Do the math for me: if our total healthcare costs go down by $2T, do our total healthcare costs go: a) up, or b) down?
You mean the cite that ignored the fact that preventative healthcare takes time to have an impact? It’s not “you get a small thing fixed easily and cheaply now, and that reduces healthcare costs this afternoon”, it’s “you get a small thing fixed easily and cheaply now, and that reduces healthcare costs the following decade”.
Here’s what your cite says:
A study published in Health Affairs in 2010 looked at 20 proven preventive services, all of them recommended by the United States Preventive Services Task Force. These included immunizations, counseling, and screening for disease. Researchers modeled what would happen if up to 90 percent of these services were used, which is much higher than we currently see.
They found that this probably would have saved about $3.7 billion in 2006.
Okay, for those who want to move beyond making fun of Ocasio-Cortez, here’s the article she was basing her figures on:
Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed
The article does specifically talk about trillions of dollars not billions of dollars. So Ocasio-Cortez didn’t just invent the figure she was using.
Obviously, you can’t find $6,500,000,000,000 in a budget of $122,000,000,000. But the article is talking about “plugs” which is a slang term for moving money around from one part of a budget to another. So if you took a sum of $122,000,000,000 and moved it around more than fifty times, you could end up with a figure of $6,500,000,000,000. But there was never a single amount of $6,500,000,000,000.
Grassley is correct. The United States government is collecting approximately $3,654,000,000,000 in 2018. The Department of Defense is budgeted to receive approximately $574,000,000,000 of this.
The article is saying that the Department of Defense seems to somehow spend a substantially larger amount of money than it supposedly receives. The discrepancy is attributed to the aforementioned “plugs”. Money is budgeted to some other Department but is then redirected to the Department of Defense.
So if I’m understanding this correctly, Congress sets up a budget and allocates specific amounts of money to different departments that they’re supposed to spend on specific programs. But a large portion of this money ends up getting moved around from one department to another and spent on different programs than the ones Congress specified. And nobody is really sure where all the money ends up.
This might normally have become a major ongoing issue. But note the date this statement was made. A different news story dominated the news on the following day.
Well put, and I agree.
The records documenting those transactions were stored in WTC 7.
You asked about the effect on the deficit.
Do the math for me: if we double federal income tax, and it doesn’t cover the cost of M4A, does the deficit go up, or down?
And my cite said rather clearly
Which is what I said it said.
Regards,
Shodan
No, I didn’t. I asked: if healthcare costs go down by $2T, is it necessary for the deficit to increase? And the answer would seem to be that if you save $2T, then the effect on the deficit is…?
The math question is: if we save $2T have we saved $2T? You seem to think not. Must be that “New Math” Republicans are always complaining about.
Here’s what the cite actually said: “Some preventive measures save money.” OK great! Lets do those!
It also said: “others do not [save money], although they may still be worthwhile because they confer substantial health benefits relative to their cost.” Well, we have an extra $2T. Let’s do those too!
It also said: “some preventive measures are expensive given the health benefits they confer.” OK, let’s not do those!
Seems to me your cite said 3 things, and you ignored the two that made your arguments look bad.
Here’s the economics question for you: If you pay me out of your right pocket then you owe me $2T. But if you pay me out of your left pocket then you owe me zero. And the question is: how deep into debt are you going to have to go to pay me?
Mercatus Center. Mouthpiece for the Koch Mafia. We could get more accurate figures from sheep entrails. :rolleyes:
I think what Shodan is trying to say is that while you are saving a substantial amount of money, you are increasing the share of healthcare the government covers, leading to a net increase in government expenditures. He is just saying it in such a way that it looks like he thinks that is the same as an increase in total expenditures.
Middle class tax payers would be reliant on employers passing the savings off on them, or they would end up with an increased share of the burden.
It seems academic anyway. The paper appears to make assumptions like cities still needing multiple hospitals to cover multiple insurance networks, the same amount of work spent on gatekeeping and liaising, that Medicare for All would still be paying the salaries of health care insurance personnel and providing the same amount of profits for the parent companies, employing the same number of people for billing, credit-checking, interacting with insurance systems, that hospitals will still negotiate bills with insurance etc, etc.
In other words it assumes the same system with no systemic savings. Not what you’d call realistic. Just billing has been estimated to cost ~500 billion per year.
We can always ccancel Trump’s “billionaire tax break”. Finance health care and fix the now “done blowed up real good” deficit in one fell swoop.
But then, we’ve had all we can stand of “fresh, outside [del]reality[/del] the box thinking” from Trump and the current Republican congress.
So much for the people out there who think she’s some kind of political Neanderthal, some sort of legislative novice. It looks like she’s already nailed down the key tactic needed to be a successful US Congressperson! 
