Not bonkers - definitionally that’s what Medicare for All means.
To be honest, the last decade has almost made me a royalist… having a member of the government who has immense powers to veto but who is strongly encouraged to decline to do so except under huge circumstances, trained since birth to handle this task… who’s primary responsibility is to be a figurehead for the country and a face of the country to the world… perhaps is not such a dumb idea after all.
1 Like
That’s utter nonsense. That most definitely is not the definition of anything. Medicare for all would demolish private insurance by making it superfluous, not by making it illegal. It wouldn’t even completely destroy it, as private insurance can exist alongside single payer - and does. It’s just not necessary.
11 Likes
If Medicare for All means no more private insurance agencies, why am I constantly being bombarded by commercials for Medicare supplemental insurance plans?
We don’t know what Universal Healthcare in the USA looks like. Perhaps if the Republicans would take their fingers out of their ears and stop shouting “NANANANANANANA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” as loud as they can we could get some definition around what it would look like…
6 Likes
Here’s a “proof by blatant assertion” (aka another point of view): “fake news” has always been with us to some degree or other; only lately it’s got notably worse mostly due to Rupert Murdoch/Fox in league with Russian psyops. But worse still than that is poorly crafted or on-purpose distorted polling: “Trump’s approval ratings continue to rise!” “43% of women approve of stricter anti-abortion laws” “53% would prefer building a Mexican wall than amnesty for illegal immigrants!” etc etc.
The particularly danger here being that politicians and people who actually make laws read these sorts of assertions and assume they must be true (“m’gawd I don’t want to cheese-off my base!”) When these sorts of surveys and polls have truly enormous margins of errors (on the order of 25%) - due to willfully inept practices and non-random sampling.
Two massive sources of this systematic error being: online polling (“Gun Fancier WebZone reports 73% are in favor of fewer gun laws!”) and cell-phones (“We auto-dialed 15,000 numbers, got a respondents for 1,003 and declare that to be a proper random sample! (so sqrt(1/1003) -> 3% margin of error)” …always ignoring how many they had to dial to get the magical >1000).
So the next time you read: “Politician A massively leads in polls over politician B by 7.6%!!” consider mumbling, “yeah, plus or minus 10%”
1 Like
Actually Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill specifically and explicitly would outlaw private health coverage. Many versions of Medicare for All do something similar to avoid adverse selection situations where the government gets saddled with high-cost patients and rich people avoid the system entirely by purchasing private coverage. Of course not every implementation of Medicare for All would do this, and Bernie’s version has 0% chance of becoming law anytime soon, but the fact is that Medicare for All as described by its most vocal and visible recent proponent would in fact outlaw private health insurance. Read it for yourself here:
What I find interesting is that several commenters on this page don’t know this and think that Republicans who say it are making up fake news. Which was my point in my first comment - there’s such rampant disinformation on both sides. Fake news is a huge issue from all parts of the political spectrum.
1 Like
Also, 50% of Americans believe that climate change is “made-up news”
The recursion makes my brain hurt.
Fake news is a crisis, is fake news, is a crisis, is fake news…
Okay, so I actually did just read it, and it does no such thing. In fact, it specifically makes provisions for private insurance. (Private insurance simply can’t replicate the benefits of public insurance - i.e. they can’t charge you for providing you nothing.) So bullshit.
Even if that weren’t the case, if it did outlaw private insurance, that still wouldn’t be part of the definition of Medicare for All; it would be Medicare for All and also a proposal to outlaw private insurance. So double bullshit.
7 Likes
The prohibition in Sanders’ bill is to prevent adverse selection (healthy people choosing private insurance and saddling Medicare only with sick people) and is a prohibition on offering insurance that covers essential health benefits. The bill enumerates the services for which private insurance would be prohibited:
"it shall be unlawful for… a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this Act … the following items and services if medically necessary or appropriate for the maintenance of health or for the diagnosis, treatment, or rehabilitation of a health condition:
(1) Hospital services, including inpatient and outpatient hospital care, including 24-hour-a-day emergency services and inpatient prescription drugs.
(2) Ambulatory patient services.
(3) Primary and preventive services, including chronic disease management.
(4) Prescription drugs, medical devices, biological products, including outpatient prescription drugs, medical devices, and biological products.
(5) Mental health and substance abuse treatment services, including inpatient care.
(6) Laboratory and diagnostic services.
