253 Economists in Support of S. 1129 a Medicare for All Health Care System

blu3bird

Well-Known Member
Canadians love their system.

I spoke with one under the cloak of anonymity because he has a green card and not allowed to speak politics. he has a Trump* pumpkin in his office. He told me his mom had cancer and never received a bill for all her treatment- all first class and the one time MRI wasn't available they sent her to the US and paid for it there..after they found out it was three solid years of treatments. not a bill for an aspirin..'yes, we get taxed but the safety net let's you sleep at night'. See? that's why Canadians have that cool laid-back attitude..there's nothing to bother Canadians like the constant American anxiety of will i live to see retirement because i can't afford to go to a doctor?

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I don't care what Canada has or likes, it is absolutely irrelevant. You cannot compare Canada or any other country to America
 

Communist Dreamer

Well-Known Member
I don't care what Canada has or likes, it is absolutely irrelevant. You cannot compare Canada or any other country to America
My grandfather was murdered because of your view. He was too rich for Medicare, but too poor to get any care at all. Over the course of a week he slowly died of starvation and thirst. He was strapped down and given massive amounts of morphine in what they called hospice "care." So your view that universal healthcare like is done in Canada or preferably like in the UK is too much of a burden on you is absolutely irrelevant to me. He served as a Captain in the Air Force flying cargo into hostile countries and was forced to retire when they deemed him too old to fly anymore. His country betrayed him. He died not even knowing who I was completely doped up.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
Nobody who knows anything are saying costs will be the same or slightly higher. The reason is, Bernie's Medicare offers much more in terms of services and subsidies than anything in our current system. Best guess estimates are as high as 32 trillion over 10 years to as low as 21 trillion. If the 32 trillion dollar number is true, even doubling the cost of people's current coverage isn't enough. Corporations are currently paying around $11,000 per household. Double = $22,000. Who is going to pay that extra $11000?


I'm not against all of that, I'm just against being lied to. There are better ways to ensure everybody has healthcare coverage, including subsidizing Medicaid for those who need it. Medicare should be an option for businesses and individuals instead of a requirement.
I don't know how I got sucked into this conversation lol, I am not a Bernie fan, and think expanding the ACA to fully cover every American is the way to go. I value insurance companies when they have oversight.

But, what I don't understand the disconnect between what I am saying and what you are is that everything today is being paid for by Americans. Nobody is denied access to healthcare if they go to a emergency room. But the costs there are sky high, because it is a very inefficient way to get healthcare. When someone falls on the street, they get an Ambulance ride ($$$), and shipped to the ER($$$$$), when if they were covered prior, they could have gone to a general physician earlier and gotten far less expensive treatment.

When those people don't pay their hospital bill, all that costs get passed onto the rest of the paying patients and insurance companies. So it is hard to see how prices would change that much, it would just be shifting who and where it is being paid from.

The extra $11,000 is being paid now by who? And I guess at the end of the day it would depend on the taxation scheme to pay for M4A, would it be strictly a business paid system or would it be a combo employer/employee? I don't know and don't really think it is going to happen anytime soon to worry enough about learning how they are imagining this system working.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
Nobody is saying costs will increase. Even I have come out to admit that costs will begin to decrease immediately. Nonetheless Bernie's estimate of 32.6T is equal to the entire federal budget for ten years. In fact, that is the nuance people are missing here, that nationalizing high costs is not the way forward. The goal is to decrease costs and the very problem is high costs. What his bill would do for the most part is to shift costs onto taxpayers.

The way forward is to get everyone covered in a way that decreases costs without huge tax hikes. That was the goal of ACA but I do think an expansion of Medicare to all who want it (with small tax hikes) is the way to go and that in time, as costs come down, more people will opt for it, resulting in lower premiums for those who do not and better coverage for those who do. This is a cost reducing feedback loop.

USA is not Canada and to compare the two is a fallacy.
I don't see prices going down, medicine is a arms race, and needs constant innovation. If we wanted to do the Republican thing and just say fuck it I want low health care prices for our generation and fuck everyone else in the future, sure we could really drastically reduce costs. Cutting funds like we do with education, let the books/buildings/desks all get old with use, pay people less and work them more so care starts to diminish, stop innovating so eventually things like super bacteria thin the herd a bit, buildings HVAC systems get older and less efficient, all that stuff.

