The Medicare for all debate

Tom Said, “That isn't what was promised.” So, a promise of a one time savings of $2,500 that wasn’t delivered?  That is a relief!  Can you imagine if he promised health insurance that covered everyone at a lower cost to both the patient and the government and in two years not being able to come up with a single plan that did just one of those things?

Once again, I never said that.  I merely pointed out the major issue with medical costs.

Yes, you bring that up often but offer no solution as to what do about it. Leaving the implication that this 5% should be left to die or be put down. 

Charles said, Nobody really believes the ACA actually saved money on premiums for average Americans.  It subsidized premiums for some people, but working men and women have seen premiums and deductibles and out of pocket expenses skyrocket.  The "It would have been a lot more according to projections" argument is plain bullshit…

The CBO says otherwise. A nameless nobody doesn’t add much to the discussion. As long as we continue on the path of private insurance premiums and out of pockets are going to continue to go up. I have never met a Doctor or a Shareholder that doesn't think they are entitled to a 10% increase in profits year after year.  Wages haven't kept pace with that. I guess you could set the minimum wage to $15 and then index it to the medical inflation rate after that if you want to stick with private insurance. 

But regardless what you really believe about the ACA or evil insurance company profits, the transition to your nirvana of socialized medical insurance would be the real clusterfuck.  Are you going to compensate stockholders for the crash that will surely happen when you eliminate the industry?

No, I wouldn’t pay them. Investors are supposed to be people that weigh risk vs reward.  Investing in a for profit business that depends on the government to continue to subsidize the cost of its product in ever increasing amounts would be dumb. 

What about all the doctors that close their practices as they are limited to Medicare reimbursement?  You can point to other country's healthcare systems and claim they are successful, but none of them converted from private to public on this grand scale.  Our federal government is incapable of this conversion.  It's a recipe for a total disaster and you're treating it like a walk in the park.  They couldn't even get the ACA right and that's penuts compared to your new fantasy.

A few doctors near retirement might close their practice, but that is how any change works. It is not like doctors are going to say, well, I was making 500k under the old system.  Now I only make 250k, so I am going to close my practice and get a job slinging hamburgers at the local McDonalds.  Under the new system, I think we should help doctors with student loans and the government should provide malpractice coverage which would ease the transition.  

Yes, we are so stupid in America we can’t have a healthcare system as good as Canada, the UK, France, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and the rest of the first word because we Americans are just too dumb to figure it out. 

I don’t think it would be a walk in the park, but I do have faith in America’s collective ability to do something. We sent men to the moon in 1969 and a lot of people thought the possibility of that happing was pure fantasy. Universal healthcare isn’t rocket science. Every other first world country has found a way to implement it. I don’t believe the U.S. is such a failure that we can’t reach a similar level of achievement.

California has a GDP greater than most those countries.  Let them try it out and get back to us.  It will be a disaster a thousand times worse than the 2.8 Billion we loaned to the Obamacare Co-Ops.  Are any of those left standing?

The federal government's failure at something as 'simple' as the Affordable Care Act doesn't bode well for the democratic politicians to go ahead and eliminate the health insurance industry and replace it with a centralized monolithic bureaucracy.  

We'd be a lot better off figuring out ways to force the current health industry participants to compete and to create new technology that actually makes health care more affordable.  That's what capitalism does best.  The markets are broken.  Broken because they don't allow real competition.  There are huge barriers to entry from the AMA Monopoly to 50 separate state licensing requirements, to laws and regulations preventing or slowing innovation; US Medical markets are nothing like free markets.  I suggest we need a LOT more competition in the medical industry...Democrats are suggesting we'd be better off with no competition at all.

The voters will decide which is best for America.  What works in Sweden may just be a big failure here...Just sayin'.

Your argument is based on Obamacare being a "failure." 8.5 million people signed up this year. The total number of uninsured has dropped by 20 million since 2014. That doesn't seem like a failure to me.

