Jabberwocky
Frumious Bandersnatch
Abolish the banking sector and save over a trillion dollars per year
2017 Trump Presidency Thread
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swilow
Bluelight Crew
Demilitarize. 
tathra
bluelighter
b-b-b-b-but, taxation is theft! forced wealth redistribution by gunpoint is wrong! i dont care how many essential, critical services that society could not function without that it pays for! its my fucking right to mooch off society, to take and take all of the benefits paid for by everyone else, without giving anything in return because i'm better than everyone else, and my bank account proves it!
talk about entitled, elitist snowflakes 8)
swilow
Bluelight Crew
Case closed :D
tathra
bluelighter
Abolish the banking sector and save over a trillion dollars per year
oh, so you do want the government regulating private industry and a centrally-planned economy, with the government dictating what businesses people are and aren't allowed to run. and here i thought you were a free market lassaiz-faire capitalist.
Morninggloryseed
Bluelight Crew
U sure? We dont have it here...how do you know? What if you want an unapproved therapy? Will the govt cover EVERYTHING? How will they control costs if everything is covered? What if you want to dispute a denial? Have you ever tried to call the IRS, or any state run govt? Its a long day when you do. Ever hear of the VA?
Sorry not convincing me that "free" healthcare for everyone in usa is the utopia my friends here say it would be.
But we can always dream.
Sorry not convincing me that "free" healthcare for everyone in usa is the utopia my friends here say it would be.
But we can always dream.
Morninggloryseed
Bluelight Crew
The nice thing about choice is you can make them. The nice thing about capitalism is it encourages businesses to compete for your dollar by offering the best product at the least cost. You dont get that with single payer universal care. At least i remain unconvinced.
Morninggloryseed
Bluelight Crew
Also...really? If i were a doctor and went to med school id be all about making a profit because...well im a capitalist. The idea that a doctor should not try to compete and earn a living is foreign to me. I just dont see it as you do.
tathra
bluelighter
thats kind of the whole point of single payer, everything is covered. we know because other countries have implemented it and there are a lot of people in this very thread telling you how it works, but you seem to not be seeing those posts (i dont read every post either, so i trust you aren't choosing to ignore them).
costs are kept down by removing the middle men, like insurance companies who only inflate costs and add not only add no but outright negative benefits, and the for-profit motive, thus you only pay for the medicines and procedures and not the CEO's bonus, advertising costs, middlemen fees, plus profits for every single superfluous step involved. you get even more choices for less money under this arrangement because you no longer have to worry about, say, exclusivity deals struck between pharmaceutical companies and specific hospitals to only carry their brand-name medicines.
thats not capitalism, thats the free market. the free market is not exclusive to capitalism nor is it some innate feature. free markets can exist in any economic model. free markets require regulation to remain free though, otherwise you end up with monopolies and price gouging and all kinds of nefarious shit, but thats a different topic. at any rate, you can have both the mandated public option as a threshold minimum, the absolute bare minimum coverage that everyone must get, and then have market-based solutions in addition to that, providing better or faster services or whatever for anyone willing to pay for them. this encourages even better and cheaper services because they have to compete with the threshold minimum, so they have to ensure quality remains higher and costs remain low, unlike what we have today where costs are wildly inflated even from hospital to hospital and have absolutely no relation to the cost of the procedure itself.
sigh. i see you missed this post too:
consumer
Bluelighter
Universal means you get ill or have a car accident then you get fixed and dont end up with massive out of pocket expenses. If your system was so great letting the private sector run it for profit why are your delivery costs the highest in the western world. Its laughable. The only people that dont LOVE universal healthcare are Americans who have been brainwashed into thinking its better to let the private sector run it than the government.
Morninggloryseed
Bluelight Crew
I never said it was great. However, it was affordable 8 years ago. Im not trying to change anyone's mind. Its cool, we all disagree.
w01fg4ng
Bluelighter
Affordable for who? 8 years ago I broke my foot and my insurance plan was literally to walk it off.
The ACA is the only reason I've ever been insured my whole life.
The ACA is the only reason I've ever been insured my whole life.
swilow
Bluelight Crew
Except for the poor. What choice do they have? Fuck them, they simply didn't work hard enough right?
Why do you think universal healthcare entails lack of choice?
