BREAKING NEWS: Most Christians Prefer Heaven Over Hell for Their Holiday Destination Despite Both Belonging to Christian Theology, Travel Agents Grasping for Relevance Say
“Now how about some travel insurance? You can’t be sure without insurance, I always say! Covers everything other than acts of God,” said one flop-sweating agent on the condition of anonymity. “Shut up, Gil! Close the deal, close the deal!”
This is in total defiance of the evidence and, to be honest, simple arithmetic. You’re embarrassing yourself.
Given the recent results of the elections in Sweden, perhaps they aren’t as willing to give generous social safety nets to immigrants as expected.
Regards,
Shodan
Given that the racist party won 17.9 percent of the vote, as opposed to 13 percent last time (and far, far less than many polls had predicted) I’d say most Swedes are fine with immigration. Having seven or eight parties can make it complicated, though.
That said, being a socialist doesn’t mean you can’t also be a racist.
OK, I think I understand what you were getting at. Never mind on my question.
The similarity is the effectiveness of their political systems to suddenly change. When Sweden made a mistake and made its economy too socialistic they were able to turn around and fix those changes. Canada did the same. The US is nothing like Venezuela except that our political system does not do fixing mistakes very well. Part of it is a lack of parliamentary system which creates more chokepoints, part of it is by design, and part of it it the difficulty in governing a huge diverse nation. Once a segment of society becomes dependent on government money it becomes very difficult for the government to remove that funding. This country subsidized mohair for decades after the military stopped using the fabric for uniforms. Generally once a government program is enacted it never goes away. Because of this the US needs extra caution in creating new programs.
The financial cost of the Iraq war was 2 trillion dollars spread out over 9 years. The proposed medicare for all is estimated to cost an average of 3.6 trillion a year in the first decade and have costs rising after that. That is like fighting 16 Iraq wars without end.
What do you think the U.S. spends on healthcare now, and what would be projected without Obamacare? By coincidence it would “average 3.6 trillion a year in the first decade and have costs rising after that”!
You’ve not provided a cite but, if we trust your figure, the total U.S. spending on healthcare would be the same with or without medicare for all.
Let me repeat that in a larger font so you, puddleglum, may stare at it for a moment:
Total U.S. spending on healthcare would be 3.6 trillion annually whether medicare for all is adopted or not.
We’re not sure where you got your figure — based on my experience of Googlings with an anti-government bent I’d assume your anti-government figures are inflated and single-payer would be much cheaper than the status quo — but even with your figures, Total U.S. spending on healthcare would be 3.6 trillion annually whether medicare for all is adopted or not. A main difference is that UHC would cover everyone; is that a disadvantage in your view?
A private pension scheme which provided the benefits of SocSec might be more expensive than SocSec, yet the anti-government clique ignores that pensions have value when lamenting huge “government spending” on SocSec. :smack:
And here, a number exactly equal to what is already spent via Aetna, Blue Cross, etc. becomes unaffordable and “like fighting 16 Iraq wars without end” if government is involved.
Got it, I guess.
That statement makes absolutely no sense. The US already spends more public tax dollars on health care per capita than most countries spend in total to achieve full universal coverage, because the system is so bloated and inefficient. Progressives are essentially saying, look to other countries for a model that works and provides better outcomes at far lower costs. Conservatives are essentially saying, no, because … socialism. And we’ll become just like Venezuela! Just like the fear-mongering they did over Medicare.
Incidentally, I note that you never responded to my post #46 in which I noted that all the fiscally responsible deficit-reduction stuff in Canada that you so admired was done by the Liberal party which governed for 13 straight years after the federal Conservatives got thrown out on their incompetent fat asses. ISTM that you have all the right objectives, but choose to put your faith in entirely the wrong ideology to achieve them. All I’ve ever seen US Republicans do is cut taxes and run up deficits and the national debt with irresponsible spending.
So France is able to get rid of inefficient programs, but the United States isn’t? What is so rotten about the United States that makes us worse than France?
Yes, people do get dependent on health care. Like, my wife had kidney stones, and if they hadn’t been removed she could have eventually died from it. So yeah, dependency on health care, because without you could die.
