Talk Elections

link - Vox (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/3/18122947/pentagon-accounting-error-medicare-for-all)The entire budget of the US military throughout it's history isn't $21T.

And yet current healthcare spending is expected to be double that with millions of uninsured people, massive high premium causing bankruptcy, huge cost on small business & and many thousands dying because of a lack of affordability.

People have to be radical fringe extremists to oppose the idea!

We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, so obviously we can't afford to have some other healthcare system.

You guys should pass your ideas on to the people that can't come up with any then.

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.

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.

Cortez Derangement Syndrome

I've said at least 40 bad things about Trump for every bad thing I've said about AOC.

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.

I wish I had a dollar for every time an Atlas leftist used "but Trump!" as a response to criticism of a Democratic candidate.

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.

Lol it doesn't take a professional to see that conservatives' focus on liberal women like Pelosi and AOC is because they are deeply misogynist.

Soon she will call for the government to seize the means of production. Are these the type of people we want in congress?

man I hope the AOC Dems become so prominent that we easily take back the House in 2020. That would be great for this country.

The United States could easily have single payer. It's just a matter of priorities, if the United Kingdom and Canada have it, saying we can't afford it is a lie.

lol dull0man

 Also tort-reform is a tired conservative talking point that has been analyzed to death. It isn't a significant contributor to healthcare costs. Furthermore the rise in premiums for Doctors and Surgeons did not come from large awards given to "Ambulance Chasers" but rather from unchecked consolidation by large insurance firms like AIG who cornered this market and immediately raised premiums to make record profits, all while pushing tort reform legislation at the state level that hurts patients and the ability to seek appropriate civil justice.

https://hornet.com/stories/7-batsh**t-craziest-statements-texas-rep-louie-gohmert/





Why stop at Congress? Plenty of crazy further down too:



And if we're talking about fitness for Congress, it makes sense to address the presidency too, but that would require several new threads for the 2 years worth of insane statements/actions of Donald J. Trump.

It's always fun when people here betray their youth and naivete, demonstrating that they've never had to actually buy or pay for their own health insurance in their lives and have probably never had a medical expense of any consequence before.

Dead0man's latest thread shows just how bad Atlas Forum actually is

do you think we've missed something?  That would be weird.

First it's ignorantly said that I don't make fun of Trump enough, now I'm a woman hater too?  Funny!

Imagine, if you will, if someone you guys didn't like had, lets say, added an "e" to the end of word that didn't normally have an "e" at the end, or asked what an "aleppo" was....how would you react?   Now what if that person just kept doing things like that?  Yeah, we have a stupid President.  I 100% agree.  AOC is nowhere near as evil/narcissistic/up her own ass as Trump is either.  But she ain't smart, or at least she's not smart enough to keep her mouth shut when she doesn't know something.

Like I've said before, if you want to be blind to this fact, that's fine (it actually adds a lot to the comedy of the situation, so I thank you for that), most of you will see it in time.

AOC has no idea what she is doing, not does she particularly care.

If true, she'd make a perfect Atlas poster.

This isn't a gaffe- it's a minor argument over policy where surprise surprise someone who hasn't got a PHD in health policy made a mistake.

you're misunderstanding my point.  The gaffe was her thinking the DoD had $21T lost somewhere, they haven't.  Their budget for it's entire history isn't $21T.  (to be fair, the DoD looks much worse here than AOC.  The accounting is just complete ass.  It doesn't matter if it's incompetence, on purpose or just because of the size of the bureaucracy, it needs to get fixed.  Freaking ridiculous.)  Her suggesting this money could be used to help, I believe the numbers were that $21T would fund 2/3rds of a ten year plan, just points out how stinking expensive it would be.

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.

Careful, she'll quote-tweet you to get her army of followers after you, and then when you delete she'll screenshot it to make a further example of you.

To all, maybe because, a, trump literally says 10 times more stupid things, both in terms of quality and quantity, then literally every Democrat combined, and what's more B, AOC is a freshman Congress Woman versus Trump being the freaking POTUS makes 8 just teensy-weensy little bit of difference in importance.

