Forbidding orphan-crushing-machines would destroy the orphan-crushing-machine industry! The horror!
I have investments in the orphan-crushing-machine industry! We can’t regulate it!
There’s no precedent for it in US history. There are American countries with universal healthcare. There are countries throughout the world who have similar successful healthcare systems.
American countries? Go fuck yourself, lol.
Canada and Mexico are countries in America with universal healthcare
You do know that USA is on the continent of America right?
It’s not named “of America” for no reason
What an aggressive reaction to learning that America is a continent.
I knew someone would lose their shit over this.
And still tries to decline your claims.
My sister had her gallbladder removed a decade or two ago. It was basically exploding or something in the er. Really disgusting amounts of pain.
Anyway, she was immediately denied as they couldn’t determine whether her gallbladder removal was elective or not. The doctor said something like “well fuck that, that’s why we have a team of lawyers.”
I think that’s a pretty succinct summary. Without one or more lawyers at your disposal we might as well all get fucked.
There was that little bit of time we got some claims through. Something about an Italian plumber.
If you were still wondering if the NYT shills for the oligarchs…
Always have
Well the title “Medicare For All Would Abolish Private Insurance” is true though.
The big question is why should we care? Why should this be our problem? Why should our hard earned money be used for profit instead working only as an insurance pool?
Things change, and one has to adapt (just look at the LLM crazy), same with insurance companies. They can similarly adapt and do something different, for example start offering non essential insurances that would be on top of the M4A. Not replacements though. Medicare “Advantage” should be abolished as well.
But, they’re liberals!
/s
Abolition would destroy the cotton industry! There is no precedent in American history!
My wife needs a surgery thats likely to cost 18 to 20 grand without insurance, and I have to do some really careful math to figure out if putting her on my insurance would actually save us anything.
Most likely flying to Mexico for a week to get it done would be cheaper too.
I’m here waiting on insurance to approve a medication I need, like, eight months ago and which costs over a hundred thousand dollars per year (before insurance gets the negotiated price).
My brother spent eight fucking weeks with a constant migraine unable to walk or even stand up without falling over, before his insurance finally approved the MRI that discovered the golf-ball-sized tumor in his brain. Muigi Langione is all I can say.
I never thought that I would see a legit folk hero in my time.
First set of pills was $483 with insurance. Bought the refill as uninsured, it was $38.
Our insurance industry is so broken it’s really just unfathomable.
My grandfather needed some medication. Only 3 months, but over $400 a month. I found a Canadian pharmacy, bought 3 months of it, had the doctor fax the script there, and it was less than $300 for the 3 months. It was quite literally a lifesaver for him and their finances.
The prescription I need is somewhat new/niche, but I will look into this.
What is the context of this quote? NYT’s journalist editorial, someone from outside invited to write, someone quoted?
I’m curious as well. It just states a fact (well, it would abolish a lot of private insurance but not all, headlines aren’t always perfect), why is the assumption in the comments that it is somehow in favor of private insurance?
Here’s a gift link to the 2019 article.
the early part of the article is about change management. It WOULD be highly disruptive to a large part of the economy:
But doing away with an entire industry would also be profoundly disruptive. The private health insurance business employs at least a half a million people, covers about 250 million Americans, and generates roughly a trillion dollars in revenues. Its companies’ stocks are a staple of the mutual funds that make up millions of Americans’ retirement savings.
Such a change would shake the entire health care system, which makes up a fifth of the United States economy, as hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies would have to adapt to a new set of rules. Most Americans would have a new insurer — the federal government — and many would find the health insurance stocks in their retirement portfolios much less valuable.
But removing the industry that increases costs and extracts rents (to benefit investors and creates worse healthcare outcomes) is kind of the Point…
Many supporters of this approach see elimination of private insurance as a key feature, not a bug, meant to improve the program’s efficiency and equity by streamlining the health care system and weakening profit motives. With a single insurer covering every patient, hospitals and doctors could spend less time and money complying with differing policies, negotiating contracts, and filing forms to get paid.
“It’s worth it,” said Adam Gaffney, the president of Physicians for a National Health Program, which supports single-payer health care and helped design Ms. Jayapal’s bill. “Because we are not going to get to true universal health care without the greater efficiency of a single-payer system.”
