Blunt Amendment DefeatedFollow

He could possibly have meant that the maximum under the new system would be less than the average under the current system.

I mean, that's still wrong, but at least it's a way for his statement to not be mathematically absurd.

you still don't know what universal healthcare is, even after the Obamacare discussions. If it costs so much, why does every G-8 Nation pay drastically less then the USA system costs its government. Your government pisses away over 7K per capita, Canada, U.K, France, Germany, all sit around the 3.6K mark. With Japan (also the highest rated country for life expectancy, and infant mortality.) at 2.5K.

One of these things is not like the others.

You shouldn't do that to analogies. They don't bend that way, and you probably left marks.

Holy non sequitur batman! The mathematical problems with the statement I quoted have nothing to do with whether health insurance companies exist to turn a profit.



It's not the profit motive of the insurance companies that is the problem, but that we have been pushed into our current "halfway to socialism" system, in which our government acts as a payer for large portions of our health care system. We have that system because those who favor socialized medicine made it that way. It's how socialism is applied. First you get government involved in something the free market does. This creates a "free money" dynamic and causes prices to rise. Then, you point at the high relative cost and argue that if only we eliminated the free market parts, we could do it cheaper.

The correct answer isn't to get the private for profit companies out of health care, but to get the government out of it. Then, it'll be cheap and affordable. Why? Because it will have to in order for health providers to make money. Think about it. The reason why t-shirts don't cost $500 is because no one would pay for them at that price so no company could make a profit selling them at that price. But if the government pays for it, the price of t-shirts will rise to whatever the government is willing to pay (which is a lot more than the public would directly). And along the way, the ability of anyone not having the government foot the bill to buy t-shirts will be eliminated. That's what's been happening to our health care.

Get government out of it, and prices will come down dramatically. If you have to pay your doctor right out of your own pocket, you can bet it suddenly wont cost $500 for a checkup.




No, they aren't. If the t-shirts are paid for with tax dollars, then those who pay higher taxes are paying more for their shirts than the guy who is paying low (or no) taxes.



Yeah. Because it's "free" to make shirts. No wait! It's not. Go figure!



No. The increasingly poor supporters of liberal social policies think they win. The reality is that everyone loses.



No. In my system, the price for a shirt is the same for everyone. Period. If you can afford a nicer shirt, you can. It's your choice. But the cost of the shirt doesn't depend on who you are, but the quality of the shirt itself. You get what you pay for. That's fair, right?

You're right. An actual universal healthcare system would eliminate our dependence on for-profit insurance systems, which subsequently would remove the insurance/hospital contracts that lead to our inequitable system that allows the wealthy to gain access to the same treatments for lower costs than the poor can.

(Meaning, the cost of paying for insurance for a year is less than the cost of paying for the treatments yourself, assuming you are actually using doctors as frequently, which you aren't, because you cannot afford it without insurance).

The issue with our system is that people are forced to choose between paying a flat cost, which is huge and barely offers them real coverage, or paying up-front, which means they won't seek medical help outside of emergencies, and will likely be destroyed economically should anything severe actually happen.

The system we have, with medical costs being inversely proportional to your wealth, is absurd.

Furthermore, when I'm being forced to choose between the right for someone to not die from a simple infection, because they couldn't pay the medical bill for the hospital stay, and someone else paying a few hundred extra a year (when they would already be paying less overall, because of the elimination of the profit motive for the middle man), I'm definitely going for the latter.

I also like how you have to try and act like we are talking about Obamacare whenever we discuss universal healthcare. Obamacare is a bandaid on a bad system--it is not, nor has it ever been, universal healthcare. You can scream about it all you want, but that's not what the rest of us are discussing.

It's also something which the US public has consistently rejected as an ideal or objective for 80 years or so. So perhaps instead of breaking our existing health care system in order to make it "kinda like socialized medicine", we should focus on making our free market health care system work. The left in this country wants something that the overwhelming majority of the population does not. But instead of just accepting that, they work to try to force the rest into adopting something they don't want anyway. What happened to freedom?

How does anyone look at the mandates in Obamacare and think this is about rights of any kind? The means violates the defined end. If one were being honest about fighting for "health care rights", and not just fighting for "government run health care", that is. But then, there's nothing honest about how the left is proceeding with this.



This cannot be true. You get that, right? Let me let you in on a secret: It will always cost more to pay for health care with insurance than paying for it directly. Always. When you say it costs less, you really mean it "costs less for some people". It must cost more in total. Even if the insurance company is non-profit, it has operating costs. The total cost for the total care covered by that insurance *must* cost more than it would cost for that same care if it were paid directly by the total people who pay for the insurance.

Use your brain. You should be able to realize that this must be true. Always. You don't save money by buying insurance. You spend more money. Most people will spend far more money buying car insurance over the course of their lives then they would ever need to cover their car(s). It has to be that way, or the insurance fund will run out of money. There's no magic here.



No. The problem is that we have, over the last 40 years, used the government to force people to pay for things they could pay for directly via insurance. You only need insurance to cover things that are rare and expensive. Regular checkups are (by definition) regular. Birth control is used regularly (presumably). Mammograms are performed regularly. These things should *not* be paid for via insurance. It's stupid to do so. All you accomplish is increase the total cost for those things.

