"Who's gonna pay for Medicare for all?" is either stupid or disingenuous

The problem is not the cost of insurance, it is the cost of the care- grossly inflated by the hordes of legal attacks that mine it for money every day.
If bread were $10 a loaf in your city and $2 elsewhere, would you see the problem as you needed to find more money in order to buy bread?
Or would you ask why the hell the prices were so severely out of line?

We argue about the cost of insurance, and how we can't afford it.
Your hospital will bill your insurance company $15 for a Tylenol.
Do you not see the problem in the relationship here?

 

Your private health insurance is not better for me... or for the majority of Americans.

Now it's my turn: I'm sorry

 

Wrong!

All that is needed is a straightforward amendment to existing Medicare legislation removing the age limitation of 65 years.

 

Off topic RANT about immigration duly noted and ignored because it will derail the thread!

 

Sure I do. I also know that without pressure from a yuge pool of people to stop it, it will continue.
I can stop buying bread, but when I need cancer treatment it's really really hard to say no.

 

Edit.
I have a cute story about the cost of my wife's colonoscopy paid by Medicare and my friends colonoscopy paid for by GM insurance. Same hospital, same doctor, same month. Care to guess who paid the hospital more for the same procedure?

 

Of course it does that's because excessive bureaucracy in the public sector create excessive bureaucracy in the private sector creates excessive bureaucracy in the private sector the fleas itchy dogs and for much the same reason.

 

Do you know why that is?

 

Your turn to have your neighbors subsidize your healthcare costs?

 

Medicare is charity rate reimbursement, accepted by physicians out of good will

 

Not interested.

 

There is a reason the US leads the world in Medical reasearch and produces more new treatments every year than any other 4 countries combined. There is a chance companies can cover their costs here there is none in Europe and Canada, where government pretty pays for treatments at whim rather than based on a reasonable assessment of costs.

 

To correct a

I understand that. But we are trying to legislate a way to pay for the $10 bread, instead of correcting the factors making it outrageous and in-affordable.
This is like running out of gas and deciding to that changing a tire will fix the problem- it means you do have not properly diagnosed the problem, and are not directing your efforts at real cause. That means- you fix nothing, and the real problem continues unabated..

 

No one to stop them from charging him more.

 

Nope. The guy in the private sector is not only paying for hie wife's care but 30 -50% of your wife's care as well because medicare grossly underpays for services rendered and that cost has to be recovered somewhere.

 

Nice chart. Does it account for the massive immigration waves, legal and illegal, of third world people into the U.S. that don't affect tiny OECD Darlings, that depress overall life expectancy? Of course not. Does it account for prosperity-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease that plague a country richer than most OECD Darlings? Of course not.

More than anything, that chart makes the case for massive reform of social programs like SNAP in the U.S. that allow beneficiaries to buy soda and potato chips with taxpayer money. It certainly doesn't make a case for more socialized medicine.

 

Oh, I see what you are saying.
But you need leverage to force those changes.

 

Naw, It can come out of the insurance company savings and the drug costs.

 

Why would it be 5% of the 60 million people on medicare, in a report about chronic conditions conditions? Chronic conditions is not the "name of their data warehouse". That is such a bizarre response. It is a condition you have had for more than 3 months. If you fall and break your hip, that would be an acute condition and not included in data about chronic conditions.

As for the average cost, your argument doesn't make sense. True the average figure is higher than the cost would be for children, but it is lower than it would be for old people. That is how averages work. What am I missing here?

 

Yeah I did mention the bureaucracy problem as well. If you have to deal with government bureaucracy regularly, you have probably contemplated suicide at least a little the 3rd time you had to bring the same piece of paper into the same office but the lady keeps telling you to go see Sheryl down the hall because that isn't her job but then she finally does stamp it after her supervisor advised her that it is her job and this could have all been done in 2 minutes but instead took up your whole morning with nonsense. I am not bitter though.
The excess costs are complicated. It would be nice if we could point our finger at 1 factor and see the problem and solution clearly. We have a lot of layers though. There are the initial costs for your doctor I mentioned in another post, the side industries like malpractice insurance or medical device manufacturing that try to milk the doctor patient interaction as much as possible, the cost of compliance with government regulations, people abusing the patent system, people abusing the legal system, and even the role of insurance in driving up the costs of medicine. Where do you even begin?

*Ideally*, you would actually rather not have any insurance at all. If no one in the US could pay $13,000 for an MRI, then it wouldn't cost $13,000. The price would be whatever people could actually afford. A lot of those ridiculous fee schedules are based on the idea that your insurance will pay half btw. A better system is one in which the cost of medicine is reasonable enough that people can afford most of it out of pocket. Then people could get catastrophic coverage for next to nothing per month or your hospital could provide it as their charity care. In order to do this you would have to incentivize cheaper medical device manufacturing, lower the entry costs for medicine, and lower compliance costs by lowering superfluous regulation, address the frivolous lawsuits with something other than the tort reform measures already tried, address the incestuous relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA, and deal with a catastrophic adjustment period. This will never happen, but it would be your best bet for cheap healthcare in the long run. It would be terrible in the short term. Whoever passed this would be drawn and quartered in the public square by special interest groups.

 

That would be true- but it's also true of trying to solve the problem legislating insurance. Since it's going to be a battle either way, we should be battling the cause of the problem rather than the effect.

Cure the disease, symptoms go away automatically. Treat symptoms, get some relief but disease persists indefinitely, manifests itself in new ways. What bothers me the most here is the total indifference to the costs that the insurance premiums are controlled by. Seem politicians can't grasp the impact of the $15 tylenol on the cost of insurance.

 

The question implies that Medicare for all will have the government taking trillions of dollars in taxes away from the people so the government can spend it instead of the people for services that the government chooses for you in lieu of the people choosing. That is exactly what you posted. So why are you calling the questioners dumb?

 

While on one hand we have to give the authority to government for many things, the last thing a wise person should do is assume that they will do the job well, or honestly, or in our best interests. Government does not have character- only people have character.

 

What you keep missing is that we are already spending that money and more. No new taxes needed.

 

So are you for having the government control the costs but not administer the service?

Your Tylenol is on the hospital. Can I add one on the pharmaceutical companies.
I take some eye drops. $450 a bottle or $4.50 a drop in the US.
Still $85 from Canada, but less painful. Now that's just F'd up.