Seriously. Ignoring the absolute sh**tbird craziness from Trump versus whatever latest gaffe AOC says is like ignoring armed robbery buy one side and focusing on jaywalking by the other. Justice response is literally as silly as saying I wish I had a dollar for everytime Democrats pointed out Trump's armed robbery for every time we point out some random Congress crater commits jaywalking.

Being a freshman Congresswoman isn't an excuse for making such uninformed statements to the public. If she doesn't understand what she's talking about, as she's clearly displayed many times, she shouldn't talk about it like she does. That applies to any politician, including Trump. When she continues doing this, people are right to call her out on it. She doesn't deserve a free pass.

As much as the left wants to claim that the right has an obsession with AOC, they really should be questioning why she brings criticism upon herself so often instead of staying quiet on issues she doesn't understand and preparing for her new job.

Your criticism would have been more credible if the majority of the Republican caucus weren't climate change deniers and creationists.

Your response would have been taken seriously if you bothered to read where I said this applied to any politician.

So what? That doesn't prevent Republican troglodytes from attacking her while ignoring their own know-nothingism.

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? Particularly when by any meaningful objective standards the former does so on a far far greater and more numerous basis?

"Kind of" is the operative phrase, and I would say only barely "kind of". The current system isn't universal so there are still a lot of uninsured people out there. By leaving employer-based plans in place, too many areas lack the necessary participation by insurers. By taxing indirectly as a penalty, too many people opt out raising premiums for those who stay in. Wyden's plan would have addressed all that by taxing directly and mandating participation, thereby creating a truly universal and sustainable system.

Yes

Then reply to them, because nothing I said suggests Republicans get a free pass too.

I'm not sure what part of "That applies to any politician, including Trump" is so difficult for you to understand. When Trump says dumb things, he deserves to be called out on it. When AOC says dumb things, she deserves it too. If people are dumb to think that being new to politics gives her a free pass, then the same should apply to Trump. To think otherwise is just being a hypocrite.

Maybe, but you definitely post more negative things about AOC than any other member of Congress, even though she still wouldn't be in the top 100 dumbest Congressmen if all her critics turn out to be right.

um
Except it isn't because Trump is in a much more powerful position. Trump being new to politics doesn't affect his power that much because there's only one president and he has vast powers designated by the constitution.

AOC, on the other hand, has her power noticeably reduced by her freshman status because seniority matters a lot in the House. So not identical situations at all.

All politicians should be held to that standard, regardless of position and how much power they hold.

Yes?

And there we will fundamentally, passionately, disagree. I will readily call out and be much much more concerned about idiotic things that the president of the United States says then any member of Congress or, as I would apply from your line of argument, a state assemblyman, Village mayor, or Precinct committeeman.

Now how about in terms of quantity and size of misstatements at least?  By any relatively objective standard Trump says my nominally idiotic things, and it's not just that he says them, it's that he apparently believes them, more often than literally every Democratic member of Congress combined, and does so on a stupefying level of, well, stupidity that simply isn't comparable.

This situation is a perfect example. While AOC said some debatable, possibly foolish, numbers supporting medicare-for- all, Trump has, just within the last 48 hours for example, posted claims that somehow the Mueller investigation has absolved him of any collusion with Russia, and stated without an ounce of proof or factual basis that James Comey testimony before Congress was a giant pack of Lies.

The bottom line is Trump supporters literally have zero, I mean less than zero, moral Authority or credibility, to call any present member of Congress, at least Democrats since we don't have extremist habitual Liars like Louie gohmert and Steve King among others, when they ignore or at least shrug their shoulders over the fact that the president of the United States who may support literally lives in a fantasy world in his head which is primarily the result of arguable diagnosable mental illness.