Leaving aside the Pentagon budget plugs, it is misleading to say “she won’t say how she will pay for this!” The part of her message that seems to be lost on some people is we are already paying for it.
Take the view of the US from space. Nice country, eh? OK, from here, notice the cost of our capitalist, for-profit health care system. It costs $X a year. I don’t know the figure, but it amounts to trillions per decade.
Now, compare that to the proposed M4A system. It costs (X minus a few $trillion) per decade. How are we going to pay for that? Um, more easily than the way we are doing it now, in terms of overall cost.
But that’s the view from space. Down on the ground, overhauling the national economy to accommodate M4A would be disruptive, to put it mildly. Insurance workers apparently are out of a job. Healthcare c-suite types who make tens of $millions a year in profit off the suffering of sick people are suddenly forced to be normal people, or at least find a new game. One could probably write a book about all the effects such a radical change would bring.
Why do it? To a public service minded person, saving the nation money is a good cause, even if it pisses off select wealthy people. Everyone being able to see a doctor serves the cause of justice. Philosophically, the idea that health care is not an appropriate arena for capitalism the way cars and video games and so on are, and that it should be socialized instead, is at least defensible. Plus, a healthy population is surely more productive long term, boosting GDP.
I am not going to label anyone as stupid for wanting to stick with capitalism. Looks like that debate is finally upon us. But when it comes to the question of “how will we pay for it!?!?”, again, the answer is we are already paying More to do it the capitalist way. Switching to M4A would be a massive PITA IMHO but in the end would benefit the general public and nation as a whole (the point if public service if you ask me) at the expense of select wealthy interests. Those interests own a lot of media outlets, so be prepared to hear all about how sinister and evil and downright Stalinist this plan really is.
I alluded to this earlier, but I might as well link it.
Which is a very good point. We already have the most expensive healthcare system in the world. It’s just that we pay for it out of our pocket rather than through taxes.
If you’re currently paying three thousand dollars a year for private medical care and it was replaced by a public health care system, would you complain if your taxes went up two thousand dollars a year? You’ve got a thousand dollars more than you had before.
The only people who have a reason to complain about the switch are the people who were charging that extra thousand dollars.
Another factor is that it would encourage economic growth. A lot of people are tied to their job because they can’t afford to give up their health insurance.
If health care was not tied to employment, these people would be free to take a chance on starting up their own business. Some of them might lost money but they wouldn’t have to worry about their family getting sick and not being able to afford treatment. And others of them would be successful and we’d see new businesses getting started. A lot of people who are currently working for wages would have an opportunity to become a business owner.
More of the same stupid, wrong, and ignorant arguments that every other right-wing idiot makes. Not sure you needed to link to yet another example of that shit.
…Rudy Giuliani was named in 2017 as “informal cybersecurity adviser” for President Trump, and is now on President Trump’s legal team. Cybersecurity is incredibly important to America at the moment considering what happened at the last election.
Yesterday Giuliani posted a tweet, but he made a typo. The direct link is still here:
The bolded in the quote is important: because the way twitter parsed “G-20.In” was that it turned it into a hyperlink. Originally the hyperlink went nowhere: but some enterprising person registered the domain, and the hyperlink now goes to here:
(In case the site goes down, it links to text that says “Donald J. Trump is a traitor to our country.”
Now this is obviously a stupid mistake to make. But we all make stupid mistakes.
But Rudy couldn’t leave it there. Because less than an hour ago Rudy posted this:
This goes beyond stupid. This is/was (who knows right now?) the informal cybersecurity adviser to the President. I can forgive him for conflating “text” with “tweet.” But the cybersecurity adviser to the President is blaming twitter for something that was clearly not twitters fault. Nobody “invaded” his text or his tweet.
This guy is a fucking moron. An idiot. He doesn’t understand the basics of the fucking internet. And I wish that he was the tip of the fucking iceberg but he’s not. This administration is a clusterfuck of incompetence, of nepotism, of corruption, of stupidity.
And this clusterfuck of incompetence, of nepotism, of corruption, of stupidity, has destroyed America’s reputation on the global stage. And what I can’t understand is why smart, intelligent dopers like Shodan waste their time on stupid, pointless, trivial threads like this when we have incompetent idiots like Rudy Giuliani in the ear of the most powerful person on the planet advising on policy that is imperative to securing your nation.
If the OP is concerned about people “floundering in the depths of confident cluelessness” then you only need to look at the current administration to find more relevant examples than anything Ocasio-Cortez has ever done.
It’s not enlightening, it’s just some random guy repeating the same old stupid arguments as your first link.
Oh, he’s a chief economist! With an undergraduate degree in economics! With those wonderful credentials he must be a Republican [checks link] Yep.