I’m sure an elderly person can buy a private health insurance plan with 2k a year in subsidies :smack:, it would probably only cost 30k a year for an elderly couple in their 70s to buy a high deductible plan with 10k in deductibles and copays a year (plus tons of loopholes so the insurance company can avoid paying the bills). 2k a year for 80 years is 160k. The average medicare recipient collects 200kin medicare over their life. There is no way in our overpriced health system that this program would work.
However I’m sure just so long as he says a qualifier like ‘only people under 55 would be affected’ then elderly people will be lining up to throw their kids and grandkids under the bus just so long as they get theirs and can pull the ladder out from under them. That happened under Bush when he tried to push for reforms, it’ll happen again.
Granted the medicare system is underfunded, I believe the average recipient takes 3x more out of the system than they pay in taxes. However because of the abolition of the medicare cap in 1993 (thank you president Clinton, before that medicare tax was capped the same way social security taxes were capped with only the first 95% of income taxed) the shortfall isn’t as big as it would have been. I’m assuming rich people pay enough in taxes to help cover the 90% of us who take 3x out more than we put in. Plus with the PPACA raising the tax on the wealthy to 3.8%, hopefully that’ll help more. I’d be willing to pay more in taxes to fund medicare, but the real problem is our health system is a broken, plutocratic mess.
The true solution is to make our health system efficient. Every other wealthy nation provides high quality health care for 8-12% of GDP. The US provides a crappy, brutal, evil system for 18% of GDP.
It’s not crappy, brutal, and evil, it’s just expensive.
If you think it will be less crappy, brutal, evil, and expensive if managed by the government, then you own a philosophical disagreement with those who oppose single-payer.
How do you suppose we will spend siginificantly less on healthcare, while still providing the same quality of care and access to treatment?
The answer: pay our doctors less, and pay less for pharmaceuticals.
The result: fewer doctors. Fewer new drugs. Fewer technological innovations.
If that is the trade-off you seek, so be it. Others, like myself, see that as too much to give up, when moderate reforms are a wiser solution.
Chronic demonization of a system that the vast majority of Americans believe works fine is not the way to win this debate.
If these $2000 vouchers are going to count as income seniors on SSI could lose their befits . You’re not allowed to have more than $2,000 in your account .
Is this a way to take SSI away from people ???
Wait, isn’t this the way that Tea Partiers and their ilk have been winning elections for the past decade? In fact Republican’s demonizing the government has been a pretty effective strategy for them since Reagan.
Yes, yes I do. I am lucky in that I am in reasonably good health, have a decent employer-sponsored plan, and have enough money to pay my co-pays and co-insurance as necessary. I still find the system to be crappy and evil, and I think that it is brutal for people who don’t have my advantages.
Some of the problems that currently exist, aside from cost, include: employers can change plans every year (as mine has), so you don’t know from year to year which doctors you can see, which prescriptions are allowed and where you can purchase them, what specific benefits you have, and what your co-pays will be. I know people who switch their coverage annually to get specific benefits.
It’s a bait and switch system in which you have absolutely no idea what the bills will be in advance. Maybe when you had your procedure, the doctor was in-network, but the X-Ray technician or the anesthesiologist or the pathologist wasn’t, so now you own $1000’s of dollars that you weren’t aware of. Sometimes you receive bills months or even years after a procedure, when the billing people finally got around to you.
But the single biggest problem is that we have a bloated, unnecessary middleman who takes up huge amounts of time and money - the healthcare insurance industry. Just removing them from the equation will make the system run more efficiently and free up all of the excess money going to them. Every time I read about the ridiculous amounts that the healthcare industry charges to the insurance companies, when they offer much lower rates to people without insurance, I am more convinced that much of the cost problem is just a game played between industries.
Single-payer will eliminate the massive confusion over plans and coverage, make it possible to budget without worrying about completely random healthcare costs, and get rid of the healthcare insurance industry. That sounds good to me.
It is a fact that other nations do it for cheaper and have better outcomes. The only argument I’ve ever heard for why it wouldn’t work that way here, is that Americans are especially inept.
Keeping to our (pre-ACA) system is stupid, and the least conservative thing anyone could support.
Probably because, as the OP cites, Medicare recipients get 3X more in healthcare services then they pay for.
One would imagine that if they had to actually pay for what they are receiving, they would be less google-eyed with the actual cost of “free healthcare.”
And by ‘they’, you mean you. I don’t know how old you are, but if you’re lucky you’ll become elderly. If Medicare is done away with, can you afford to pay possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on your health care? Can you afford ten thousand dollars a year for insurance? Or will you just say, ‘Oh, gee. I’m sick. I guess God’s calling me home,’ and lay down and die?
As a young person, I am less inclined to be able to pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in healthcare expenses. Old people have been saving for their retirement and have already passed through their highest-earning years as workers.
Beyond that, I wouldn’t have to pay hundreds of thousands in healthcare expenses if I got sick. I have this thing called insurance for that.
The point here is that when the elderly have free healthcare that they underpaid by 3-to-1 as younger workers to receive, using their high satisfaction as an argument in favor of Medicare is in poor form. I’m sure the poorest workers love the earned income credit. That, in itself, says nothing of whether it is worthwhile.
For the record, I am in favor of Medicare and Medicaid. I would favor a “Medicaid-for-all” baseline program, with the option to purchase private insurance for those who want better services/options. What I am not in favor of is a government-run, single-payer system. I believe it would be inordinately expensive and would return diminishing results.
Actually, the accounts would be funded by $2000/yr contributions by the government from cradle to grave, according to the article. The math actually does work.
The problem is the transition cost. What you could do is say that anyone born after the law passes starts getting the $2000 payments in a personal account. Everyone else gets Medicare. But for quite some time you’d be paying both. I’m not sure how you’d pay for that. It’s the same obstacle to private SS accounts. As Al Gore said in 2000, you can do “Social Security plus”, by allowing people to take extra money out of their check and investing it privately, but you can’t do “Social Security minus”, since SS is a pay as you go system that’s already not long from having to automatically cut benefits as it is.
As for cost of health care for seniors, it’s already in the OP: $200K average over their lifespan after 65, which isn’t “hundreds of thousands per year”, but actually on average about $15K. A senior would want to get a catastrophic plan and pay for routine care out of the account, which should be worth, worst case, about a million.
Yes. The philosophical disagreement is this: I believe that we should make government policy based on evidence from the world around us, and they, at a fundamental level, do not.
They have a government-run system that is triply dependent on outside funding from those not in the system. That is not reflective of what an inclusive, single-payer system would look like, given that all benefits would have to be fully funded from within.
