I admittedly haven’t read this article. Much of the reason is that the US already pays way more for healthcare with about the same (often worse) outcomes. The causes for the higher cost span a variety of reasons [1]. The largest reason is paying more for administrative overhead. The US government currently pays about as much for healthcare as other governments that provide universal healthcare [2]. Most all of the numbers I’ve seen come from the Congressional Budget Office.
There can be a bunch of bickering over the details, what to transition to, and how to transition, but the main point is that with almost any other setup it would be difficult to have something as inefficient and ineffective as our current insurance situation.
Keeping things shitty for most/all of the people to keep things safe for some/few of the people seems like a shortsighted thing to do. I mean, it’s super for those few. But we can see how “super for the few” is tearing us to shreds.
Also, all the points everyone else brought up about cross-training/switching services. It’s not like when the lights on the monstrosity go out, the people working there lose the skills they’ve built.
Add to that THEY WILL HAVE FUCKING GUARANTEED HEALTH INSURANCE and maybe a lot of them will find something they enjoy doing more with their lives than being a cog in a machine designed to squeeze people for all the money they have and all the money they don’t have.
As for your stock losing value, welcome to 2008. And we left that without anything better than what we had; just fatter banks and businesses too big to fail. If my stock portfolio cratered (hah, as if I make enough to be able to use anything to dabble) and I ended up with better insurance than I have now (which is pretty damned shitty) then I would chalk that up as a net gain. As long as the GOP didn’t step in and fuck up the place once more if they ever get behind the wheel again.
In the USA, healthcare spending that concentrates wealth will always be funded (expensive interventions, new hospital wings, EHR IT deployments, etc) whereas healthcare spending that disperses wealth through the system is never funded and always fought against (hiring more nurses, at-home care, generics supplier expansion).
Also: I specifically mean that the current private for-profit insurance companies may switch to become private federal contractors for a Universal Medicare’s records keeping & related needs.
“What about all those poor workers?!” is a common insurance industry talking point, which they pay millions to promulgate. Wendell Potter, a former exec who found his conscience and quit, often points that out.
Both of these are examples of the invisible hand of Capitalism doing its thing. M4A has a more difficult sales pitch because it is The Government taking over something that was once the realm of private industry, which is the kind of thing that gives fiscal conservatives nightmares.
Yeah, plus many other avoidable reasons, too, which are related to the for-profit nature of US healthcare (and games played between healthcare providers and private insurance).
I always think of an article written by someone who worked in the US and UK detailing an experience they had with both medical systems. They injured their shoulder in the US. They went to see a doctor here, and the American doctor’s verdict was that the patient’s shoulder had to be replaced with titanium, at enormous cost of money, pain and recovery time. He was rather alarmed by this, but was heading back to the UK, where he saw another doctor. That doctor’s recommendation? Just physical therapy. When the subject of replacement came up, the doctor was outright alarmed by the idea - because given the injury, it not only wasn’t necessary, it actually wouldn’t have even helped. So the US system not only was pushing the far, far more expensive treatment, but one that was actively harmful. It’s a story backed up by studies that show the US routinely pushes treatments that are more expensive with worse outcomes.
Yep, indeed! It’s not a real problem, it’s a problem that people who are against M4A have made up to give them an excuse to not support it. The exact same people who are against it because of this made up reason are the exact same people who shrug their shoulders about off-shoring or companies going belly up, or the stock market taking a dive and taking people’s retirements with it.
Same with the “how will we pay for it” argument… you don’t see people wringing their hands about how we’re going to pay for killing people in foreign countries for no good reason… As @lava says below, we’re already paying for it!
Even the very person who talked about the invisible hand, Adam Smith, supported social programs. There are some things that should not be profit-making, people with cancer is kind of chief among them. No one should be buying a yacht off your dead relatives. That’s some bullshit of the deepest and stinkiest order. Smith was against the notion that governments should intervene on behalf of corporate entities (ie, the monarch giving monopolistic rights to for profit enterprises). He was never against various kinds of regulation. And besides that, he was writing in the 18th century, when the modern capitalist economy was still developing… people also tend to forget that he was a moral philosopher, not an economist, as such things as we think of them today did not exist in his time.
Right? But they’re perfectly fine with an executive getting another bonus, while care is being denied for millions of Americans.
Yeah, little things like dental work and vision care, unless that’s been added in. I haven’t read the proposals myself, but I do know that dental isn’t covered, nor are glasses unless you have supplemental insurance that picks that up.
I mostly agree, but the problem to be overcome is that those health care companies have a lot of money that they are using for “campaign contributions” and general influence peddling. Unlike 2008, when the financial disaster happened quickly, the health insurance industry is being given plenty of time to develop counterattacks to maintain the status qo. Obamacare started out as something a lot more like universal healthcare, but then the big corporations and interest groups got involved and diluted it.
However I would assume with useful basic coverage taken care of way fewer people would opt for more extra cost insurance. Additionally I believe current health insurance employs many many many people to try to find ways to deny coverage, and to deal with you calling them back and arguing that it was BS and then they need to have an elaborate phone tree staffed with people that have different conflicting advice about how to get the thing at least early covered (if in fact “the thing” legally does need to be covered). In a world where the actual medical cost is already covered the insurance companies are less likely to try to knee-jerk avoid paying (so more like car insurance…it happens, but less frequently), so they need way way fewer employees per covered person (this is in addition to not having as many covered people!).
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it (we absolutely should), but it will have an impact on people who work in that industry. Some of them I don’t much care about (like anyone who has another viable employment choice), but many do it because jobs are scarce, and they don’t want to be hungry.
