How much would you be willing to personally financially sacrifice for everyone to be insured?

Great Debates
61

I’m one of many, many, many assistant general counsels at a ridiculously large multinational corporation. However, we don’t all answer directly to the General Counsel like I do. You’ve probably watched one of my company’s channels or bought a light bulb :slight_smile: I manage the legal affairs in a division within this organization and cover/provide back up our healthcare division (really, a large credit card company). Depending on your organization, you will have different benefits. I do know there is something called an Executive band, but the only lawyer I know that is on that is the General Counsel (I think). We have an executive training program that is available to college graduates. Think of it as an express train to middle management. So, for me, there really is no top or bottom, I’m just a cog in an otherwise gigantic machine.

Anyway, I’m still not convinced that UHC will provide profits for everyone. The only reason that companies offer it is because of the tax benefit. The only UHC that really makes sense is single payor, and I really don’t see that as a benefit at all, unless you can pay your way to the top of the line.

But, let’s be optimistic. Let’s say that whatever real cost GE pays to cover my healthcare is exactly what the tax is to fund UHC, and let’s say that it is enough to cover a UHC single payor program. What do we do with all the insurance employees? Are we comfortable creating yet another bureaucracy? It’s not like Medicare/Medicaid/VA Hospitals are exactly shining examples of well-funded government efficiency. Why don’t we concentrate on fixing those programs first and then let’s see the real need for UHC.

62

As has been discussed, this is a flat out, 100% complete and total lie. You get emergency care in an ER. Meds thrown at a headache are emergency care. Diagnostics to determine the source of a headache and medication or physical therapy (or a combination thereof) to treat ongoing headaches are basic health care. Getting a broken leg set is emergency care. Getting physical therapy after the leg is basic health care.

And it’s not free. I’m not insured. Whenever I’ve had to go to the ER – for emergency situations and emergency treatment, not as an alternative to a regular doctor, I have one of those – I get a bill. It’s a big bill. And I have to pay it. I’m currently working down over $20,000 in debt over emergency room care alone. Not everyone who is uninsured is impoverished. Not everyone walks away from their emergency room care bills without making any effort to pay them, even though they can be ridiculously crippling.

Foreign aid accounts for about 1% of government spending. It’s an easy target for people to pick on but it’s not a rich source of revenue.

63

I’m not insured either because my employer won’t offer it, but you and I are already paying more to insure other people than ourselves via fica - which is awesome because the amount I pay in would probably just about cover a mediocre insurance policy for myself. I’d gladly pay another $30-50/month in taxes over what I already do if that made it so some of the medical care I’m footing the bill for was also my own and that of my coworkers.

64

If you will guarantee health care for all in the US, I would gladly give my life and everything I own or ever will own.

65

Here’s what I would sacrifice. I would surrender all rights to public insurance for myself & have a law written denying me access to health care in the United States for the rest of my life.

I came up with this as a condition I was willing to have written into the law so my plan for a public health agency could go through. Just to say that I wasn’t benefiting from it.

66

How much would I be willing to give up financially? It depends on what I got in return for it.

For a universal system with no rescissions, no pre-existing conditions that covered everyone and was solvent for 100 years I would pay an extra 3-5% of my gross income in taxes. So if I made 50k (good luck with that) an extra $1500-2500 a year in taxes. But that is assuming the higher tax burden was split among the population. The middle class, poor, corporations and the wealthy all saw a tax hike of 3-5% of GDP.

However my problem with these threads is they assume you have to sacrifice to get UHC.

The average family already pays about $1000 in higher premiums to cover the uninsured. So anything less than $1000 per family is going to be a wash because premiums will go down to match the higher tax rate.

On another note, every other wealthy country on earth that has UHC does it for about 50% less than we spend. Medicare for all would save $300-400 billion a year. Also, if it was run right, it would slow the rate of medical cost growth and save endless trillions over the decades ahead.

http://www.correntewire.com/just_where_does_medicare_all_would_save_350_billion_come

So these gotcha questions are wrong on 2 levels.

  1. People already pay tons to cover the uninsured. So whatever increase in taxes will be offset by lower premiums and a lower annual increase in health costs. You’d have to pay at least $1000 more per family just to break even with what people already spend to cover the uninsured.

