I don’t know if they can get the 50 votes in the senate or a majority of the house to do it. Supposedly they will use budget reconciliation to convert it to a voucher program if they do.
But if they do, it’ll mean everyone in the US under the new plan will need to spend at least $100,000 per person in retirement on higher health care costs. It is probably going to cost each married couple a quarter million dollars or more because medicare is cheaper and more efficient than private insurance, and the medicare vouchers will likely not keep up with medical inflation. Right now I think people need 100k to cover medical costs in retirement not covered by medicare, under this plan it’d probably be closer to 200k. I believe medicare has a lower medical inflation rate than private insurance too (possibly far lower for various reasons). So that 100k is probably just the starting point. Who knows what it’ll be in 30 years.
Trump said he wouldn’t cut social safety net programs. But we shall see. Trump isn’t known for consistency.
The sad part is all the white working class people who voted for Trump and the republicans will find a way to blame the democrats for the fact that their families need an extra quarter million dollars to retire.
Oh! I hadn’t realized they were going to try to use reconciliation. Fuck. Guess I’ll have to get politically active before I wanted to. I wanted a holiday off, at least.
But my Republican congresspeople are going to hear about this. For once, I think it’s something they might listen to, and not just chalk it up to liberalism.
My 72 year old dad heard the tail end of this story on the radio and flipped out. He has a leukemia called myelofibrosis (likely due to benzene exposure in the Navy) that has so far not responded to any treatments since he was diagnosed in April. A DNA test was done to see which leukemia it was in order to start treating it and my folks paid nearly $900 b/c Medicare didn’t cover it. The chemo drugs they’ve tried have been about $12000 a month; Medicare covers 90% and also covers 100% of his radiation (to shrink his enlarged spleen that’s grown into his mid-section) and weekly blood infusions on which he’s now dependent, as well as his COPD treatments and portable tanks; my dad’s fear was that cost would all suddenly fall on him and mom.
By the time she called me last night he thought they’d have to sell their house. I explained to her they’d be grandfathered in as I understood Ryan’s ideas and for them to not worry about it. Sent her a couple of links on it to calm him. They’re in rural NC, voted straight ticket Dem and had enough to worry about before the last two weeks unfolded.
We already have Medicare part C. The notion was to semi-privatize medicare to injecta healthy dose of market competition into the equation and make medicare more cost effective.
However, insurance companies wouldn’t participate until we gave them 15% more than what it costs medicare to provide the same service. This was supposed to be a temporary boost in payouts to “prime the pump” but when the 15% premium was removed by ObamaCare after almost 15 years of “pump priming” the insurance companies abandoned medicare partC as soon as the 15% premium was withdrawn.
If we are going to pay 15% more, it is pretty clear that the 15% would be more efficiently spent by expanding coverage in actual medicare rather that providing a profit cushion to private for profit insurance companies.
Kind of off subject, but the longer I live the more I believe the whole ‘competition brings down prices’ isn’t all that true. Instead I see businesses matching prices with each other in an upward trend rather than trying to compete with lower prices. So if you sell widgets and your sole competitor is charging $4 per widget, and you can charge $3, well, why aren’t you charging $4 also? Why start a price war? You both lose then, right? I think the industry caught on to this after the cereal price wars a few decades ago.
I went to both links and did not find any actual evidence that Ryan is proposing to “phase out medicare”. The first link was to a JPG and the second link was to a speculative article (more of an opinion piece than an article). From the 2nd link:
In theory, competition eventually drives all prices to the marginal cost of production plus a risk adjusted rate of return.
It works best with commodity products (and you consume more commodity products than you realize) but sellers try to differentiate their commodity product from other commodity product with marketing an brand management.
Still, without AT&T, Sprint and T Mobile, Verizon prices would be much higher.
One of the single biggest factor in determining the effect of competition on price is the barriers to entry and the impact of economies of scale.
If anyone can get into the business for little to no effort and investment, the prices drop as competition increases.
The barriers to entry for a cell phone carrier are high. The barriers to entry for a dry cleaner are relatively low.
The economies of scale for aluminum production are relatively high and you can’t really be a small aluminum producer that slowly grows to compete with Alcoa and Reynolds. Their economies of scale allow them to make a profit while still underpricing any potential new entrants into the market.
If Social Security were privatized this wouldn’t be an issue.
And wasn’t Obamacare supposed to solve all medical cost issues?
My strategy is that Amendment 69 will pass once the absentee ballots are counted.
Leeches are cheap.