(7) Comprehensive reproductive, maternity, and newborn care.
(8) Pediatrics, including early and periodic screening, diagnostic, and treatment services (as defined in section 1905(r) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1396d(r))).
(9) Oral health, audiology, and vision services.
(10) Short-term rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices.
(11) Emergency services and transportation.
(12) Necessary transportation to receive health care services for individuals with disabilities and low-income individuals."
i.e. almost everything you’d think of as health insurance. It doesn’t outlaw private insurance for benefits that aren’t EHBs - like fertility care or cosmetic surgery, for example.
Here’s the NYTimes explaining the same thing: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/health/private-health-insurance-medicare-for-all-bernie-sanders.html
1 Like
Private insurance, in other words, would work the way it does in countries with socialized medicine. I won’t join you in quibbling over details, the fact remains: it does not fucking outlaw private insurance. And yes, private insurance, post-single-payer would necessarily not be the same as it would before. It’s supplemental.
Yeah, I’ve read it. Weird how there’s no mention of it making private insurance illegal. Maybe because: disruption is not the same as legally prohibiting it, criminalizing it or otherwise making it illegal.
6 Likes
Yeah, wow no kidding that is an awful headline to get from that data. There is nothing at all that says anybody thinks fake news is a bigger problem than anything.
Bad blogger - no affiliate link commission for you today.
1 Like
but how do you make the house of reps less vulnerable to the President?
The bill literally states the word ‘unlawful’ and the article literally says the intent is to ‘abolish private insurance’.
(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
This is vastly different to what happens in say Australia where you can decide whether you go onto a public hospital waiting list, or book into a private hospital and pay for the same procedure.
3 Likes
I just shake my head at how both sides are convinced that the other side is completely nuts and deluded but they’re the ones that see the truth.
You wrote: “not a single one of the positions was something the Democrats actually held, even remotely. Things like…making private health insurance illegal”
I quote a NY Times article that says: “Medicare for All Would Abolish Private Insurance.”
I quote the bill itself, which says: “it shall be unlawful for… a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this Act.”
And you’re now arguing that these aren’t “remotely” similar. It’s just crazy to me. If a Trump supporter was similarly splitting hairs about a Republican bill we would all be ridiculing them as blinded by their loyalty to Trump, yet here we are. And by the way I am in no way a Trump supporter and I am in the health care industry and deeply familiar with these laws and proposals.
1 Like
i’m not the solutions guy, i’m the hot takes guy
That’s not how it works in single-payer countries. There is private health insurance in Germany and Scandinavia. It just doesn’t duplicate what the single-payer insurance provides. It’s supplemental.
ETA: I’m not sure if it’s specifically illegal to duplicate what single-payer provides, but it sure as hell is functionally gone. Familiarity with the US health care system does not equate to familiarity with all health care systems. As it has been well established, the US healthcare system is an outlier in many ways.
6 Likes
Fake news is a serious problem only because Boomers and many Gen-Xers have broken bullshit filters.
Folks should treat the Internet, especially Facebook, like they do the trashy magazines at the supermarket check out. (Bat-boy is not real, and he doesn’t have 6 grandkids. Or whatever the National Enquirer headlines these days)
1 Like
Right, but we’re not talking about other countries systems, we’re talking about Democratic positions as described in newspaper articles and the text of actual bills prominent Democrats have written and filed. For some reason we are splitting hairs about whether a proposal that would, according to the NY Times, cause the entire health insurance industry to disappear is technically making that industry “illegal”.
Whether companies could still offer insurance that covers other things is entirely irrelevant to whether or not they would be allowed to offer health insurance. According to the explicit text of the bill, they would be forbidden from offering health insurance. The bill even goes so far as to list all the things for which private insurance would be forbidden.
I’m not sure how it matters that companies would be able to offer insurance for other things, nor how it matters what Canada or Sweden or the NHS or whatever allows to supplement those countries’ public insurance schemes. The fact is that the bills proposed by candidates for the Democratic presidency would specifically outlaw private health insurance.
1 Like
The relevance is that you’re misreading what those bills actually mean. They were modeled off of European single-payer systems. That means that what is forbidden is direct competition with the single-payer system, not supplemental health insurance.
https://media1.tenor.com/images/bbc0b37b24fe1695c86e72f56c6d4de9/tenor.gif?itemid=5453422
2 Likes
