And I was correcting the claim that we’d have “Medicare for all” instead of “Medicaid for all”. The lower Medicaid payment rates were chosen for ACA for a reason. We can’t afford Medicare for all.
Limited population, and so we can spend lavishly on them.
WEll first, you have to get Democrats in control of the government again. Then you have to convince all the Blue Dogs to commit political suicide again. The next time Democrats convince Blue Dogs to run in red states they won’t be useful idiots like Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu.
Figure out how to make ACA popular and then there might be a comparison.
It’s a matter of adjusting tax rates, that’s all, to broaden the extent of a program that is much more efficient than any private system. You would have us go back to the bloated bureaucracy and incredible overheads of Big Insurance instead - *that *is what we can’t afford.
They’re mostly gone already.
That is not a hypothetical. Support is already a majority, and still growing. All the way past the graveyard, friend.
Of course, there is no Republican plan to provide a “comparison” to, is there? And there will never be one in this generation, either, will there? And you’ll never face up to that reality, will you?
Vermont found that in order to do single payer it would cause a huge increase in taxes. And Vermont has a better than average per capita income.
I mean the new ones you’ll inevitably need to have a Senate majority again.
Support is not, nor has it ever been, a majority, even by your own weird arguments of what constitutes “support”. When someone says “opposed” because it doesn’t go far enough, that is not “support”, although it’s not the same type of opposition as conservative opposition.
If the Republicans repeal ACA, single payer becomes more likely, not less. And I’m sure a lot of single payer advocates would shed no tears in getting to that outcome. There were many single payer advocates that tried to kill ACA before it got passed most notably the writers at FireDogLake.
Not sure what you base that on. Going from a program that’s 80% of what UHC advocates want, to one that’s 100%, is a damned sight more likely than going from 0% to 100% after having gone from 80% to 0%.
FDL is generally considered by the denizens of the lefty blogosphere to have gone off the deep end. (This has been the consensus for years, btw.) Didn’t know any non-lefties were paying enough attention to FDL to take them seriously anymore.
The point is that any group that’s ‘most notably’ the writers at FDL is probably not a very big group.
And in this case, it’s one that I would condemn with great fury: being OK with seeing millions of people once again deprived of reliable health insurance in the hope that we ultimately attain the goal of single-payer strikes me as both cruel and immoral in ways that would have very adverse effects on the life of millions.
People’s lives aren’t pawns in a goddamned game. Treating them as such is the work of the devil.
Smacks of Leninism, theorizing that provoking brutal oppression is a net positive because it inspires more revolutionary fervor among the victims. The Devil is not a Communist, we may be assured, because the atheistic requirements of dialectical materialism were problematic.
Concur with friend Elvish. When Bender on Futurama says “I’m boned”, he means he is screwed, fucked, has taken a Boehner up his Nixon. He is not suggesting that his skeletal structure has been neatly incised.
It’s more that it’s easier to go from “broken” to single payer than “works pretty well” to single payer. Countries simply do not change the basic nature of their UHC programs once enacted. ACA is going to be tinkered with, but we’re not going to go to the trouble of getting everyone private health insurance just to take it away.
There’s also the problem of unions and their gold plated plans. They ain’t giving those up, and they have power within the party.
There’s your problem right there, you think single payer equals taking away private insurance. All we have to do is offer a public option with lower premiums and better benefits and the private plans will wither as people voluntarily switch over. No taking away required. Private plans cannot compete when there is an alternative with no profit motive, lower overhead and increased bargaining power. Good riddance to bloodsucking parasites.
I’ll be happy to support a public option that has to be funded entirely through premiums and will be allowed to fail should it run out of money. As for increased bargaining power, it can’t get that until it gets enough customers.
The problem with your assumptions about a public option is that it has to win the competition in order to gain most of the advantages you ascribe to it. While it’s competing, it’s under the same constraints as the private companies, except for the profit motive. Which gives them a 3% advantage, which would be dissipated if they decided to pay their people a little more than the private companies. There’s also the problem of fraud and waste. Medicare has low overhead because there is little incentive or effort to make sure payments are proper. A public company that has to compete with Aetna, Cigna, and Blue Cross will have to avoid such waste to survive. Can it do it? I’m eager to find out, personally.
As much as many of us here on the Boards have endorsed adaher for the position of Senior Strategist and Decider in Chief for the Republican Party, our efforts have borne no fruit. As regrettable as this may be, it remains the harsh reality.
One wonders why. Why do they continue to groan under the oppression of socialized medicine? It being so dreadful, and all. They have democratic mechanisms and traditions that they could bring to bear to overthrow the nanny-state and return to the time-honored values of profit and competition. Even with the shining example of America before them, they do not.
They witness at first hand the numbing horror of socialized medicine, and do nothing to reverse it! Perhaps, when you have a moment, you will tell us why.
More countries have private health insurance as the basis of their system than socialized medicine. Exactly none of them are considering scrapping it. Switzerland did have a referendum on it and overwhelmingly chose to keep the private insurance system.
Those are interesting, albeit unsubstantiated, facts. Which have no direct bearing on the question. I did not ask if any democratic countries had decided not to try it, I asked about the ones who have tried it and hated it so much, they voted it out.
The opposite is also true. Countries with multi-payer UHC also do not vote theirs out. Which says that once UHC is in effect, voters tend to go ultraconservative on the issue of any major changes. The same will be true of ACA if it succeeds.
The UK, which has universal single-provider health care, still has private health insurance companies such as BUPA (which I get through my job) who cover what are basically add-ons to the current system - private facilities, shortened waiting times, coverage of non-urgent but medically-justifiable conditions, regular thorough health checks, that sort of thing. BUPA do quite well out of it, it doesn’t conflict with the basic care level the NHS provides, and users get added value. Win-win all around.
I think the real question now is to what extent do you guys think that ACA repeal will be a centerpiece component of the 2016 GOP nominee?
I mean, with this last SCOTUS case basically laughed out of court, the law will continue unimpeded throughout the rest of Obama’s term. By the time he leaves office, we’re gonna be looking at ~30 million people owing their health coverage directly to Obamacare; that’s nearly a tenth of the US population. Any Pub candidate who runs on ACA repeal is effectively going to be running on snatching health insurance from 30 million people.
Look, this is not a biased question, I am a far left liberal, but as it stands, the ACA has many problems, primarily that for may people insurance is now more expensive and has less coverage before. Perhaps that is because the state I live in, Georgia, is an “anti-obamacare” state. But, I saw a recent thread that asked what people were paying for coverage under ACA and most people said they had very large payments. So, how will democrats keep support for ACA if it is so expensive?
