Obamacare

NoCoPilot wrote:

He had to find a quack to sign his own letter of fitness to run for the presidency.

And all we ever got was a bullshit letter. Of course, Hillary released her medical records. And guess which one was the target of ludicrous propaganda about medical problems?

There will be no tax returns either, despite promises to the contrary.  This will be a presidency of unparalleled untransparency.

Trump will be battling Congress from Day One.

Funny, I don't see him winning.

Quote :

the goal of “insurance for everybody”

Like "everybody" can open his own health savings account?

What a surprise.

GOP governors who turned down Medicaid money have hands out

kilo wrote:

Quote :

the goal of “insurance for everybody”

Like "everybody" can open his own health savings account?

Why isn't the goal "health care for everyone"? Oh, that is socialism. Forgive me.

At the bridge club this afternoon, a guy was telling me that in China, if you go to the ER without insurance or money, they call the police and have you tossed out on the sidewalk. He said that was the way America was going, which I agree with (it's the corporate line). He also seemed to think it was a good idea, which I find hard to swallow. Of course, he is quite well off and healthy. Maybe if he gets sick he will change his mind.

The American Health Care Act -- notice, they've dropped the word "Affordable" -- has been unveiled by the Republicans who claim to have been working on it for eight years.

It is more expensive.

It covers fewer people.

It'll raise the deficit substantially (CBO is still figuring out how much).

It removes the mandate, so healthy people won't buy in, which means higher expenses for everybody else.  Employer mandates -- covering their employees -- may go away too (in the pursuit of "competitiveness") so the pool of insurance buyers who do not use their coverage will be a FRACTION of what it is today.

Many of the provisions in the bill are lifted verbatim from Obamacare.  That's why it's being called Obamacare 2.0 or Obamacare Lite.

This will be going down in history as an EPIC FAIL.

This chart is a powerful indictment of our current health-care system

The chart in the article comes from here. Lot of info there.

The US is one of only two countries in the world that allows prescription drugs to be advertised directly to the public (the other is New Zealand).

In the US, drug companies spend roughly twice as much on advertising as on R&D.  Most of this is advertising to prescribers rather than direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising.

At a quick glance I couldn't find comparable figures for non-US pharmaceuticals.

Pharmaceutical companies are also among the largest donors to Congress.  

That's why any healthcare reform is guaranteed to benefit the industry first, consumers second (if at all).

The amount spent on health care in the US can be reduced by twenty percent simply be eliminating private insurance companies. There's no reason - other than political - why the Medicare program cannot be extended to every person in the country.

Additionally, all hospitals should be non-profit - real non-profit. Not every fucking thing in the country should be run as a profit center.

_Howard wrote:

Additionally, all hospitals should be non-profit - real non-profit. Not every fucking thing in the country should be run as a profit center.

Socialist.

Under Trump the prisons will be for-profit, neighborhood schools will be for-profit, road & bridge repairs will be for-profit, the military will be for-profit, water and electricity delivery will be for-profit. Everything is susceptible to being privatized -- and that most certainly includes healthcare delivery.

Because, as we all know, the unfettered free enterprise market delivers maximal value for minimal expense.

From that other link:

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It shows that both public and private expenditure went up substantially in the 20th century, particularly after the Second World War. And this increase was such that public resources became an increasingly important source to finance healthcare (despite the fact that public resources always accounted for less than half of total spending on healthcare). The continued increase in public expenditure on healthcare in the U.S. means that today it actually spends more government money per person on healthcare than many countries that fund universal programs. Specifically in comparison to the U.K., by 1995 the U.S. already spent more public resources (as a percent of GDP) than the British NHS.

Chris Matthews just had a graphic up, on his show, about the repeal & replace effort of the Republicans.

It was "Pin the blame on the donkey." Funny!

_Howard wrote:

There's no reason - other than political - why the Medicare program cannot be extended to every person in the country.

Capacity?

Obamacare is ... forcing Americans to buy insurance they don’t need

Trumpcare is..."Dismantles the Obamacare taxes that have hurt job creators".

The rich get huge tax savings - as much as $197,00/year - while those in need take it in the ass once again.

Did you notice that about ten percent of the bill deals with taking health insurance benefits away from people who win a lottery?

These are not good times to be an insurance company. I could see a lot of insurers leaving the market if they're used as political footballs, if their profits are (further) regulated and if regulation ties their hands.

52 million uninsured could be way off.

The ACA repeal bill was pulled from the House floor today. Not enough votes to pass.

No surprise. The GOP has bitten off a huge turd in trying to repeal the ACA, which for all of its (many) flaws is still a vast improvement over before.

I've said it before I'll say it again as long as Congress drinks from the Big Pharma trough there will be no meaningful patient-centered healthcare reform. You simply cannot serve two masters when they're diametrically opposed.

The flaws are not necessarily in the ACA, but in the American health care industry.
And the problem's roots are far deeper than just the pharmaceutical industry. It goes all the way down the core of the American psyche, which has been fed the big lie that only capitalism can solve problems; that capitalism is the one and only true economy; that the country cannot exist without filthy rich motherfuckers.

Oh I don't know. I think the examples of France, England, Russia and even Canada tend to support the idea that too much government planning and involvement in the everyday affairs of people is not a good thing. I like America's ethos that people doing it for themselves is better.

Of course unfettered capitalism leads to oligarchy, so it's necessary to limit the power of the recipients of public largesse, and tax the piss out of them. The 70-90% top tax rates in the decades after the war led to a booming and well-distributed economy.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I think the examples of France, England, Russia and even Canada tend to support the idea that too much government planning and involvement in the everyday affairs of people is not a good thing.  I like America's ethos that people doing it for themselves is better.

Spoken like a true oligarch/conservative/Republican/...

NoCoPilot wrote:

The 70-90% top tax rates in the decades after the war led to a booming and well-distributed economy.

While I think a top tax rate of seventy to eighty percent would be a good thing - and probably necessary to maintain our economy - the tax rate was not the reason for the growth after the war. That was simply because the US had the only significant manufacturing base after the other countries had their factories bombed to the ground. If I remember correctly, more than half of the world's manufacturing was done in the US for a number of years after the war ended.