What you’re saying is that you’d rather people die than that we all paid for national health insurance. Some people just aren’t worth saving. Remember Death Panels? Like, if a government bureaucrat says that we aren’t going to spend a million dollars curing grandma’s toe fungus, that’s a death panel. But if a government bureaucrat says we aren’t going going to spend any money at all on any health care, that’s not a death panel.
The 3.6 trillion figure is from the Mercatus center’s estimate which I believe everyone interested in the subject is familiar with.
It is actually about 100 billion a year more than is projected to be spent without Medicare for all, but it is in the ballpark.
I am not sure what point you think you are making. It makes a huge difference as to who pays for the healthcare system. If individuals do it and it grows unaffordable then those individuals have to adjust their lifestyles or go without. An awful outcome to be sure, but it is not going to destabilize the nation.
However, if the government can not afford to pay, then it has to have a huge tax hike or cut lots of other spending. This is going to be politically difficult and have huge effects on the economy at the level we are contemplating. A shortsighted politician, which the US has a huge amount of, could decide to monetize the burden. This results in inflation and starts the spiral that Venezuela is stuck in. It would be back to the stagflation of the 70s.
What progressives are actually saying is not to make the system more efficient, but to change to a Medicare for all model. That is not because it is the best possible system but it is one of the few possible ways to get to single payer. We could get costs down to Canada’s if the government agreed to cut provider benefits 25-40% and limit access to specialists and expensive technology. Neither is politically possible or even close to it. We could get to Canada’s present level of spending if we started from Canada’s level of spending in the 1960s and 70s. However, we can only start from the present system.
Discussion of which party made the cuts is the kind of stuff which would only interest a Canadian. It does not matter which party it is that enacts conservative policy, only that it gets enacted. It is great for Canada that they have at least one party that is willing to make drastic cuts in government programs. In the US there are only a tax and spend party and a tax cut and keep spending party. In the last election the responsible Democrat, Hillary, proposed 170 billion a year in new spending and the irresponsible Democrat, Bernie, proposed 3.3 trillion a year in new spending. The likelihood that a liberal American politician would actually cut the budget by 20% is similar to that of monkeys flying out of their butts.
It’s a shame you don’t believe in the benefits of capitalism and competition.
First, I’m not sure that a lot of people are saying that the government should just pay for what we all say is a broken system. But even if we literally adopted Medicare for all, we’d still save money. Medicare pays less to physicians than insurance does.
But won’t cutting payments destroy our system? That’s where competition and capitalism comes in. In most areas of tech costs go lower. Medicine is now quite high tech, and its costs are going higher. And why not? Who wins if costs are reduced. Not the hospitals. Not the insurance companies - they want to negotiate a good deal, but their profit is based on sales and justifiable costs, and the higher they are the more profit. I worked for the Bell System, and it was the same there. Good for us, not so great for the consumer.
And if we add some stuff like negotiating drug prices, even better. And you’ll remember who was against doing that - wasn’t the Dems.
Who can imagine the efficiencies achievable if the health care system has their feet to the flier. I spent 35 years in the computer and telecom industry with my feet to the fire, and it is good for the soul.
This is the issue - if someone is dying, or terribly ill, or significantly injured, they will seek medical assistance, whether they have money or not. Either we
[ol]
[li]continue on our current path of rolling the cost of treating those that can’t pay into what others do BEFORE we tack on the 20% insurance company margin, or[/li][li]find a way to spread the liability around to everyone in some sort of Medicare-For-All, or[/li][li]turn people away from healthcare unless they can prove ability to pay for any treatments that may arise, which - even if all healthcare professionals somehow agree that doesn’t violate “do no harm” - still results, eventually, in people dying in the streets from easily treatable diseases and injuries.[/li][/ol]
Are you ok with people dying in the streets from dehydration due to influenza, or skyrocketing disability costs due to people being unable to get an injured shoulder or broken foot fixed? That’s not even third-world-country bullshit, that’s pre-Industrial Revolution apathy.
The richest country in the history of the world, and we’re absolute shit at taking care of our citizens, all because of greed at the top.
puddleglum, do you have any response to post 64? I feel like your premise is fundamentally misguided.
So your $3.6 trillion scare figure should have been $100 billion increase. Why not go with truth? The difference between Tr-tr-tr-tr-trillion and B-b-b-b-billion might have been lost in your screed anyway.
