The TrumpCare comes back from the dead (...and lives!) thread

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Name me a conservative, sensible plan they could have come up with that wasn't going to be met with scorn from you people?

I'm not an expert on health policy, asshole, just a poor body who contemplates suicide multiple times a day even with my thousand-dollar-a-month psychiatric medications. Why doesn't your party put an ounce of effort into this for once if it wants to know what people will think?

My view is simple:

We will never see long term, tangible, widespread positive trends in our healthcare system unless two things change

1) The AMA's power is reduced: it's hard to imagine a more stupid setup where we restrict dramatically the supply of a good or service when the exorbitant price of that good or service is the issue. There are countries in europe that have TWICE the amount fo doctors as we do, the netherlands for example. The AMA is a cartel.

2) Employers have to pay payroll taxes on healthcare premiums they pay for employees. A huge reason why the pre-exixting condition exists in the first place is because people lose their jobs and thus their insurance.

The AHCA and the ACA do not address either.

I want to see a dramatic increase in the supply of health services in this country. Econ101: when the supply curve shifts right, what happens to price?

I want more doctors being accepted and I want more medical schools built.

I met a lady at my chiropractor the other day who was a dentist in peru for 4 years and was NOT ALLOWED to practice it in America when she moved here. How is that possible?

Maybe doctors would be willing to accept lower, European-level salaries if they didn't have to go into $200K+ of student debt to complete their education.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Name me a conservative, sensible plan they could have come up with that wasn't going to be met with scorn from you people?

I'm not an expert on health policy, asshole, just a poor body who contemplates suicide multiple times a day even with my thousand-dollar-a-month psychiatric medications. Why doesn't your party put an ounce of effort into this for once if it wants to know what people will think?

My view is simple:

We will never see long term, tangible, widespread positive trends in our healthcare system unless two things change

1) The AMA's power is reduced: it's hard to imagine a more stupid setup where we restrict dramatically the supply of a good or service when the exorbitant price of that good or service is the issue. There are countries in europe that have TWICE the amount fo doctors as we do, the netherlands for example. The AMA is a cartel.

2) Employers have to pay payroll taxes on healthcare premiums they pay for employees. A huge reason why the pre-exixting condition exists in the first place is because people lose their jobs and thus their insurance.

The AHCA and the ACA do not address either.

I want to see a dramatic increase in the supply of health services in this country. Econ101: when the supply curve shifts right, what happens to price?

I want more doctors being accepted and I want more medical schools built.

I met a lady at my chiropractor the other day who was a dentist in peru for 4 years and was NOT ALLOWED to practice it in America when she moved here. How is that possible?

Maybe doctors would be willing to accept lower, European-level salaries if they didn't have to go into $200K+ of student debt to complete their education.

This, again, can be traced back to the past when many medical schools were shut down en masse.

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A lot of those schools were the period equivalent of diploma mill jokes.

Medicine shouldn't be like law school where any moron who's willing to borrow the money can get a degree from a third-tier failure factory.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

TD, this has been boggling my mind for a while so why not ask here.  Why is that you dislike Medicare and Social Security but support Obamacare?

Well, I don't support ObamaCare, if you read my post here. I've edited it a bit about Medicare to make my position clearer on healthcare. But I'll get back to that.  

To start with, I don't like the New Deal; I think it was an overreaction to the Great Depression, where the Federal Reserve would have done just fine had they turned on the money spigot. That said, I think the New Deal created a dependency culture that expects people to be taken care of by government no matter what. I think that Social Security went from being an old age program to a catchall program that takes in a lot of people at unsustainable rates. Ultimately, I don't find it sustainable without higher taxes. With Medicare, same type of objections (although my plan would cover everyone and be a replacement for Medicare/Medicaid). That said, I wouldn't vote to repeal either because the instability caused by the loss of these programs would be immense and economically disastrous. If ever down the line, we can figure out how to repeal it in favor of a more libertarian set of ideas (thanks to technology or whatnot), that'd be something I'd like to explore if the disruption is minimal.

As far as ObamaCare goes, I don't support it (I think it was too cumbersome, unnecessarily so, and I didn't like some of the regulations that required companies to give healthcare if you worked over 30 hours, and whatnot). It's a little better than the New Deal, which were straight up cash and benefits programs, so I'm not as hostile. Also, healthcare is much bigger than retirement and there we have to help sick people who would otherwise die if we don't help them, so I'm more sympathetic on healthcare. But I didn't support the law when it was enacted and would prefer to repeal it in favor of a better law.

That said, I don't support this bill, because it abruptly pulls out the plug on those who gained Medicaid access and disrupts tons of healthcare plans that were designed with the ACA in mind. Any unwinding at this point should have been over ten years, and done with an eye to keeping markets stable as we transitioned to a better plan. The GOP plan, in my eyes, isn't that replacement. They rushed the plan, they didn't find the spot between good policy and good politics, and didn't even wait for a CBO score. Their political posturing has led to this (and admittedly, I was on the ObamaCare repeal bandwagon for many years without thinking about what would come after; which is why I raised the point of asking people to defend this law). We'll see if the Senate crafts anything worthwhile.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Before SS and Medicare, the percentage of elderly people in poverty was astronomical. If your adult kids couldn't afford to support you, you were up a creek. Living with adult children stopped being a realistic approach when we transitioned away from an agrarian society.

People weren't living healthy, independent lives before the New Deal. They were dying poor, broke, sick and alone.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

The Senate put Lee and Cruz on the committee because they figured that's the only way they'll be able to get them to vote for the final product.

But if they think Ted Cruz isn't perfectly capable of sitting on his hands while everyone else drafts a bill and then voting against it, they don't know Ted Cruz.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Mulvaney is encouraging the Senate to make major changes to TrumpCare:

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/07/white-house-pressures-senate-to-fix-health-bills-policy-problems-238085

JFC then they should have passed a better bill in the House

What's even weirder about this is that it's not as if the House passing a healthcare bill was necessary for the Senate to commence work on an apparently totally different healthcare bill.

I don't understand what they got out of any of this other than forcing dozens of their most vulnerable members to vote for a toxic bill their constituents hate.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

How are all those 50-64 year old Republicans, whose premiums have been effectively "subsidized" by younger people paying more, going to react when they see their insurance costs go up?

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I'm still really unclear on what requires 50 votes and what requires 60.

Say Republicans pass AHCA or the Senate's version of it by the 50 vote threshold.

When Democrats are in power again, can they "reconstruct" Obamacare back to what it was using a 50 vote threshold?

Only if such a reconstruction met the criteria for being done through reconciliation.