It wasn’t hilariously wrong. In our long discussion I had mixed up federal spending with overall spending. It’s absolutely correct, although I wish I could edit it to demonstrate that it’s $1.1 trillion multiplied by ten years.
The rest of your post here I have no idea.
Ok, a couple of things that jumped out at me as sleight-of-hand in the article Dacien posted:
Let’s assume the numbers are correct for now. What is glaringly omitted are the credits associated with these outlays. If single-payer costs $32T, there is an associated big-picture credit of $34T. Free public college will make the country more competitive long-term and surely increase GNP compared to leaving the population uneducated. Infrastructure spending creates jobs and stimulates the economy without there really being a viable alternative. What do we do, let everything fall apart? Really? I will punt on the others regarding whether they bring more benefits than they cost. But the nub is: it is dishonest to present these proposals as nothing but a list of costs. You also have to weigh the benefits.
This bit seems like a misunderstanding. What is omitted is by what a vast degree the top 5% out-earn the average worker. Of course it is appropriate that they shoulder a larger share of the tax burden. Why would it be any other way? Total red herring. And the comment about leaving ‘less room’ for additional taxes is just daft. That’s not how it works.
I think it is silly to treat taxing the middle class to pay for these programs as a third rail. If it is designed such that the middle and lower classes benefit significantly more than they pay, it shouldn’t matter, if the obsfuscationists don’t win that is.
Anyway, I’m in a hurry and wanted to add my 2 cents real quick. This is a very consequential decision that amounts to restructuring a large part of the national economy. Even without all the fearmongering and misdirection, it will be disruptive. The rich will pay more, some people will benefit more than others, some will take a hit, if only in the short run. I generally like the idea, but I don’t want to pretend the transition won’t be a big headache, not to mention what happens if it passes, the GOP once again regains control of government and does what it can to sabotage the ‘socialist’ programs their predecessors put in place. Yeah, let’s not pretend.
But let’s not pretend the proposal is just a litany of expenses with no benefits. That’s bullshit.
Yeah, mixing up federal spending with overall spending is a strangely common mistake among conservatives opposed to “Medicare for all” plans.
So your own calculation now shows that Americans would overall save three trillion dollars by shifting to a Medicare for all plan, the only difference being who they made the premium check out to.
So now you know it would save an enormous amount of money, and that all your previous arguments about the excessive cost of it were hilariously wrong. But that’s not good, because you don’t want facts getting in the way of your opinion, so go back to arguing that it’s too expensive and ignore this little conversation we had.
Aww, poor babies:
https://www.thenation.com/article/dream-hoarders-class-inequality/
BTW, James Fallows would like a word with you about the “boiling frog” metaphor: Boiled-frog - The Atlantic
That Laffer Curve is the golden goose that keeps on giving!
…Not at all. I feel like we’re talking at each other, not to each other.
Like, the only way they made it cheaper on overall spending was to make absurd assumptions, which have been laboriously detailed ITT, while at the same time federal spending would balloon massively.
We’re running circles around each other, so I’ll just let it drop.
:rolleyes:
First off, a correction or clarification: I said my children had Medicaid/SCHIP all those years, not me. My eldest child was born in 2000, and his mother’s pregnancy was fully covered starting in 1999, and all four of my kids were covered until mid-2017.
I personally was completely uninsured until 2016. Then I had a HDHP for a year, and for the past year and a half I have had a pretty nice plan through my wife’s employer (a school district), that the medical billing supervisor I was talking to about copays the other day expressed envy for (“wish I had only a hundred dollar deductible!”). In that year and a half, I have accessed FAR more health care than I did in the previous twenty years—including two sleep studies, which it turns out ain’t cheap! I use more because my health is important to me, not because it’s a jolly fun time to go to the doctor.
Moving away from anecdata, the Oregon randomized study showed that giving uninsured people Medicaid did indeed significantly increase their use of health care. So it looks like it is your own anecdote that is atypical.
Well, I think you started that rant onto something: Americans are selfish. That’s kind of what the “Spirit of ‘76” was all about, and this was a particular problem in the South going back to the eighteenth century at least.
But then you went astray with “Poor people being able to get health care does not hurt me”. If you added “…as much as it helps them”, then sure. But it doesn’t hurt you at all? Not so fast: that really depends on the design of the system.
Cheesesteak comes closer to the truth with this comment, although it’s still a little skewed:
I’d say “an extra 6 weeks” is lowballing it, not only based on my sister’s experience but on the cites I posted earlier. But the overall point is fair: long wait times for everyone in Canada is better, from a utilitarian viewpoint, than short wait times for people with wealth or at least good insurance, and no care at all for people who don’t. But it’s not better for the middle class. If we make our system just like Canada’s, and wait times shoot up, pissed-off swing voters are not going to be mollified by “yeah, you have to wait a lot longer now, but poor people who live in a different part of town now have access to care, so isn’t it worth the tradeoff overall?” No matter how much you argue that it should be, and I might agree with you, this is not going to fly politically. Just a nonstarter, a sure route to a backlash that leaves us worse off in a variety of ways.