With the correct arithmetic, instead of “Wars in Iraq as far as the eye can see” you could have written “need to cut down on our orders of Ford-class aircraft carriers.” We’re already scheduled to spend about $50 billion on the Joint Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle. Maybe if we didn’t have “Wars in Iraq as far as they eye can see” we wouldn’t need them. How large a fleet of Boeing P-8 Poseidons does the USAF have? 100? If that fleet were just 99 planes, the savings would enable every uninsured child in the nation to visit doctor and get antibiotics next time he has an ear infection.
So much is wrong here. For starters, one minor point is that $100 billion is much less than $3.6 trillion!
You also seem unaware that health insurance is [SIZE=“5”]already unaffordable[/SIZE] for many Americans. I’ve highlighted that to help you focus on it. Some Americans can only analyze in the context of “What’s best for me ME ME?” but that isn’t you, right** puddleglum** ?
But the strangest misconception you have is the insistence that money acquires a different character when it passes through government hands. Rather than pursuing this confusion down an abstract rabbit hole, let’s compare with public education.
Governments in the U.S. spend about $650 billion on K-12 education — far more than the projected increase with medicare for all. * Your argument, if valid, should apply equally to that K-12 spending, no?*
If parents spent this money themselves, they could respond to any price hikes by cutting down on their fine wines and iPhones, or by keeping their children home. “Awful, but not destabilizing.” But with government involved, what if K-12 education costs increase? Wouldn’t this also be a huge problem?
Do you advocate repeal of “K-12 education for all”? To be consistent, it seems you should. First answer this question and then we can go on from there.
You have an odd definition of capitalism and competition if it includes the government unilaterally setting prices and paying for everything. One of the reasons that Medicare is able to pay less to doctors is the difference between marginal cost and average cost. Medicare is able to pay closer to the marginal cost because private insurers pay the average cost. When Medicare pays everything that will no longer be the case and providers will have to swallow the loss. When this happens they can innovate and lower prices and find new efficiencies or they can lobby the government to hike payments. What evidence is there that the first route will be taken and not the second? They did that with the Medicare doc fix successfully getting it postponed for 17 years and then cancelled. They did that even though the cuts were going to be nowhere near what would be needed in the proposed Medicare for all plan. In contrast Obamacare created 34 pilot projects designed to rein in costs through disease management and care coordination. [URL=“https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/WP2012-01_Nelson_Medicare_DMCC_Demonstrations.pdf”]This[/URL did not actually work. The idea that the government is going to impose cost discipline on medical care is a pipe dream.
The first way is better than the second way because having the government bankrupt itself trying to pay for everyone’s healthcare has consequences that are much worse than rising insurance premiums.
The problem with Venezuela is not that the government suddenly became rapacious and incompetent, that seems to be par for the course in much of that region. The problem with huge social programs is not that they are run by bad people, though in Venezuela’s case they certainly were, but that they become so expensive they drag down the country’s economy. From my distant perspective Sweden probably has one of the finest government’s in the world. They seem civic minded, hard working, competent, incorruptible, and smart. Yet, despite this Sweden had slow growth throughout the 70s and 80s until the crisis of the early 90s created the worst economy since the great depression. The mistake in post 64 is to presume that the problem was bad actors and not bad policy. Sweden had a slow descent and then a bad recession until it changed, Venezuela had a plummet into hellish conditions. My fear for the US is not an utter collapse like Venezuela but instead of 20 year decline and turnaround like Sweden we will have a permanent decline because we won’t be able to turn it around.
It makes a huge difference who pays. People react to taxes differently than they react to other expenses. Because no matter how much or little you pay in taxes you receive the same benefit. Thus there is no benefit or incentive to pay more in taxes. This limits the amount of money a government can raise and spend. The higher the taxes are the more people are affected. The amount of economic activity destroyed by avoiding taxes is called deadweight loss and the higher the taxes the more deadweight loss. If you double everyone in America’s income tax then the deadweight loss is going to be huge. That is why the correct number for new taxes is 3.6 trillion and not 100 billion.
Secondly it is important to think on the margin. We already pay 650 billion, which like heathcare costs is way out of line with what the rest of the world pays. This means that any additional money is going to have a larger effect and deadweight loss than the current amount of spending.
So the answer to your question is that education spending should definitely be cut but not entirely, however if any new spending is approved then it should be cut even more.