So hospitalization causing 4% of bankruptcies is a low number? Mmm, ok. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Wonder how high it gets with non-hospitalized medical expenses.
It’s a much, much lower number than the one Bernie is claiming.
Where is Bernie pulling his numbers from?
Eta: and what’s the medical bankruptcy rate among the elderly? Why did that cited survey not include chem?
FWIW, 4% of all bankruptcies would be almost 31,000. (Source: Bankruptcy Filings Continue to Decline | United States Courts) I just heard a soundbite from Bernie (on the highly recommended “Hacks on Tap”* podcast) telling David Axelrod this past weekend that the number “this year” will be “a half million.” :dubious:
And any of the Democrats running will get rid of that 31,000.
*Mike Murphy, who masterminded McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” campaign in 2000, cohosts it with Axelrod. Murphy is one of the wittiest guys in the world. Sample: “Trump always takes defeats and declares victory. If he had been president during Pearl Harbor, he would say the Japanese lost because they used up so much aviation fuel and torpedoes.”
Well, from what I recall on earlier goes on this subject, more “robust” numbers on medical bankruptcy just want a smaller amount of total debt to be medical to count it. I suspect there’s a middle ground of reality somewhere between the non-elderly hospitalizations bankruptcy numbers and the “everyone who still owes a clinic a copay”.
I agree, but I really doubt it’s a six figure number, which still makes Bernie’s “half million” wildly overinflated. For a guy whose brand is supposed to be probity and forthrightness, he sure takes a lot of liberties with the truth.
I was wondering where the hell that factoid came from since the principal conclusions I saw from that study – just like from all other such studies – is that Canadians get the same or better health care than Americans (and live longer, healthier lives) without having to pay outrageous amounts to insurance companies and have insurance bureaucrats rule on whether they’re allowed to have a particular medical procedure or not. And the difference in health and medical outcomes is most dramatic for lower income groups. One must also remember that “lower income” means not just members of the middle class who may think “that’s not me”, but a great many retirees on fixed incomes who suddenly find themselves in that very class and with substantial health care needs (and in the US, Medicare is only a partial help).
Anyway, as I said, I was wondering where the hell that factoid came from since I never saw it mentioned in the body of the report, and it appears to be based on your microscopic examination of the bar graph in Exhibit 5. What that graph tells us is that Americans in the three lower income quintiles have overwhelmingly greater unmet medical needs than Canadians, whereas in the top two income quintiles they are statistically identical. Not only are they identical within any conceivable margin of error, but it’s kind of remarkable that they are since Canada’s population includes many sparsely populated northern regions where medical care is not readily available.
So the reason the report never mentions this “fact” is because it isn’t a fact at all. And yet despite the report’s overwhelming and clearly stated conclusions, you’re trying to tell us that middle-class and rich American voters are going to rebel against UHC because they purportedly would have more “unmet medical needs” than Canadians by an amount equal to about the width of an ink molecule on a graph that they’ve never seen. :rolleyes:
No, I’ll tell you why rich Americans reject UHC, and it’s not rocket science and it’s not because of any statistical subtleties. They reject it because they know – and this really is a fact – that despite all of its overwhelming advantages and lower costs across the board, in any health care system that is substantially funded by taxes the rich are going to be paying more and not getting any better services than the excellent ones they already have. There are also lots of fake beliefs underlying opposition to health care, and stupid ideological ones like objecting to “the undeserving” (mostly code for “black people”) getting health care for free, but the preceding is a true fact: UHC in almost all its implementations is an equalizing mechanism that requires the rich to subsidize care for the less fortunate.
So this is ultimately not a health care debate, it’s a debate about the kind of society people want to live in – it’s exactly the same argument about whether poor people should die early deaths whether it’s from lack of health care or from malnutrition. The argument about egregious social inequalities has been settled in most of the industrialized world since at least the middle of the 20th century – Britain’s landmark social transformations after WW2 being a great example – but it’s a tough argument to win in America. And that, my friend, is the real issue here, not some imperceptible subtlety on a bar graph. Americans need to be convinced that their broken and barbaric health care system didn’t come about by accident, but reflects the values of the society they live in, and the power brokers who control it.
Would it help if I begged people to not turn this into a basic UHC thread? Yeah, we get it wolfpup, Canada is awesome . Thanks for the reminder.
There seems to be very few medical bankruptcies among the over-65s.
