll never happen because Americans won't accept being denied anything and b) the list of what is covered would go up every year negating cost savings
Pretty much what VA said (with the exception that I still wouldn't support it). The nation would get offended that rich people could buy better stuff and then would just want the rich people to buy them everything anyway. As I said, the problem is the expectation that people get things without buying them, which doesn't work
The hordes are uninformed and unprincipled. They would rather have free crappy care provided for by the evil rich people than self reliance
freedom and self-reliance are ideas
Nope, no ideas. You can put sprinkles on a turd and convince yourself it’s a cupcake... but I’m not buying it.
I'd view the analogy as more accurately the democrats trying to sprinkle turds and calling the republicans the "party of no cupcakes"
Occasionally? Saying “X” and then doing nothing is how one gets elected, it’s not an occasional occurrence.
I agree with you on their political spinelessness. I just don't view lacking the guts to do what you promised as not having an idea in the first place. Semantics for me.
You propose the democrats are “more free” than the republicans?
Math isn't your strong suit is it?
My response to your argument is we shouldn’t bail out companies, increase military or have medicare
That still amounts to an overall reduction of health care spending of nearly half a trillion yearly, and likely far more than that over time due to inflation curbing, so it ends up being less expensive of a system overall
That's assuming that 10 year figure is accurate and doesn't increase over time. What government program has that ever been true of?
NASA, the CDC, and every other governmental agency that the Republicans view as a cost sink. They would likely view health care the same way and axe it every chance they got to keep costs down
Neither nasa nor the CDC are a nebulous promise of very personal and very subjective “health” to 300 million people
I said program not agency.
The CDC has numerous programs under its umbrella, as does NASA. Agencies are collections of programs, and the vast majority of programs under both agencies have had budgets slashed
OK, so when has Medicare or SS been decreased?
Once the government is the only player, pharmaceutical payments, medical device payments, availability of services, etc all become nothing but costs. At our current point there is competition in the market and enough competing corporate interests to limit the ability of the government to control costs, since if they were to lower rates enough hospitals, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, etc would simply stop taking government insurance. When the government is the only payor, they don't have much choice in the matter, and if the government says you're only getting X number of dollars per Y and the alternative is a 0% share in the US market, most people will choose whatever they are willing to pay out
SS and Medicare have an increasing number of recipients, which is an entirely different scenario than other government programs. On an inflation-adjusted basis, Medicare pays far less per procedure/hospital stay than it did twenty years ago. Social Security, similarly, has not kept up with inflation and has kept cost per recipient down. SS could easily be maintained indefinitely with a very small tax increase at current funding levels, while Medicare could easily control overall health care costs by constraining payments or simply keeping them flat and limiting payments for end-of-life care, a likely scenario under single payer that could save trillions and free up GDP for other areas of the economy
Right because all of those groups are just going to quietly accept that. They don't have massive lobbying budgets to prevent exactly that scenario. And we haven't seen similar scenarios play out before - like why Medicare can't currently negotiate drug prices.
Sure, M4A COULD control prices. But that actually happening is very unlikely. Go look around, all of the countries with socialized medicine are having similar problems and they already do much of what you're suggesting. And yet costs are still a problem.
Except we all know that medicare won’t actually cut people off from end of life care. There will always be a politician willing to promise away someone else’s money to keep your gramma on a vent.
And perhaps that will happen, we shall see. I think it's an inevitability at this rate that some form of universal coverage is adopted. Personally I prefer the German model of private nonprofit insurers provided through employment, with a Medicare-like option provided to all not working (this is simplified as an explanation, obviously, but is the gist)
In my ideal world we'd have more of a Medicaid for all option. A fairly bare bones public option. Its enough to provide for basic care but not so much that it discourages people from getting private insurance.
Medicare and Medicaid have very straightforward processes for basically everything. Only the private insurers seem to put me through the utilization review wringer.
“Good job” is only true in terms of overhead on paper. Neither of those programs are solvent long term and so they don’t get credit for being well ran
Yes and no. Medicare/caid pay easily and quickly when they want to but there's no appeals process if they decide not to. You can work with insurance companies, government plans are hard rules.