So whatever changes we make, we have to make sure that middle class people get the same quality of care they are used to, and don’t get hit with a tax increase. That’s tricky! Which is another reason I support a more barebones universal entitlement, paid for entirely by tax hikes on the rich.
Nope. Despite what Captain Undergraduate tells you, the only absurd assumptions are those trotted out to exaggerate the costs of medicare-for-all once the paper’s authors realized it accidentally showed the opposite of what the Koch brothers paid them to show.
Here’s what happened–the paper was written as proof that Medicare-for-all was more expensive than our current system. Then people actually read it and noticed that the author was misrepresenting the result and had actually showed that medicare-for-all was 2 trillion dollars cheaper than our current system. So there was a rush to invent trillions of dollars of additional costs (by people like Captain Undergraduate) to flip the result to what was initially paid for by the Koch brothers.
“Here’s my paper showing that the cost of Medicare-for-all is an enormous 32 trillion dollars!”
“But we’re actually paying 34 trillion dollars for healthcare. That’s a 2 trillion dollar savings”
“Oh. Whoops. Wait. I just found 4 trillion dollars in costs that I ‘forgot about’ before. Please pay me?”
You used Canada as an example of a system not working, so I pointed out it’s a far higher ranked system than the US.
See also Japan, France, Australia (all spend under half what the US does) or the Netherlands, Germany or Austria (all spend a little over half what the US does)
Switzerland is the outlier. It spends 80% what you do, but they really do want the best of the best.
You can pick whichever model you like. They’ve all been proven to be cheaper to implement than the US, and they’re all ranked as better.
But somehow, Shodan and the likes feel that the US is incapable of setting up something that many other countries have without it being vastly more expensive and less successful. Usually when people believe in American Exceptionalism it’s not in terms of American’s being exceptionally crap, but they appear to feel otherwise.
See also South Korea. I spent almost a month in the hospital and my share was approximately US$1,500. I qualified for that because everyone (for the most part) is required to be enrolled in the National Health System, paying 4.5% of salary with the employer matching that amount. And medical care in South Korea is pretty good.
Look, we done fucked it up real good compared to so many other countries. But ironically you are underselling the value of years of groundwork in those countries to keep costs down. Our late start means we cannot just snap our fingers and instantly catch up. Baby steps.
USA is too fucking stupid to be able to do healthcare as well as most other countries. Plus, it’s too hard and it might allow poor people to get something for free. It will be awesome once we repeal the ACA. I know there was supposed to be a “replace” after the repeal, but why bother?
By which, you mean we are behind on the math skills that would let us be able to tell that less is less, and more is more.
We end up having claims like cutting taxes will decrease the deficit, or saving money on healthcare will increase the deficit from these poorly educated, and proud of it, posters.
You’re already paying 2/3 of your healthcare bill via taxes*. All you have to do is setup a suitable legal framework for how it’s spent (and you can copy that from any of a dozen nations) and you’re there.
There’s no excuse for the level of stupid America demonstrates with regards to healthcare. You are literally spending far more, to get far less, just to make sure that poor people get as little as possible.
*The Current and Projected Taxpayer Shares of US Health Costs - PMC
I’m not so sure the US is being called to do something that was done successfully in many other countries.
It’s not just that we are supposed to implement UHC. We are supposed to cut spending by 25-40%. Can you think of a country that has done that?
Please understand what I am saying. I am not asking what other countries have UHC, nor what UHC costs in those countries. Which of those countries implemented cuts in health care spending at the same level?
Regards,
Shodan
Compared to what? Most of the civilized world implemented their systems generations ago (and anyone who would propose repealing them would be considered loony). Only the US is faced with cost/benefit analysis at all, and then only as a foot-dragging measure.
So you are saying that it’s too hard to cut spending because our spending is so relatively high? Isn’t that pretty much the opposite of what any rational person would believe about any other situation?
Like, if two people were discussing their cable bill, would you think the person who was spending $1,000 a month would have a harder or an easier time cutting their spending than the person spending $50 a month?
We spend more per capita on healthcare than any other country of which I am aware (for worse outcomes), and you think that means it’ll be harder to cut costs?
So … You’re appointed legislative healthcare czar for the {you-pick-it} Party. What’s your plan? What are the baby steps for the first few years?
I am asking if there is any other country who has cut healthcare spending by as much as the US is being expected to do. It was asserted that many other countries have done this - which ones?
Regards,
Shodan
Well, question for you. If it is in fact the case that e.g. Canada spends half as much as the US on healthcare on a per-capita basis (this is in fact a fact), would you consider this as Canada reducing their healthcare costs by half relative to the US?
Like, back to our cable bill example. Suppose I get only HBO and pay $50 a month, and some other guy gets both HBO and Showtime and his cable bill is $100 a month. He says that he wants to get his cable bill down to $50 a month and I say “you could do what I do”. Would it be fair for him to say “I can’t follow your example because you’ve never had to cut your cable bill in half the way I need to”?