I expect Bernies numbers are from this article in theAmerican Journal of Medicine. As I remember, it made a splash. The figures are disputed, of course.
Its hard to pin down an exact number, because illness often leads to loss of income as well as medical bills. Also, illness and medical bills can put a financial strain on close family which can cause financial stress beyond the patient.
I expect you can get a very low number if you count only direct medical bills from hospitalizations, and only look at the patient. And you should be able to get very high ones if you count all the cases where people were too sick to work full time and bills just grew unmanageable for them or their family.
Which would still be a problem even with single-payer healthcare. But I’m sure Liz and Bernie have some other pie in the sky plan to take care of that eventuality. :rolleyes:
Doubt it. There’s really no one here who is willing or able to argue that advocating for Sanders plan is smart politics for the general.
“Is it bad politically. Yes.” would have been a pretty short thread.
I guess in terms of political messaging, Bernie and now Warren have an easy set of short talking-points that they can use to demonize people who are either opposed to Medicare For All (Bernie’s version of it), or people who are not fully on board with his proposal. It can sell in a Democratic primary. But in a general election, Bernie’s exaggerations on things like medical bankruptcies and lack of truth on cost will get more scrutiny.
Now, on the Republican side, they basically have nothing to offer, except a pack of lies. So, this is really about how far the Dems want to take healthcare in the US, and how fast.
No it would not. Please don’t tell other posters what they may post. If you think there’s a hijack in progress please feel free to report it and let us make that call.
I would have thought the word “begged” would keep me rather clear of junior moderator complaints.
A major reason that ‘Medicare for all’ is dangerous politically is that most Americans believe things about single-payer and/or UHC that aren’t true. So wolfpup has been posting some facts.
Seems relevant to me. The only way to message effectively about health-care policy positions is to get your listeners/readers on approximately the same page on the actual outcomes of UHC and single payer systems.
Really Sherrerd no. A fine discussion to have mind you. But as I stated earlier, engaging in a long discussion about why you or I believe Americans should not have a candidate’s sexual orientation or religion or gender fluidity or whatever matter to their vote is not especially relevant to the question of whether or not it does matter to enough of them as to impact a candidate’s chances of winning. Not a hijack worth reporting in my mind but one fair I would think to point out in progress.
I’d ask to have this discussion of whether or not it does dropped, as a further digression, but that might get me a note for telling posters what to post. 
And sometimes, when we have these “debates”, there are candidates who will pretend to support doing something they do not actually support - such as Republicans saying “repeal and replace”. But there are also candidates who will not be honest about the cost or the reasons behind their great program which they claim will address social inequalities. When I hear a candidate sell his/her policy without being honest about the cost of his program, or who exaggerates the problems in the current system, I have to wonder if he/she actually believes in what they are trying to sell. If you’re cooking up something that has a big impact on 18% of our economy, and where a large majority of Americans already like what they have, we need to hear the full truth.
Yet Sanders and Warren combined have more combined support in many polls than any other pair of candidates running :smack:
How do you reconcile “a large majority of Americans [liking] what they have” with the fact that 70% of them are in favor of single payer in the form of Medicare for All? And only 20% are opposed to such a system.
I reconcile it by suggesting that “liking what they have” doesn’t mean what you think it does. If you asked a typical middle-class American if he’s satisfied with his health care, he might observe that he has a doctor who he can see if he has a medical need, likewise he has access to hospitalization should he need it, and in most cases insurance will pay for most of it. So he’s more likely to say he’s “satisfied” than “dissastisfied”. But more and more, Americans appear to be realizing that all other comparable countries provide health care for all their citizens and that they do it more efficiently and far more economically than the US does. So there’s a growing conviction that what other countries are doing is worth emulating.
As for “being honest” about cost, is there something less than honest about observing the documented real costs in all these other countries? Health care systems involve a lot of potentially complex issues, so what better way to understand their performance than to look at real-life examples of how different systems actually work and what their outcomes are, and what the public’s level of satisfaction is with them. That’s the most pragmatic way of arriving at the “full truth”, and it’s why the examples of other countries are not a hijack or irrelevant to the discussion but absolutely central to how policy proposals should be presented. I’m always astounded by how something like MfA is often represented as being a crazy and daring experiment with absolutely unknowable outcomes when variants of it exist all over the world, readily available for detailed study.
I’d say that 70% is not reliable. There is other data that shows the figure to be significantly less.