Medicare will be insolvent within five years. People with Medicaid die waiting in line for care, as do our veterans with Tricare, also government-supplied, insurance. EMTALA created the unfunded mandate that is forcing closure of rural hospitals. HIPAA failed to make insurance portable and, worse, obstructs communication between health care professionals. Before the ACA, average maximum wait time to see a primary care physician was 99 days; after the ACA was implemented, the wait increased to 122 days.
If the federal government subsidizes full private coverage for all Americans, the price tag will be even greater than Bernie Sanders's projection for his single-payer system — $40 trillion. Forty trillion dollars is slightly less than half the combined GDP of all nations on Planet Earth.
The Rats do, but do they count as Americans?
Do I want to go through whatever it takes to enable the immense amount of funding and manpower necessary to enable that? Much more complex, and if you want to carry it to its logical end, you must compel doctors and nurses to provide labor to other people through force of government.
Really though, in five years, would it be that difficult to create an AI-powered triage system that could take much of the drudgery work out of the hands of humans and drastically expand access to some sort of basic medical care? Probably not. I would bet computer-attendant exam rooms will start showing up in ERs around the country by that point for handling cough and fever cases and maybe even simple prescriptions.
Put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert, and in six months there would be a shortage of sand.
The Health Insurance industry wants your money but will do anything they can to avoid paying out. Exceptions to care and deductibles help them to reduce costs considerably.
And then there are the medical institutions, hospitals and doctors. They want to bill us as much money as possible for every little thing. They are less interested in curing patients and more interested in treating them. A cured patient is a lost customer.
We are stuck in the middle, costs are being driven higher by guaranteed premiums under ACA, and everyone wants their slice of the pie.
This is exactly the same reason that college costs have soared since the introduction of college loans. Getting the government out of the healthcare industry is paramount if we want to rescue costs. Let the medical institutions business fight each other for our business, we know that competition lowers costs and improves service.
The government needs to get out of the way.
“...Most Americans do not distinguish healthcare from health care...”
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That’s just stupid.
Too many people getting health care for little or nothing. Most screwed up system in the world.
Why does every other developed nation in the world have a reasonably successful health care system and we have this abortion?
Why? Greed. Nobody on the gravy train is giving up the gravy train.
That is all I have to say. It will never make things any better and they will never be any better. In fact, what we have to look forward to is worse all the time.
Not surprisingly it's difficult to research the amount that insurers skim off the top to administer your health care, that number is well hidden. I'll bet anything that it's a lot though. What we have now is a system where you give a small fortune to an insurance company with the promise that they'll pick up the tab, naturally they skim some off the top. They've figured out that's a license to steal so insurance becomes a bigger and bigger part of the picture while actual health care gets rationed more and more. It's unsustainable, patients aren't getting the care they need while doctors and nurses are squeezed and overworked on the other end. The giant pig of insurance, which provides no actual medical benefit to the patient, meanwhile gets fatter and fatter by taking bigger and bigger cuts of the money passing between patients and providers.
Hell no. I’ve seen too many horrors from Canada and the UK. Sorry to my northern friends. I’m sure it’s fine for general health. They still seem to love it tho and criticize US health care. But, their system scares the crap out of me.
ping
We went through this crap when Bill put Hillary in charge of healthcare reform. We didn’t want it then, and we don’t want it now.
Do Americans Really Want Universal Health Insurance?
A BIG FAT NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
As I said before, this is no longer Reagan's America.
NO!!!!
I’ve seen how the government has run the post office, the DMV, the Dept of Education, and the IRS.
NO WAY IN HECK do I want their grubby fingers in my health care.
I think the advantage plans will take over Medicare. 38 million on it already.
It might not fly in the USA but the Swedes were good with for two generations.
16 million Americans just signed up for Obama Care. 3 million were new ones.
Do Americans Really Want Universal Health Insurance?
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Most Americans want as much as they can get...partially through work and partially through the ballot-box. Increasingly though, the ballot-box is more appealing as someone else has to do the work for you.
Obamacare won’t be repealed, because it can’t be repealed - or, more exactly, it can’t be repealed without ushering in huge Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate.
Members of Congress don’t know much, but they can count votes like a pimp in a whorehouse can count money.
Yes, the voters “hate Obamacare and want it repealed”. That is absolutely true.
It’s also true that they want the ability to buy insurance for pre-existing conditions, want insurance companies to be forbidden to cancel policies for non-payment, want zero payment at the point of service, want their adult children who are smoking dope in a dive in Oakland to stay covered, want their States to expand Medicaid without taxes going up, and so on.
In other words, the only two things they hate about Obamacare are paying for it, and the name.
Republicans in Congress understand this perfectly well, which is why there’s no plan.
And, not coincidentally, Obamacare (and Romneycare) were the culmination of fifty years of “reform”, all of which had the purpose of destroying the private sector or making it impossible for the private sector to function, except for boob jobs and a few other things. And, by 2009, the mission was largely accomplished.
Obamacare was merely a temporary mop-up operation, until full nationalization was possible.
And now, it is.
It’s coming, because it’s what the voters, bless their pointy little heads, want.