AOC's latest gaffe shows just how expensive Medicare for all would be

[Person Man]

Yeah. 21T is what will probably be spent on HC in the next
So, would I want to spend 250 a month on insurance that I'll have to change each time I get a new job or 350 a month on taxes that goes with me and which I only pay when I'm not laid off? I mean, it's a good question. Right now, I'd be ok with expanding Obamacare to what it was when it was originally proposed or how Pelosi passed it. I get it. Too many people are dependent on the status quo to immediately nationalize a sixth of the economy. That girl I almost married almost voted for Romney over Obamacare because she was into hospital revenue.

[Person Man]

I'm no fan of AOC.
That said, conservatives' obsession with her (especially when they turn a blind eye to the constant stream of BS flowing from the White House) is deeply disturbing and ought to be studied by psychiatrists.

Cortez Derangement Syndrome

[Person Man]

Yeah. 21T is what will probably be spent on HC in the next
So, would I want to spend 250 a month on insurance that I'll have to change each time I get a new job or 350 a month on taxes that goes with me and which I only pay when I'm not laid off? I mean, it's a good question. Right now, I'd be ok with expanding Obamacare to what it was when it was originally proposed or how Pelosi passed it. I get it. Too many people are dependent on the status quo to immediately nationalize a sixth of the economy. That girl I almost married almost voted for Romney over Obamacare because she was into hospital revenue.

Cute.  You really have no idea how expensive insurance is without subsidies from the tax system or employers or directly from the government, especially when you get old.  Here's a hint. IT"S DAMN EXPENSIVE!!!!  I'm a 50-55 year old non-smoker who gets his insurance from the Marketplace.  Pre-subsidy it's around $900/month. Thankfully, the subsidy cuts that down considerably, but it's still a pain.

You aren’t paying anywhere near $900 and in a single payer system you’d still probably pay less than you do now.  Healthy wealthy Ralphy might pay quite a bit more...but that’s a feature, not a flaw.

Angry_weasel knows what he’s talking about.  You’re just marveling at big trees with no concept of the forest you’re lost in.

I'll grant that single payer will reduce costs, but if you think it'll cut two-thirds of the cost, you're living in fantasyland. By one-third is possible, but going beyond that is going to lead to considerable impacts on quality and availability of care.  Already with some specialties, if you're on Medicaid, you're screwed. You may have to wait months if there's even a specialist available. Squeeze the turnip too much and there will be no more blood as health care providers leave the system to do other things that pay more.  Moreover, even if we were to get health care down to the fantasy one-third level, we're still talking an average of $800 per worker per month in costs.

This is true, but even beyond this single payer itself won’t be doing the cost regulation - the government will.

Regulation in most industries makes it more difficult to start and run a business. This is generally a bad thing. However, when it comes to medical costs, people truly have no clue what they are paying for or how much, and are in a much worse position to make smart purchasing decisions.

If we could set a Medicare fee schedule for all services in the United States, we wouldn’t need to destroy the free market for insurance to regulate costs - costs would come down all on their own. If we were to institute TORT reform and lower the legal risks associated with performing risky procedures at the patients’ behest, operating costs for hospitals would go down and doctor wages would go up. Same with providing tax breaks to hospitals.

The problem is that hospitals need to be able to make money or else there is no reason for them to exist. If you address the issues hospitals and doctors are facing while simultaneously limiting costs through regulation, you would see a fairer system wherein hospitals can more easily make a stable profit year to year and consumers (including health insurance providers) would be on the hook for significantly lowered costs. Via the Obamacare market, those lowered costs would translate almost directly into people’s pockets.

In other words, there absolutely is a way to fix the healthcare system in this country through the mechanisms provided by Obamacare. The main losers of such a fix would be ambulance-chasing lawyers and other bloodsuckers at the fringes of the healthcare industry who profit off of the wide variance of outcomes and massive costs that people are willing to pay when it comes to their own health (or are willing to award when it comes to malpractice suits).

A friend of mine’s father is a pediatric neurosurgeon at a prestigious hospital and makes upwards of 500k per year. The reason he makes this much (outside of how skilled he is) is that he pays upwards of 100k per year in doctor’s insurance to protect from malpractice suits, despite never once having to defend against such a suit in his 15+ years working. This is the impact that medical malpractice lawsuit payments have on the industry: doctors need to be paid exorbitant amounts for their services because the financial risks involved with executing their profession are so insanely high. I know that he for one would happily take a 150k pay cut if he had to stop paying for insurance to cover merely the possibility of a multimillion dollar lawsuit against him in the event that one time a risky procedure is a failure.

Now obviously our malpractice laws are in place to provide incentives to doctors to do good work, since when they do bad work it irretrievably damages the lives of others (or even kills others). However, I would suggest that, as in most cases, massive negative consequences have less effectiveness than marginal negative consequences combined with positive incentives to do a good job - I highly doubt there are a significant number of doctors out there who would do things differently if the malpractice lawsuits were 10% of what they currently are.

That's just health care rationing with extra steps. Just like with implementing high deductible plans, this would just keep people from going to the doctor.

[Person Man]

I'm curious why Dems have totally forgotten their universal multi-payer HC plan from the pre-Obama days, it was best described in the bill filed by Sen Wyden as the Healthy Americans Act. It completely removed the employer supplied plans and put everyone in state exchanges, paid for by employer and employee taxes, and offset by deductions and required wage hikes to match prior employer health care costs. From the public consumer side it was more like the German model than the French single-payer model.

Preliminary CBO estimates rated it as revenue neutral. Naturally, discussion of the idea disappeared when employer-based Obamacare became the focus. But when talk turned to creating a truly universal plan beyond Obamacare, this idea seems to have vanished.

We kind of have that already for people not getting benefits through work.

[Person Man]

But the point remains, shouldn't this role perhaps, just possibly, apply a teensy-weensy bit more to the president of the United States then to a fresh woman in Congress?

You mean there haven't been eleventy billion threads here on Trump's stupidity and incompetence? How long did the thread on his phone autocorrect misspelling coffee get again? Like, we get it Trump is garbage. But this thread happens to be about dumb comrade AOC. Its totally possible to call out someone other than Trump for being dumb without a disclaimer reminding the TDS afflicted that "buh Trump is still a more evil Nazi Hitler of course."

The problem is when the usual suspects,perpetually shrug off or defend Trump raving like a literal loon on an almost daily basis, but jump on relatively slight gaffes by any member of team blue.

If there was anything close to the same level of approbation of Trump by said usual suspects, the hypocrisy and partisanship would be less subject to comment.

It's called "living with your consequences" or "personal responsibility" or something they have very poor skills at but yet profess the importance of those skills. Perhaps they profess that these are the most important skills they say that anyone can have. This "paradox" is important here because these people have enabled someone who says all kinds of ignorant and demented things and they defend him. When he does well, it becomes apparent that the things he does are acceptable. When other people they disagree with do what Trump does on accident, they will attempt to avoid personal responsibility and the consequences of their past behavior by pretending what they allowed  Trump to do didn't happen. Consequently, they accuse the opposition of being malfeasant and incompetent by simply being inartful or getting carried away.