One of the smarter things Obama said that never seemed to stick with all the trolling of the ACA, was 'bending' the cost curve. The idea that it is going to decrease in costs is not realistic, the thing is to reduce to rate the costs are increasing by being far more efficient than we currently are.
 

abandonconflict

Well-Known Member
I don't see prices going down, medicine is a arms race, and needs constant innovation. If we wanted to do the Republican thing and just say fuck it I want low health care prices for our generation and fuck everyone else in the future, sure we could really drastically reduce costs. Cutting funds like we do with education, let the books/buildings/desks all get old with use, pay people less and work them more so care starts to diminish, stop innovating so eventually things like super bacteria thin the herd a bit, buildings HVAC systems get older and less efficient, all that stuff.

One of the smarter things Obama said that never seemed to stick with all the trolling of the ACA, was 'bending' the cost curve. The idea that it is going to decrease in costs is not realistic, the thing is to reduce to rate the costs are increasing by being far more efficient than we currently are.
Prices go down when supply increases. This is the law of economics.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
Prices go down when supply increases. This is the law of economics.
To increase supply in this case, new hospitals, doctors, medicine etc all need to be increased which would increase costs, population increases would increase demand, so prices would still increase I think if we took the time to chart everything out, i am not sure the healthcare market works like the basic supply and demand setup.

I think it would look more like this:



The Quantity is increasing (along x axis in (b), As the Supply increases, but the shifts in Demand also cause prices to increase, but then settle back down in the long run. This is why it is so much of a pain in the butt to explain for someone like Bernie on the campaign trail. Populist messaging sells, reality bores people.
 

Communist Dreamer

Well-Known Member
To increase supply in this case, new hospitals, doctors, medicine etc all need to be increased which would increase costs, population increases would increase demand, so prices would still increase I think if we took the time to chart everything out, i am not sure the healthcare market works like the basic supply and demand setup.

I think it would look more like this:



The Quantity is increasing (along x axis in (b), As the Supply increases, but the shifts in Demand also cause prices to increase, but then settle back down in the long run. This is why it is so much of a pain in the butt to explain for someone like Bernie on the campaign trail. Populist messaging sells, reality bores people.
That's how things happen in a perfect world without greed. Some sort of manipulation takes places that prevents your fantasy from happening. Reality is either government intervention stops the greed, or the capitalist class does bribes. But most of the time both sides make up an illusion a "compromise" takes place. Each side then complains they got the worse deal.

We're just a game to them.

It's very interesting this is only a game, but gives you a glimpse of what our perfect society they have planned for us looks like.

Magnasanti is stunning to look at, its scale troubling. From above, enormous towers fill the entire screen, blending together in repeating patterns like a concrete magic eye puzzle. There’s a circle in the center of the map, inspired by the Buddhist bhavacakra. Imagine if someone clone-stamped Manhattan’s drably foreboding multi-block Stuy Town development, and pasted it across the entire Tri-State area, crushing all trees, animals, and joy in its path.


Inside all of those buildings live a staggering 6,005,407 people. There’s no water pollution, traffic, or crime. There are no vacant buildings. Ominously, there are no residents over the age of 55.


 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
That's how things happen in a perfect world without greed. Some sort of manipulation takes places that prevents your fantasy from happening. Reality is either government intervention stops the greed, or the capitalist class does bribes. But most of the time both sides make up an illusion a "compromise" takes place. Each side then complains they got the worse deal.

We're just a game to them.

It's very interesting this is only a game, but gives you a glimpse of what our perfect society they have planned for us looks like.

Magnasanti is stunning to look at, its scale troubling. From above, enormous towers fill the entire screen, blending together in repeating patterns like a concrete magic eye puzzle. There’s a circle in the center of the map, inspired by the Buddhist bhavacakra. Imagine if someone clone-stamped Manhattan’s drably foreboding multi-block Stuy Town development, and pasted it across the entire Tri-State area, crushing all trees, animals, and joy in its path.


Inside all of those buildings live a staggering 6,005,407 people. There’s no water pollution, traffic, or crime. There are no vacant buildings. Ominously, there are no residents over the age of 55.


1577709461710.jpeg
 

Communist Dreamer

Well-Known Member
lmao, if my saying it leads to a cold war, Russia has bigger issues. This shit is on them and their world wide assault on democracies.
Let me think hard about this. We nearly caused Iran's nuclear reactors to meltdown through phreaking which installed a worm called Stuxnet on their computers. That's a fact. While you're convinced through very compelling evidence that Russians caused Hillary to have egg on her face through hacking.

This is a real tough one. Which one is worse... Hilary go embarrassed, or we almost succeeded in making a disaster worse than Chernobyl and Fukushima combined, killing thousands to potentially millions of people becoming sick, and completely devastating the whole economy of Iran. Hmmm. I'm guessing Russia? Did I win?
 

