Americans have a weird habit of aggressively defending a status quo that they would violently oppose if it wasn't already the status quo. See also: the Electoral College.
At the beginning of the year i take home about 66 percent of my gross, by about half way through EI/gov pen are paid in full and i take home about 72 percent of my gross. That isn't including if it is union due week or not. If i work on a Stat that week i get thrown into the next tax bracket and i take home 63 percent at the last half of the year. Fair deal i think.
I agree that its weird, but theres a huge question mark around implementation. To completely back away from employer sponsored coverage, it essentially means the end of the private insurance companies. On paper, that sounds great because they are the ones who turned medicine into a for-profit endeavor. What does it look like to dissolve those companies? Do all their employees go to work for the government in order to keep their jobs? Lets skip ahead to a point in time where we transfer to a national system. You'll have the GOP(whatever is left of them at that point) intentionally wrecking the plan to prove that government run anything does't work. I'm all for M4A. I just don't know how we get there.
To be clear: no one likes the system we have. It fails all tests of logic and reason, not to mention economics. However, it's the status quo, and there's a sizable chunk of the country that believes they earned whatever they have (including shitty healthcare) and giving it away to someone else is unfair. And to be fair, it's not like our government has ever done anything that saved trillions of dollars. It's slowly changing as more and more people get ground up in the system we have. My folks are a great example: Dad can't retire because no insurance until he's 65. He's scared to death of getting sick and losing the house, which is a possible outcome my aunt is facing after my uncle's death. There's certain jobs (ie, part-time) that he can't take because they literally don't pay him enough to cover insurance premiums. For a lot of the over-50's who are laid off, they will never be re-employed, and many of them are boomers entering in the years where their health expenses start to skyrocket...it's going to make for a fun time. Most people believe the uninsured are still "kids" in their first jobs and can still use their parent's insurance (as if somehow, it's acceptable that an adult working a full-time job still relies on their parents for healthcare). Now, you've got folks in their 30's who still don't have reliable access to healthcare and it's killing them. Trust me, I love my country but it treats us like absolute shit compared to nearly every other place I've lived. I think the secret to M4A is slow expansion and a phased "take over" of billable services....just like what you're seeing with COVID-19 now: hey, don't bill insurance for the COVID test, the feds are footing the bill. You could do that with flu shots, then broken collarbones, then on and on and on. You'll still have private insurance, and they'll cover a bunch of shit like massage and acupuncture that we don't want tax dollars covering. Will they be a trillion dollar industry and will employers need entire HR departments to deal with them? Hopefully not.
Nope... step one is to get rid of the lobbyists and paid-for politicians and others who have no real desire to see it happen in the first place.
You guys routinely handle problems way more complicated than your health care system... if you wanted it bad enough, and put the right people in charge, you'd get it done. Until then, it's just all "give up before we even try because it's haaard.... who knew it would be this haaaard?" demotivational bullshit that is probably sponsored by the health care people in the first place, all designed to make you not even try to do anything beyond say, "this isn't working".
I still never understand how people don't get that it's not 'You' paying for 'that guy'... It's shared costs... Ask them how they feel about paying for highways or schools or Police for that matter. The issue is until people stop being fucking morons about these things, that's what's stopping it from really happening.
It's amazing how people vote against their own self interest. I have a cousin who is a Trumper, watches Fox news yada yada. Doesn't want Biden because "he will raise our taxes." I have so far stopped myself from pointing out that he is poor and isn't in any danger of having his taxes raised.
One thing that really irks me about the rhetoric is that our system already does that, but on a smaller scale. The unhealthy people at your company are getting their premiums subsidized by people who are healthier and rarely go to the doctor. One of the huge benefits of a socialized health care system is that you increase the pool of people contributing so the average cost goes down.
Let me tell you about all my trumper relatives who are enjoying their sweet medicare and social security and don't actually think it's gonna be taken away because "he wouldn't do that to us." People believe what they want to believe, and they don't want M4A because it's the other side's position. It's a matter of wanting "them" to not be right, even if it makes sense by all objective measures. If all the sudden the GOP came out in favor of M4A, they'd be singing from the hilltops how important it is. Until then, they'll sit back without their masks and say it's evil.
I could tell your friend lots of horror stories about having a higher tax bracket. Like having a kid in intensive care for two months and not paying an earned dime for it. The fact that all those worries just plain aren’t worries at all... and knowing other people up here have that same access... yeah, I don’t mind higher taxes at all. It’s better. People are happier in countries that provide.
Yes and no. That sword cuts both ways. Typically, companies that employ people who are higher on the education scale and have better salaries, tend to have healthier employees. More money allows for healthier food options, more time for exercise, etc. It’s not a 100% thing as there are always outliers but generally speaking, from a healthcare perspective, higher socioeconomic status = healthier people. Oh the other hand, employers that have larger numbers of less healthy people might have higher costs due to more chronic conditions. Think of McDonald’s workforce versus an investment firm. Their larger pool of people brings their costs up while the first example keeps costs lower. The second group would be more likely to have less comprehensive coverage because it costs them less. They will get HMO’s while the first group will have more choices. In fact the McDonald’s group would be more likely to waive coverage all together because the costs per paycheck would be too much to make it worth it. Leveling the whole playing field and putting the country in one gigantic pool will require some sort of gatekeeper setup to control utilization. There are health plans like that now where you need to go to a PCP for a referral before you can see a specialist. What you will see is a surge in concierge medicine practices for people who are willing to pay completely out of pocket for private care.
I just had this discussion with a friend... and I'm 100% fine with that, and look at it as no different than private schooling or being chauffeured to work. The ONLY metric that matters to me is that everyone have baseline level of care that works. If you want to opt into something private and more expensive, go nuts.
Same here. What I guarantee you will happen is some sort of GOP led push for healthcare vouchers for people who don’t want public healthcare and choose to opt out somehow.
I have no problem with that... because that doesn't remove their input into the global system. Use it or not, but pay into it regardless.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/17...d19-and-what-questions-remain-to-be-answered/ This is probably the best summary and myth-busting article on the virus I have yet read.
Have you guys seen how our government handles things down here? I wouldn't trust them to return my beer cans for the deposit. For me, that's the biggest barrier to all this.
Scientist now suggest herd immunity could be achieved with much smaller percentage. Going to the discussion a few pages back. I just dont even know how to ingest all of the scientific data and know how to filter what should be taken at face value. In general terms science is never going to have a set answer and that's the point and what makes it the golden standard in figuring out real world questions. When this back and forth is say for the cholesterol in eggs or if coffee is good for you long term new studies every few years that do complete flip flops dont bother me. When it is something as serious as a global pandemic and the political arena has weaponized it. It's all so tiring I just want to tune out. I fall victim to the confirmation biases like everyone else but Ive always put capital in scientist with professional expert analysis over it to a good degree. With so much conflicting stuff and things being overturned on a weekly basis I just dont know how to filter it. Be damned if I let the news media be the arbiters of this information but I just circle back to, fuck it dont stress yourself by digging into stuff you cant control, go tend your garden and relax. How does everyone else deal with this deluge?
I guess as more and more information is learned about the virus, the best thing to do is to just live your life in the safest way that can you can. Being over cautious which is always safer and not treating experts who are also learning about this like shit(you aren’t but I’m talking on the whole). Exercising universal precautions by minimizing time spent in public and keeping distance from people are always safer even if we don’t know every single thing. Rather than get bogged down in what is perceived as flip flopping on details, just remember that at least 170,000 people have kicked the bucket in 6 months from this and basic germ theory applies as far as prevention is concerned.