Also, whatever flaws Obamacare has are due to the efforts of REPUBLICANS. For instance, the repeal of the individual mandate means that premiums will go up as younger, healthier people leave the exchanges. That was a Republican idea, meant to weaken Obamacare--which it did.

You may have been listening to too much Rush Limbaugh with your fears of a "monolithic bureaucracy." Many government institutions are like that, and function pretty well. The armed forces. The post office. The FDA. The factor you keep forgetting is that a federal health care agency won't have to make a profit; it'll just have to meet its costs. Therefore, the cost per capita would be less.

Also, capitalism does a TERRIBLE job of creating a viable health care market. Profit-oriented medicine focuses on expensive procedures and really isn't interested in preventive care. Poor people make lousy customers, so for-profit medicine won't and doesn't serve them.

I know that Republicans are always gaga about "free markets" (except when cheering for Trump's tariffs, lol), but certain good and services are highly prone to market failure. Health care/health insurance is one such market.

Medicare for Some has a $40 trillion deficit & the participants have to purchase supplemental insurance to cover their out of pocket expenses.

Somehow we are supposed to believe that thru magic medicare for all will not run a deficit.  

Well if Obamacare is so great why are you democrats trying to completely gut it after just a few short years?  It promised affordable heath care for all.  It delivered subsidies for some and higher premiums, deductable and out of pocket expenses for most.  You have no credibility when you claim how great Obamacare is out of one side of your mouth and our healthcare sucks and we need to replace Obamacare out of the other side.  You can't have it both ways. 

"We Democrats"? I had no idea that I was part of any legislative effort. It's possible that I'm a congressman and don't know it, but...

You're the one saying "Obamacare is so great," not me. Everybody knows that Obamacare isn't perfect, or even close to it. That's because flaws were deliberately introduced into the original legislation, flaws that Republicans wanted, in order to possibly appease them--as at the time, it wasn't at all clear that it would get the 60 votes needed in the Senate. Then, of course, Trump attacked Obamacare and weakened it, as I explained earlier. Its flaws are Republicans' fault.

You're also misstating the facts when you say "it delivered higher premiums." That's wrong on two counts. One, the insurance companies raised their premiums, as they had been doing for years. Those increases were actually somewhat smaller than prior to 2014, when Obamacare was introduced. Two, those "higher premiums" are subsidized with tax credits. Without Obamacare, premiums would be just as high as they are now, or higher, but no one would be getting a tax credit to offset them.

You lack the intellect to understand the concept that Obamacare is considerably better than nothing but it's also much less than it could be. You somehow view "We like it, but it could be better" as some kind of contradiction. We--as in, most of the country--want a single payer system where everyone would have access to care. However, Republicans prefer that people suffer and die, so we can't have that yet. However, they've also failed in their dozens of attempts to destroy Obamacare.

So the current situation is a kind of unhappy compromise. Democrats want everyone to have health care; Republicans want only rich white people to have it and for everyone else to die. Thus, the present situation.

"You lack the intellect to understand the concept that Obamacare is considerably better than nothing but it's also much less than it could be."

You're acting like the complete federal government takeover of the medical insurance industry is simply a tweak to Obamacare.  In effect you're too dumb to understand that you're actually advocating to repeal and replace the ACA.  Damn...That's what the Republicans want too.  Only they're smart and honest enough to realize that you only completly replace a failed system.  They don't praise Obmacare out of one side of their mouths and attack out of the other.

And blaming the failure of Obamacare on Republicans is laughable.  Typical Democrats never take responsibility for their failures.

      "And blaming the failure of Obamacare on Republicans is laughable.  Typical Democrats never take responsibility for their failures." ------ The TRUTH.

True compromise, option to buy into Medicare, like obama care is now, but the dems have to be willing to get the lawyers out of the way with tort reform, and the republicans have to be willing to let the Insurance companies lose out on these customers. This is the only way to save money, in other words, it will never get done. 

A lie, referred to in all caps as the "TRUTH," is still a lie.