"I'll try ̶s̶p̶i̶n̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ printing more money, that's a good trick!"
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Whether or not it's a good idea, wouldn't Medicare for All also save people money that they now use to buy private health insurance?
Sure only to have it plus more taxed from you.
Government is always inefficient. Medicare for all would cost substantially more per capita in taxes than private insurance. Despite that, I have conflicting thoughts about universal guaranteed healthcare.
Someone who isn't an ideologue, I like that.
Yes, government is rather inefficient. But for some reason, countries with 'universal healthcare' spend less on health care than the US with better health outcomes. This has two reasons: the obesity epidemic in the US, and the fact that some health care is delayed or denied for us. But may universal health care not cut out a lot of bureaucracy and form-filling?
Honestly, I don't know. I don't want to support one position or other simply because either my country or 'tribe' supports it, so I just decide to do the wisest thing of all: shut up.
I think the price of healthcare in the US is messed up in a similar convoluted way as university tuition. In both cases, something the state did ruined things. Considering that, perhaps further state encroachment would have counterproductive results.
But is there any place where it actually works fine then? Everywhere else the state does more, not less.
Outcomes have a lot to do with inputs. It does not follow that simply switching the US over to single payer would result in any sort of good. You'd also have to get rid of all the profiteering and corruption, and I just don't see any reason turning more over to government would do that.
It's kind of like defense spending. Other countries spend immensely less on defense, even per capita, with similar "outcomes" (they still have a country). But the government is already in charge of defense spending. And yet they're constantly trying to turn things over to the private sector, use "commercial off the shelf" etc. There is no reason to think creating a single payer Defense Spending Agency would be anything but a boondoggle.
The US doesn't have private health care -- the government is immensely involved, and we don't have public health care, either. We were supposed to have universal healthcare care of Obama, but I'm sure the same people who always whined about it will claim we don't. You can't trust the government to take care of you, and you can't trust our corporatocracy, either. Bad healthcare is just a symptom of the rot, not due to any lack of planning.
The problem is that Medicare for All would be far more expensive as a replacement for private insurance. Private insurance actually has incentives to compete and keep costs down. Government does not. Government has incentives to mandate additional coverage to pander to interest groups, like covering birth control, abortions, gender reassignment surgery, etc.
Conceptually, it could be cheaper if the government was willing to assfuck the medical industry and cram down prices, but we have decades of proof from the Medicare system itself that the government is totally unwilling to do that. So the end result would be higher, not lower prices, similar to how Obamacare forced everyone to take all kinds of coverage for shit they didn't want or need.
The government has made it so hard, I assume on purpose, to be an insurer that there really aren't that many players. The states I'm intimately familiar with have only a few choices. And if you want to try something different, well, you can't. You want to have catastrophic only coverage and pay for your own shit? Too bad, illegal.
Speaking as a European, the government has plenty of incentives to keep costs down. By denying us care.
That said, I'm rather risk-averse so I would not want the American system, since I wouldn't know what the hell would happen. I can see the problems with both systems. Which is worse, I honestly don't know.
It seems to me that this is more of a problem in the US than it is in Sweden, where such crap is more restricted for some weird reason.
I've given up trying to understand what is better or not.
If you asked me if people should get dental care, I'd say yes. But I always pick plans that do not include it, since it is cheaper for me to pay it out of pocket.
That only comes later when your government runs into a budgetary crisis and is forced to ration care to balance the books.
The US Congress tripled the US national debt in the last 10 years They give absolutely 0 fucks about responsible spending and are going to bankrupt the United States and cause another global financial crisis in doing so, it's just a question of when. Fiscal conservatism is a joke because everyone in Congress is just a pig at the trough, and I don't blame them. If Republicans were fiscally conservative and didn't lead the charge with tax cuts, all they'd be doing is saving up money for the Democrats to spend when it was their turn.
If you look at data, competitive private systems are always FAR better than socialist systems. It's literally the point of the whole capitalist vs socialist/communist struggle of the past 100 years.
The reason US health insurance sucks is not because it's private, it's because it isn't private enough. It is HIGHLY regulated and restricted and non-competitive compared to a truly free market system. Hospitals also play a lot of games which would normally be illegal under anti-trust laws and yet they get a free pass because politicians will not touch hospitals.
Euros are super left wing in most areas, but there are pockets of social conservatism. Same with how France told Metoo to fuck off.
It seems that you can just spend as much as you want when you hold the reserve currency. There are always enough chumps who are fine with funding it by holding dollars.
That is what Democrats claim Clinton (and the GOP Congress) did for George W. Bush and his wars.
Absolutely. But I'd rather not base judgments on ideology, but based on empiricism. Is this also applicable to health care? The counterargument is alwys "the US spends twice as much but has worse health outcomes". And yes, I know that this is at least in part due to obesity.
This makes sense, but is there any place on earth that does do its health care in a way that has your approval? If there is none, isn't it more of a thought experiment? People can always think of a world that is superior to the one they inhabit.
We're mostly left-wing on economic issues. Even the most socially liberal places in Europe are not quite as bad as a Portland. Thank God for small blessings.
Probably, but it would be a major gov expenditure, which is what this graph is depicting.