  2. Covering the uninsured with a UHC system would likely save more money than it costs. Its like spending $1000 on a better car that saves you $3000 in repairs. Its not really a wild eyed liberal fantasy, just good planning. The fact that it is humane is a bonus.

Would you pay $200,000 for a house that needed $100,000 in repairs or would you pay $240,000 for a house that needed $15,000 in repairs? Depends on how you frame the question and what information you leave out.

Either way, I’m not surprised we don’t have UHC if people think it just adds new costs but doesn’t subtract them.

67

Everyone’s medical condition is a combination of genetic predisposition, the social environment, and personal decisions. There’s no clean way to delineate these factors, certainly not in an individual. But there is a way to make it cheaper for every person, namely by creating one big customer pool to control cost.

68
  1. My tax exemption for health care insurance dollars.
  2. 10% of my income (I currently pay about 3% for Health Insurance).

In exchange, I want everyone else to be covered by health insurance - with no exclusions or recissions.

69

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70

That’s what I’m talking about.
Finally, good answers.

71

I’m a bit lucky in that for my situation, for the health care I’ve signed up for, and at my company, I pay nothing for my health insurance.

Well, let’s clarify that: my company pays for my benefits. I pay about fifteen bucks co-pay at the doctor’s office, $5/$10/$25 for prescriptions, and 0% of pretty much any procedure I have. I’ve had several surgeries for kidney stones and I paid nothing out of pocket for those, nor is anything deducted from my paycheck.

I am definitely paid less as a result: it’s part of my compensation. I work for a fairly large company and I’m on an HMO so I have some hoops to jump through, but nothing horrific.

I’ve also had insurance of the “just don’t get sick” kind: you’re allowed six doctor’s visits per year, the insurance company pays $2000 toward non life-saving procedures and $5000 for life-saving procedures (and the insurance company chooses what is and isn’t life-saving), and I paid something like $100/month for the privilege. I was SOL when I needed surgery, and I’m still paying for it. I also find it unlikely to be a coincidence that my recovery from the anesthetic from that surgery was far longer and more brutal than my recovery from subsequent (and insured) surgeries of the same type.

I remember when a buddy of mine collapsed in the middle of a store when his back gave out. We called an ambulance because we were afraid of causing permanent damage if we moved him, and he was taken to the nearest hospital. They stuck him on a gurney in the hall for six hours with minimal care. We had to hunt down nurses and beg and plead when he needed to urinate. They wouldn’t bother to take him to the bathroom and just passed us a bottle for him. We tried hauling him to the bathroom ourselves since we couldn’t even get him a damned wheelchair and he ended up collapsing again and soiling himself. Meanwhile, the lucky folks who had insurance were treated before him over and over. He was given the barest minimum possible examination, fed a few pain pills, and sent home. On the way out, they shook us down for the cost of the ambulance and treatment, insisting that the full bill be paid immediately. Finding us incapable of passing them an immediate five hundred bucks, they assented to taking a hundred immediately and billing us – not the patient, they knew he didn’t have the money, so they billed his roommate – for the rest.

And that’s just a personal anecdote. There’s lots of stories about people denied treatment for life-threatening illnesses because they couldn’t afford them. This PDF provides some information (I picked a short brochure from the Institute of Medicine on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website. Here’s the Factcheck article about the informatino there and in other studies, with lots of meaty numbers: click). It seems ingenuous to me to argue that being uninsured has no effect on your physical health, but perhaps the obvious needs to be pointed out.

For that to never happen to anyone ever again? I shouldn’t need to pay more taxes but I would. I’d merrily pay as much as another ten percent of my annual income to prevent that from happening. My salary would almost certainly go up – the free market being what it is, any company in my industry (good benefits and vaguely okay pay are common) that did not adjust its salaries at least somewhat for this would start hemorrhaging employees – and I would actually have the option to change jobs and/or work less and spend more time on, say, writing or taking classes.

72

Most bankruptcies have a health problem as a cause or huge contribution. You do not walk away from paying health care costs if you go to an emergency. They will come after you for payment. As expected, those without insurance pay more for service than the insurance companies pay. It is so warped.