I think the commentary is fair throughout the first half of the article… but then there’s some real lack of critical thinking (emphasis added):
Their plans would include nearly every doctor and hospital in the United States and provide generous benefits, including dental care and hearing aids, and would not require patients to pay any out-of-pocket cost to see a doctor. The federal government, of course, would have to cover those benefits, and would need to raise taxes to pay for them.
“Raising taxes” is present as a boogeyman here… taxes bad (they do poll poorly in general) but the key advantage of a single payer system is less bureaucracy (I don’t have n-teams to support doing the same job differently) and more streamlined rules. I don’t have to have more administrators than medical providers in hospital systems. They can focus on care instead of negotiating prices
Private insurance employs 2x the number of people covered by the insurance?? Wow, wtf. No wonder it’s expensive. Your premiums are basically paying someone’s entire salary.
The private health insurance business employs at least a half a million people, covers about 250 million Americans
500K employees vs 250M insured
Thank you for providing the link and quotes!
In France, we have a mix of things. State generally covers 70% of the major public health fundamentals (long duration illness gets 100%), company benefit (provided mostly by non-profits) to complete and for intermediate stuff like orthondontics, and I think some additional private insurance for what’s left uncovered.
So I think they may be exaggerating in thinking it’s either one or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_France
It’s also a flatout lie. It wouldn’t abolish private insurance at all. Nytimes is dogshit journalism.
I lost my job at the end of February, and have been enrolled in the affordable care insurance program ever since. Let me tell you, it’s almost less than having no insurance. I got charged $1.1k for my COVID booster. I got charged full price for my dental cleaning. My current “insurance” has denied every single thing I’ve submitted. I still have to pay them $500 a week though. Want to talk to them on the phone to resolve claims? Good fucking luck.
the denials are the worst part. insult to injury with all the costs.
You got a covid shot and you paid for that 🤣🤣🤣🤣 made my day lol!!! Here they were giving 100eur for people to cone to take it🤣 and there were morans who took a shot. Mostly are ill now. And you paid for that 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Make sure to check if hospitals in your city/state have forgiveness programs. When my wife was out of work we were able to get 80% of the bill written off. I make $100k a year and still qualify for like 40% forgiveness just for submitting paperwork.
Not a surprise Americans here are called a bit dump in general. Now I see why.
Right, there’s no precedent in American history for declaring an entire class of business to be illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States
I think guys have maybe heard about this.
https://www.nytimes.com/1930/01/02/archives/prohibition.html
Oh hey look, yeah, you did!
You can not like it but can… can we not, with the blatant historical revisionism?
You could also just point out the Sherman AntiTrust Act, point at that, maybe.
Oh right we also banned gambling, tons of forms of gambling, back in the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_the_United_States
PASPA
I wonder what the kalshi odds are on that happening again…?
Anyway uh, the Old Gray Lady needs to go to fuckin’ bed now, thanks.
I’m gonna be real with you:
Comparing Universal Healthcare to Prohibition is the single worst pro-universal-healthcare take I’ve ever heard. Prohibition nearly broke this country. People lost their faith in the constitution, crime skyrocketed, people started dying from poorly distilled liquor and poisoned ethanol. It was a constitutional disaster.
Your other examples were acceptable, but I’d maybe leave the puritan moralizing constitutional amendment out of any future comparisons.
It’s just precedent for the economic effects, I don’t think they meant it to be a complete analogy or a point of advocacy.
It is nontheless a precedent for a massive reworking of the US economy by way of outlawing particular kinds of business activity.
Also ‘constitutional disaster’ and ‘skyrocketing (white collar) crime’ describe at the very least the last 6 years, so… its apt.
And… an actual serious problem that would happen if we did Universal Healthcare right now is that this would reduce paperwork and bureacracy so much that you’d lose about a million or two million jobs.
That’s how much of a wasteful behemoth our current private system is, that many bullshit jobs, that many consumer incomes in a consumption based economy.
To realistically do a Universal Healthcare switch in the US, to be responsible, you would need something like the CCC or JobCorp or AmeriCorp on steroids, otherwise you’d cause a recession.
