Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/03/medicare-for-all-2.html
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As usual, the Know-Nothing 27% and the corporate greedheads who dupe them will form the opposition to what the majority of Americans want.
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No, thank you.
(a) IN GENERAL.—Beginning on the effective date described in section 106(a), it shall be unlawful for—
(1) a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided
under this Act; or
(2) an employer to provide benefits for an employee, former employee, or the dependents of an
employee or former employee that duplicate the benefits provided under this Act.
Some questions!
- How do we balance the Freedom of Choice section with the need to reduce costs, for example by having folks with very common ailments see an RN or Nurse Practitioner or whatever instead of an MD?
- Why do we need “Medical Cards”? Do we not already have a system to establish residency?
- Can all enrollment be automatic, not just for newly born residents? Why would we need an enrollment system? Do we not already have another means to establish residency?
- Additional private insurance is still allowed… can some folks from civilized countries tell me whether that’s a thing and why?
- States are allowed to provide extra benefits above and beyond… wait what? The federal coverage is supposedly “comprehensive” so what extra is there to provide?!
- The law forbids copayments. A nominal copayment system seems like an effective way to control costs since it discourages unnecessary office visits, but there’s no such thing as nominal if you live in poverty. So I guess I’d want to to be a product of income, at which point maybe it becomes too complicated to be worth it? Also, perhaps unnecessary office visits are not really a significant source of extra costs in the medical system.
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Given that a private insurance company just denied my claim and my family might be on the hook for 20,000, for the “privilege” of being able to function without a face full of pain because my sinuses can’t drain… after paying them tens of thousands of dollars over the years… I will not at all be sad to see for profit insurance crash and burn. If I were much less lucky in life, having to pay this much would be financial ruin for my family. We’re lucky it’s not.
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I love it if we figured out how to pay for the existing Medicare.
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I just wanna say my representative rocks!
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WAY WAY WAY cheaper than all the military expeditions we have our selves mired in and we find ways to pay for that.
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As @TobinL notes, we can. Shift money from the pentagon to other places. It’s really not rocket surgery…
On top of that, we end up paying millions each year on people who are not covered and end up going bankrupt, which at the end of the day is also lost productivity in the economy. It’s not just about paying for a program out of our taxes, it’s also about the hidden costs of taking care of people who can’t afford to get coverage, because we end up paying for that, too.
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The key word there is “duplicate”. If you look at other countries with public health care – all of which have better health outcomes than the U.S., at a fraction of the cost – they all allow private coverage as well. It’s just that the private coverage is not an exact copy of what the government is already providing.
Or are you arguing that people should have the right to pay for the exact same coverage they’d be getting as citizens anyway? That seems a small hill to die on.
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Or reinstate the corporate tax rate to a reasonable level, but still below the previous tax rate. Corporations get 3-5 years of opportunity to buy back all the stocks they want and distribute it among the C-class and Americans don’t have to foot the bill. Or marginal tax rates, wealth tax, or any number of other places where we’re leaving money on the table to reward the robber-barons.
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Actually, we don’t. It’s all on the credit card.
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And the pentagon has the biggest charge account of all…
I’d gladly support a tax hike on those in the higher brackets in order to fund a public system of some kind, as well as for a rebuilding of our public infrastructure that already exists, improvements to the public education system (and expanding that from k-12 to k-16), etc. All of this would help make the American economy more productive, in part because the American PEOPLE (all of us, not just a fraction of us who are born lucky) would be happier and more productive. We’d be more likely to take entrepreneurial risks, more likely to put money back into the economy, more likely to not end up homeless or a “drain” on the public…
At the end of the day, we seriously have to ask ourselves what all this is really about. Should we really be merely cogs that are there is benefit some imaginary construct known as the market? Should we fetishize a balance budget or low taxes if they come at the expense of the health and welfare of humanity? Or should the market be in the service of bettering all of our lives, giving us not only what we need to survive at a minimum, but also help make our lives better across the board? Because if we’re just here to service the “needs” of the market, then what’s the point of this all?
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You get bonus points for the film reference.
Man, the 70’s were weird.
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I’m on Medicare - and as everyone who has gone on it knows, it does not cover everything, and to get adequate coverage you need to have private medical coverage in addition to the complicated Medicare coverage. The mess that is Medicare is the fault of both Republicans and Democrats, who’ve whittled away at it over the years - it’s not the simple, one-payer system it was originally intended to be, and any move to make Medicare universal also has to fix the existing Medicare.
The cry “Medicare for all!” is the cry of young people who have no idea of the poor state Medicare has gotten into.
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You want to be careful about causation here: health care is mostly after the fact of getting ill. Saying that the US’s poor health outcomes are due to our rat-fucked healthcare system (which I totally want dismantled and replaced with a single payer, or better yet nationalized health care system) is like saying that because taking aspiring lowers a fever, not having aspirin causes fevers in the first place.
A decent lay primer: Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick, episode 1 In Sickness and in Wealth
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What is bad about preventing companies from charging for what is already publicly available?
It prevents rampant fraud or deceptive practices by private insurers.
Health insurance sales and policies involve a ton of deliberate misinformation to the insured as to what is covered and what isn’t. A good deal charge a great deal to provide very little. There is no transparency in health insurer policies with insured’s need for informed decisions.
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That is a rather poor argument to make. Most of the developed world has similar health outcomes at a fraction of the cost due to single payer options. There are far fewer, if any bankruptcies due to medical costs, an endemic and largely ignored problem here.
Single payer systems by virtue of having larger insurance pools lower costs far more easily than private insurers. There is clear causation because insurance costs are in many cases a function of the size of an insured pool. The more who are insured by the same people, the lower the costs can be.
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