Its not a utopia. Its healthcare. It diesnt solve global warming nor make you a cup of tea, it just means you can cut your arm of with reasonable expectation of it being sewn back on, for "free". If we have a government, it should damn well benefit me rather than fatcats. And we've, ah, got a government.
We should probably stop busting your balls in case you're uninsured.
Morninggloryseed
Bluelight Crew
You guys get very condenending w me ya know. I do have healthcare insurance and i pay a LOT for it. From 2011-2015 I did not have insurance...as I was not working, and prior to that I always had it through a job. So i know what im talking about with regards to my own medical expenses and experience in buying healthcare through the open market (obamacare) vs coverage through work which is 3x what i paid before 2000-2010.
consumer
Bluelighter
But you have zero idea about universal healthcare if you think paying a lot for private health insurance is a better system. It makes zero sense to anyone from a country that has universal healthcare.
LucidSDreamr
Bluelighter
it encourages the companies to lobby congress and rig the system so that they bleed working ppl dry until they are living like animals.
keep believing its a good thing for working ppl
because he keeps believing the lie that the US has the best healthcare and these other countries, while affordable...have substandard healthcare.
Conservative figures just repeat over and over that we have the best healthcare and the followers believe it on blind faith knowing nothing about the reality in other countries
Jabberwocky
Frumious Bandersnatch
Pre existing conditions should have been its own bill
So much unnecessary crap in the "affordable" care act
So much unnecessary crap in the "affordable" care act
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Jabberwocky
Frumious Bandersnatch
Medical Analysis By Milton Friedman
President Obama, the press, all the Democrats and a fair number of the Republicans in Congress share the same assumption about health care. Whatever you believe should be done about the problem, it sure is complicated.
Yet one man figured it out.
In 2001 the economist Milton Friedman read up on health care, discovered that the inefficiencies in our system trace back to a single policy mistake, worked out a policy test that would help us correct it and then described his findings in a few thousand words of plain English.
Since the end of the Second World War, Friedman explained, medical care in the U.S. has displayed three features: technological advances, increases in spending and rising dissatisfaction.
The first of the three was common to one sector of the economy after another. Agriculture, manufacturing, electronics, communications–all had experienced technological progress. Yet the two final features proved unique to health care. While we were paying less and getting more when buying food or computers, in health care the opposite was happening.
Why?
Because, Friedman saw, most payments for medical care are made not by the patients who receive the care but by third parties, typically employers. Since, in Friedman’s phrase, “nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely as he spends his own,” this third-payer system by its very nature introduces inefficiencies throughout the health care system.
The reason for this wasteful third-party system? The tax code. Money spent on health care is exempt from the income tax only if the health care is provided through an employer. “We have become so accustomed to employer-provided medical care,” Friedman wrote, “that we regard it as part of the natural order. Yet it is thoroughly illogical.”
The policy mistake that produced this illogical mess took place during World War II, when the government imposed wage controls. Unable to compete for workers by paying them more, employers began providing medical care, and the new benefit spread rapidly.
When the Internal Revenue Service caught on, requiring employers to include the value of medical benefits as part of the wages they reported, workers, who had grown accustomed to the benefits, protested. Congress responded with legislation that made employer-provided medical benefits tax-exempt.
By the time the 1960s arrived, Americans were used to having third parties pay their medical bills. Thus the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid–under which the government, rather than employers, acted as the third party–seemed perfectly reasonable.
Friedman wrote: “Third-party payment has required the bureaucratization of medical care. … A medical transaction is not simply between a caregiver and a patient; it has to be approved as ‘covered’ by a bureaucrat. … The patient has little … incentive to be concerned about the cost since it’s somebody else’s money. The caregiver has become, in effect, an employee of the insurance company or, in the case of Medicare and Medicaid, of the government. … An inescapable result is that the interest of the patient is often in direct conflict with the interest of the caregiver’s ultimate employer.”
In that one paragraph of under 100 words, a diagnosis of our ailment.
What should we do about it? Ideally, Friedman argued, we should reverse the mistake that started all the trouble, repealing the tax exemption of employer-provided medical care. Yet Friedman was a realist. Vested interests, he recognized, would make such a radical reform impossible. Instead he believed we should seek incremental changes, asking of each proposal simply whether it would move health care “in the right direction.”