We could also maybe ban private prisons, as a business model, but to my knowledge there’s never been a federal / nation wide legislation push to do that.
Or, maybe we could try to actually fix the car centric nature of the US by doing something like… mandatory full drivers liscense retest every 5 years, every 3 years past 65, every single year past 75, and any time you get any traffic violation of any kind, you must fully retest within 1 year, or your liscense is revoked. If your income is below AMI, testing is free.
If that worked as intended, well, we’d have a lot less cars and car related businesses, which are also a considerable chunk of megacorp and small business activity.
Or you could go further than the … 92? Assault Weapons Ban and actually rework the 2nd Ammendment. If you could somehow do that, well again, megacorps and a considerable number of small businesses would have greatly reduced demand for civillian firearms, thus people lose jobs.
Anytime you massively rework part of an economy, by substantial new policy… you are reworking the economy, society broadly.
My point was that precedent for doing that kind of thing does infact exist.
And as for abolishing an industry that seemed too big to fail, while having already been abandoned by the rest of the world as horribly immoral… We do have one very big, shameful precedent.
And NYT said Hitler was a reformed man after a brief stint in prison.
A blatant lie as well, plenty of countries with universal healthcare sustain a private health insurance industry.
Yes, but admittedly, the sector would plunge in terms of revenues and profit. What will be left is much smaller than what they have today.
One of the biggest and longest rip-off scheme in history would end quite abruptly.
Now from an economic standpoint, that’s as much money available to consumers that was previously going almost straight to shareholders with a limited return. That could be huge!
Unfortunately our morass of a healthcare system is deeper than insurance - medical device companies, big pharma (&PBMs), venture-capital-owned hospitals, and more all take their cut. Universal health care would not end the rip-off. But it would be an excellent first step.
More an indictment of their mediocre reform than a testament to their accommodation.
Why do you still need private insurance in a public system unless it’s two-tiered and rationing care by wealth level.
It’s not possible to approve all care. Taxpayers will, through representative lawmakers, allot a certain amount of money to healthcare, and within that budget, decisions must be made. The realistic goal is not to have every possible treatment always approved, it’s to have a moderately high floor of care that everyone has as a baseline.
Fuck the NYT. I unsubscribed the moment they started shit talking Bernie back in the day.
As long as they keep publishing david brooks columns, they’re a mouthpiece for fascism
It’s a false claim. Medicare Advantage (Part D) is private insurance to cover more than Medicare. Medicare for all would be a public/private split, where the private part is generally considered a luxury benefit.
Medicare Advantage (Part D)
Advantage is Part C and it’s largely just a scam. Overpriced private administration of the policy that mostly exists to deny it’s members care available under Plan A and B.
Part D and Medicare Advantage are different things.
Part D is straight Medicare (or, rather, the pharmaceutical part of Medicare…save for benzos and barbiturates). Advantage is a private insurance that replaces Medicare.
Honestly often not an advantage. I don’t know if things have changed but when I read up on it (while working in pharmacy billing), it sounded to me like basically the definition of a scam.
Medicare advantage is a complete scam. It can deny more claims than government insurance and there’s really no accountability.
Medicare advantage was the scheme of George W. Bush’s admin to dismantle Medicare.
Part D plans are all privately offered. The government does not offer a Part D plan like it does Part A and B.
Then maybe some kind of job placement program should be made available for all the folks who would stand to lose their private insurance jobs, and that’s written into the transition plan. I’m sure the government is going to need help running Medicare for All.
this. the work requirements are bs. they need to guarantee a job if doing that and it needs to pay enough to meet modest costs.
On one hand, sure. But at the same time those people should really already get another fucking job and not help that shithole industry. Their paycheck comes from stealing other people’s paychecks to enrich the parasitic investor class.
I had a job for a “Medicare advantage” company for a little bit, and it’s the only job I quit without another one lined up. They were fucking scum.
Fuck that industry, the boards of directors would all be hanged if we lived in a just society.
what i was saying is if the gov requires people to work to get benefits then they should be providing guaranteed work that pays fairly.
All the folks who were paid to reject claims could be transferred to examine puplic subsidies applications by oligarchs corps. Jut putting, that on the table…
