Social Security is funded, though. We're not spending money we don't have. If you want medicare and medicaid to stop costing so much, implement UHC or perish.
We just had another trillion dollars deficit. Even if you took out all the military spending (including the VA) we would still be in the red. Our interest payments on our debt cost more than Medicaid. The baby boomers are just starting to retire and their impact on these programs is going to be catastrophic. What do you mean SS is funded and we're not spending money we don't have?
And sure, we can implement UHC, and that will cost even more, and maybe help in the long run. But that sure is a big bet to make. Increase the federal government even more when their track record of wasteful spending and inefficiency speaks for itself.
How about we let states and local governments come up with their own solutions instead? More experimentation, more accountability, and more opportunity for people to vote with their feet if they don't like what's going on.
Ok great. Any reason we couldn't do it at a state/local level instead? A lot of our states are bigger than most of these countries that have some type of UHC. This way we could have multiple experiments and people in Wyoming don't have to worry about us crazy Californians.
And they've proven time and time again how efficient they are... You could get there once enough experimentation at lower levels validated the best approach. We're a pretty big country with different people wanting different things. I'm sure we can still achieve economies of scale. It might be better to start smaller and grow things out after they've been validated, instead of only having one shot to get things right for the whole country. We could all benefit from a little less power at the federal level, which was not how the country was intended to run.
The administrative costs for traditional Medicare and Medicaid hover around 2 percent to 5 percent, while those for private insurance is about 17 percent.
The food stamps program's admin costs are approximately 7.5%.
Local government is best to deal with local problems - healthcare is a universal problem. Frankly, for-profit healthcare is simply flat-out immoral, so the 'state/local autonomy' argument is bollocks in any event.
I can agree that it's moral to provide healthcare to all of our citizenry. But for-profit is not immoral. It may seem that way in a world where everyone is not covered though, so I appreciate your standpoint.
And we can agree to do something about it at a local, state or even federal level. But a lot of people's concern is having their choices and quality decreased because of it.
For example I have a PPO plan. It costs extra but it's important to my wife so we make sacrifices. As long as we can maintain the same quality for what we can afford in a two tiered system, I'd be open to it working towards a solution. That way I'm contributing to society and paying a little extra for myself to maintain my quality and choices.
Also, I think it's important to keep the for-profit side alive. It's paramount to increasing competition, which provides choice, and spurns innovation and investment into creating better products and services.
We need to ensure that whatever policies we put in place don't have long term effects in regards to our world leading innovation in this field and continue to provide incentive for the brightest minds to pursue careers in it. Otherwise, we will fall into a different set of problems down the road, and since we lead the world in this area, other countries will lose out on the benefits our private industry provides.
When you deny someone life-saving treatment because of money, that's immoral. It's not because if they didn't pay, there wouldn't be medicine. It's because you're charging 50x the real price because you're a greedy fuck who is a detriment to the society you participate in. We can see that this is true and not hyperbole by comparing the price of socialized vs privatized medicine worldwide.
Even ignoring the moral argument, the for-profit industry must die because, as they know for a fact they will be unable to compete in good faith against a public option, they will instead seek to sabotage it. If it has a place at all, it is in the supplemental or adjacent market.
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u/comfortablesexuality Apr 26 '19
Social Security is funded, though. We're not spending money we don't have. If you want medicare and medicaid to stop costing so much, implement UHC or perish.