Grandpapy

Well-Known Member
Let me think hard about this. We nearly caused Iran's nuclear reactors to meltdown through phreaking which installed a worm called Stuxnet on their computers. That's a fact. While you're convinced through very compelling evidence that Russians caused Hillary to have egg on her face through hacking.

This is a real tough one. Which one is worse... Hilary go embarrassed, or we almost succeeded in making a disaster worse than Chernobyl and Fukushima combined, killing thousands to potentially millions of people becoming sick, and completely devastating the whole economy of Iran. Hmmm. I'm guessing Russia? Did I win?
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"This shit is on them and their world wide assault on democracies."


I feel a warm war coming on Comrade.
 

Unclebaldrick

Well-Known Member
Let me think hard about this. We nearly caused Iran's nuclear reactors to meltdown through phreaking which installed a worm called Stuxnet on their computers. That's a fact. While you're convinced through very compelling evidence that Russians caused Hillary to have egg on her face through hacking.

This is a real tough one. Which one is worse... Hilary go embarrassed, or we almost succeeded in making a disaster worse than Chernobyl and Fukushima combined, killing thousands to potentially millions of people becoming sick, and completely devastating the whole economy of Iran. Hmmm. I'm guessing Russia? Did I win?
Stuxnet only affected their centrifuges.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
Let me think hard about this. We nearly caused Iran's nuclear reactors to meltdown through phreaking which installed a worm called Stuxnet on their computers. That's a fact. While you're convinced through very compelling evidence that Russians caused Hillary to have egg on her face through hacking.

This is a real tough one. Which one is worse... Hilary go embarrassed, or we almost succeeded in making a disaster worse than Chernobyl and Fukushima combined, killing thousands to potentially millions of people becoming sick, and completely devastating the whole economy of Iran. Hmmm. I'm guessing Russia? Did I win?
First and foremost I had some really great conversations with Iranians while at school who were here getting their PhDs in Statistics. They were good guys and I actually learned a lot about the problems with the blanket bans on them having nuclear technology. There is a lot of scientific research that they were not able to take part in which means their economy is being held back (much like the minority communities in our country were not able to take economic advantage of in our country). In my opinion the best way to create peace among nations is to create a strong middle class so that the governments are forced to spend all their time making them happy or else lose power. Keeping people desperate and poor is a outdated policy.

Anyways, with our country showing their vastly stronger capabilities of shutting down their centrifuges in a exact way was not what you are pretending it was. Iran saying things like 'bombing Isreal into sand' or whatever it was didn't go over well in the Bush administration who did do a lot of bad shit in the middle east after the Saudi's attacked us in 9/11.

But you saying the Russian hacking our democracy is about Hillary Clinton again shows how much trolling you are willing to do for Trump. Clinton would not have killed the Iranian deal, and we would not have been seeing them, Russia, and China doing military war games together. We would not be at each others throats in our own country due to the online disinformation that the foreign governments have been hitting us with for years. We would not have to see the worlds greatest forests being destroyed as the rest of the world burns.

But you are just trolling me so I really don't think anything I say matters to you at the end of the day.
 

abandonconflict

Well-Known Member
To increase supply in this case, new hospitals, doctors, medicine etc all need to be increased which would increase costs, population increases would increase demand, so prices would still increase I think if we took the time to chart everything out, i am not sure the healthcare market works like the basic supply and demand setup.

I think it would look more like this:



The Quantity is increasing (along x axis in (b), As the Supply increases, but the shifts in Demand also cause prices to increase, but then settle back down in the long run. This is why it is so much of a pain in the butt to explain for someone like Bernie on the campaign trail. Populist messaging sells, reality bores people.
I appreciate the effort you put in to sharing graphics and you're right that supply of health care is much more than just coverage, but

(And I want to make it abundantly clear that I'm not dismissing any of this)

I'm still not convinced of your conclusion. If you are to convince us of the very important argument that M4A will actually cause healthcare costs to increase. I would like to be certain, if possible.

Because if costs would actually increase, it is imperative that it cannot come to pass.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
I appreciate the effort you put in to sharing graphics and you're right that supply of health care is much more than just coverage, but

(And I want to make it abundantly clear that I'm not dismissing any of this)

I'm still not convinced of your conclusion. If you are to convince us of the very important argument that M4A will actually cause healthcare costs to increase. I would like to be certain, if possible.

Because if costs would actually increase, it is imperative that it cannot come to pass.


I am with you man.
 

abandonconflict

Well-Known Member


I am with you man.
That's just not enough (of an argument) but I will definitely give the idea a very honest and diligent examination. Maybe it's worthy of a thread of its own. Duly noted, you're arguing that health care costs would actually increase as a result of the passage of single payer healthcare.

Let's see if anyone else can refute that. I have no refutation.
 
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