You must remember an ultimate reality of the high cost of the medical system we have. Much of it isn't going into medical treatment per se. Inflated costs include easy profits for people who have no other way of a gravy train. Start with monopolistic pricing of prescription drugs and medical devices. Add to that the unusual feature of a for-profit bureaucracy that has every incentive to load costs onto any payer. Medical facilities have their 'edifice complex' which does wonders for building contractors and construction workers. In many communities the hospital is the biggest or second-biggest employer (the other is the school district, but at the least, public K-12 education is one of the most efficiently-run activities around). Then come lobbyists and ambulance-chasing attorneys.

Don't forget people who fail to take care of themselves. I need go into few details about such. Sure, I used a riding cart at Wal*Mart a couple times -- during gout attacks. If I can spend two hours in the store and leave with $15 in merchandise, I probably got a good hike in.

Then there are the outright crooks -- people who hustle the system with fraudulent claims. You know -- the fellow with a horrific back injury  who brags to his buddies about his perfect game bowling. (I got a backache so severe that it imitated a coronary and I got the coronary treatment.  Sure, someone else ended up paying for it, but I sought and got the least expensive treatment for the backache. Physical therapy -- no pills).

Our healthcare is in part more expensive because we get more care per visit, pay our doctors more, and fund most of the world's drug and medical innovation with higher prices for drugs and our patent laws. When talking about more care, think that someone in the UK might not get an MRI, we readily offer them to people. When thinking of our medical innovation, think about how almost all major medical research and drug innovation is concentrated In the US. Heard an Obama Econ advisor speak about this before. We get more care, and its more expensive, but its also more preventative. Our 5 year cancer survival rate is the highest in the world, we don't ration care, anyone can receive the care they want, emergency rooms can't deny people. You can hate on our healthcare all that you want, but theres no place in the world id rather get a heart surgery done or be a doctor.

Arguably true about the quality of our health care, but none of that has to do with, and in fact is short Changed by, the American Health insurance industry. It is the Achilles heel of our medical system. Thoroughly a bug and not a feature.

I am amused how many ostensibly conservative and America-first posters seem to advocate for the US to continue to subsidize the rest of the world by providing research and developments others are using, but US (and, to a significant degree, US government) pay for. Where is this sudden internationalist impulse coming from?

While, I would agree, US may be the best place to be a doctor or a medical researcher, I am not sure it is the best place to be a patient. In terms of life expectancy at birth US is somewhere between Taiwan and Bahrain, closer to Eastern Europe and Latin America than to the major Western European or Asian nations. And citizens of those nations get a few extra years of active life at a fraction of the cost. Unless one cares more about an MRI scan than about being, actually, alive, I do not see why would anybody express so much pride over the availability of the former. I mean, it is not like being inside an MRI machine is so much fun :)

BTW, it used to be that US was doing quite decently for the elderly, so that, conditional at being alive at 65 US was the place to be (which was a funny argument, considering those over 65 have always been enjoying Medicare), but I have just checked the latest data, and even there US is no longer doing that well. And, arguably, end-of-life expenditures in the US are doing a lot more to tax inheritances than all the estate taxes combined.

Because they’ll say anything to own the libs and make sure non-whites in America don’t take their disability checks - uhh I mean “hard earned tax dollars”.

we've subsidized their military for more than half a century, why should health care be any different?this only makes sense if you believe the difference in life expectancy is 100% health care related.

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.

ITT Bad-Faith Concern Trolling

It is not. But  there are no obvious other factors that would explain away the mediocrity of the US record. I mean, Latin Americans are poorer, less educated, eat equally fatty food, suffer from more crime (including murder), etc., etc. Yet, the gap in life expectancy between US and, say, Mexico, has been shrinking for a long time and is now pretty small. Adding the usual other explanatory variables would make it only worse.

Does anyone else find the right's obsession with AOC downright disturbing

American health care is only really 'superior' to the rest of the world at the high end of complicated, expensive, and cutting edge treatments. For most things it's the same treatment for an exorbitant price. My family (myself included) regularly has big-ticket stuff like dental work and surgery done in Ukraine instead of the U.S. for this reason.

I always encourage my American friends to go overseas for healthcare - to do it here is only to subsidize millionaires with rare heart conditions.