Expanding savings accounts that allow individuals control over relevant spending, Friedman argued, would move health care in the right direction. So would extending the tax exemption to all medical expenses, whether they are paid by employers or individuals. A “sweeping socialization of medicine [such as that] proposed by Hilary Clinton”–and, now, by Barack Obama–would not.
Wherever possible, reduce the role of third parties. Increase the autonomy of individuals. Get the government and vast, bureaucratic insurance companies out of the way, permitting the free market to work its effects in health care, just as it does in virtually every other sector of the economy.
President Obama, the press, all the Democrats and a fair number of the Republicans in Congress share the same assumption about health care. Whatever you believe should be done about the problem, it sure is complicated.
Yet one man figured it out.
In 2001 the economist Milton Friedman read up on health care, discovered that the inefficiencies in our system trace back to a single policy mistake, worked out a policy test that would help us correct it and then described his findings in a few thousand words of plain English.
Since the end of the Second World War, Friedman explained, medical care in the U.S. has displayed three features: technological advances, increases in spending and rising dissatisfaction.
The first of the three was common to one sector of the economy after another. Agriculture, manufacturing, electronics, communications–all had experienced technological progress. Yet the two final features proved unique to health care. While we were paying less and getting more when buying food or computers, in health care the opposite was happening.
Why?
Because, Friedman saw, most payments for medical care are made not by the patients who receive the care but by third parties, typically employers. Since, in Friedman’s phrase, “nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely as he spends his own,” this third-payer system by its very nature introduces inefficiencies throughout the health care system.
The reason for this wasteful third-party system? The tax code. Money spent on health care is exempt from the income tax only if the health care is provided through an employer. “We have become so accustomed to employer-provided medical care,” Friedman wrote, “that we regard it as part of the natural order. Yet it is thoroughly illogical.”
The policy mistake that produced this illogical mess took place during World War II, when the government imposed wage controls. Unable to compete for workers by paying them more, employers began providing medical care, and the new benefit spread rapidly.
When the Internal Revenue Service caught on, requiring employers to include the value of medical benefits as part of the wages they reported, workers, who had grown accustomed to the benefits, protested. Congress responded with legislation that made employer-provided medical benefits tax-exempt.
By the time the 1960s arrived, Americans were used to having third parties pay their medical bills. Thus the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid–under which the government, rather than employers, acted as the third party–seemed perfectly reasonable.
Friedman wrote: “Third-party payment has required the bureaucratization of medical care. … A medical transaction is not simply between a caregiver and a patient; it has to be approved as ‘covered’ by a bureaucrat. … The patient has little … incentive to be concerned about the cost since it’s somebody else’s money. The caregiver has become, in effect, an employee of the insurance company or, in the case of Medicare and Medicaid, of the government. … An inescapable result is that the interest of the patient is often in direct conflict with the interest of the caregiver’s ultimate employer.”
In that one paragraph of under 100 words, a diagnosis of our ailment.
What should we do about it? Ideally, Friedman argued, we should reverse the mistake that started all the trouble, repealing the tax exemption of employer-provided medical care. Yet Friedman was a realist. Vested interests, he recognized, would make such a radical reform impossible. Instead he believed we should seek incremental changes, asking of each proposal simply whether it would move health care “in the right direction.”
Expanding savings accounts that allow individuals control over relevant spending, Friedman argued, would move health care in the right direction. So would extending the tax exemption to all medical expenses, whether they are paid by employers or individuals. A “sweeping socialization of medicine [such as that] proposed by Hilary Clinton”–and, now, by Barack Obama–would not.
Wherever possible, reduce the role of third parties. Increase the autonomy of individuals. Get the government and vast, bureaucratic insurance companies out of the way, permitting the free market to work its effects in health care, just as it does in virtually every other sector of the economy.
Escher's Waterfall
Bluelight Crew
Which part of the ACA prohibited you from choosing another insurance company that would cover your medication and doctor?
If we use that definition, there's no such thing as free police or free firefighters either.
consumer
Bluelighter
Someone posted not long ago a study that ranked various nations healthcare systems. America did not fare well. You have a crap system that has the most expensive service delivery in the western world and you pay a fortune for any kind of decent cover. The only people that benefit from your system are insurance company shareholders and their CEO's.
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