But this is precisely the kind of coverage that the left has used the government to foist on us over the last several decades, and it's exactly the kind of coverage that Obamacare makes a huge point to provide. It's "comprehensive coverage". Meaning that instead of just covering you if you're in an accident or get a rare medical condition, it covers you for everyday things as well. IMO, that's when health care in the US went in the wrong direction and we only make things worse by expanding that.



How do you figure this? Are you honestly trying to suggest that it costs a rich person *less* money to buy health insurance than a poor person? Or are you playing games with relative costs? The hospital is going to charge the same amount for a given procedure no matter how wealthy the patient is. The only question is how that bill is paid. A free market system would simply charge the patient for the cost of that person's care. A universal health care system would have the government pay the bill, but with a progressive tax paying for it (so a wealthier person pays more for the same care). The current US system has the insurance company pay, which they passes that cost on to the pool of payees. But since *some* of those payees have their costs paid for by the government (medicare, medicaid, various state health care plans, etc), the wealthier person is paying full price for his insurance *and* paying more total taxes for the government paid portion *and* the system will charge more money because it has a large payee with no motive to keep costs down.


That's what's wrong with the US health care system (part of it anyway).



That's one huge freaking false dilemma. A "simple infection" should not cost that much to treat. It's only because of the government intervention into the system, and the mass of bureaucracy and paperwork that brings coupled with the "free money" aspect of government payments that causes costs for what should be simple and cheap procedures to be monumentally expensive. We've created a "buy-in" cost for health care. Used to be, if you got sick, you showed up at a doctor's office, and got treatment and the doctor charged you (and had the leeway as a private business to adjust costs based on the ability of the patient to pay). Now, the doctors don't bill you directly. They are paid by a health care association or hospital, who charge the insurance companies (or the government) for various services, and pad the bills for all the overhead that is involved, and they pass the cost on to employers, who pass it on to their employees (but often hidden from them so it's hard to know how much is actually being charged).

The result is a massive increase in costs. How much do you think it would cost for a single doctor in a small office to treat a "simple infection"? $20 maybe? It really should be that cheap. And it is that cheap (or cheaper) at the occasional free clinic type operation. It should be that cheap everywhere. But it isn't because nearly every practicing physician in the country has to operate as part of one of these big health care providers. And the cost to get care from them requires a huge up front cost. We've eliminated the direct pay for health care option almost entirely from our system. That's why costs keep going up. When you separate the buyer from the seller, there's no incentive for the buyer to demand a low price or the seller not to charge a higher price.


Imagine if you bought your food the same way you pay for health care in the US. It would be insanely expensive. Ok. It would just be insane.




And yet, the same people who praise the idea of universal health care also support and defend Obamacare. You'd think they'd oppose it, given that it increases costs, and put more money in the hands of insurers. But they don't.


Given that this thread is about an attempt to change just one aspect of that horrible health care law, I think it's fair for *me* to point out that what we're talking about isn't universal health care. It's not anything remotely close to it. Yet, the same people stubbornly defend Obamacare anyway. I can't figure that out.

Funny. I thought eliminating the need for insurance companies would kinda eliminate insurance companies, generally speaking. Which would make your objection irrelevant. Health costs can't cost less for insurance companies if insurance companies don't exist to pay the cost.

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I didn't say eliminate the need for insurance companies. I said to only use insurance companies for things that we actually need insurance for. Insuring something that is a regular expense just makes that thing cost more money. If you think about how insurance works, it should be immediately apparent why it should never be used to pay for things like regular checkups, birth control, preventative care, etc.

Insurance should cover things that are rare and expensive. When you expand insurance to cover things that are common, you make those things expensive.



It will cost less for the consumer though. At the very least, the cost must be higher just to pay the overhead of the insurance company managing the paperwork. In practice though, the costs also go up because you've concealed the real cost within a larger insurance system. If you simply pay X for insurance (and perhaps a small amount for co-pays), then you don't really care or even know how much the health care you just got actually cost the insurance company. If the hospital increases the cost for the medicine, and adds in some extra expenses, you wont notice because your insurance covers it. And when you insurance premium goes up down the line, you wont connect the two. More to the point, your insurance premium will go up even if you personally do check the costs and work to minimize them because most of the other people also covered by your insurance company will *not* do those things.


If you had to pay every penny out of your own pocket, you'd look over that bill with a fine toothed comb and make sure nothing is too high. And you'd challenge any questionable item on the bill, and if it was too high, you'd complain. And heaven forbid, maybe go to a different doctor next time. Competition drives prices down. The floor of the cost for something is determined by the costs to the person providing it, but the ceiling is determined by your willingness to pay for it. Insurance separates the buyer from the seller. Thus prices will be higher just because it's being paid for with insurance (on top of the extra cost of the insurance itself).


The only reason to accept the higher overall average cost for something that insurance causes is if the thing you're insuring is rare. If you have a one in a thousand chance of having something happen that costs you $50,000, it's worth paying for insurance for that thing. Odds are you wont be that one guy in a thousand that gets hit, in which case you will lose money (you're paying for insurance but never filing a claim). However, if you unlucky enough to be that one guy, you'll be covered. You're making a reverse bet essentially. There is *no* reason to pay for something that you know will happen with insurance. If you know you're going to go to the doctor for a checkup once every 6 months, then there are no odds involved. You *will* need to pay that cost twice a year. If you pay it directly, then it costs you the amount of the doctor visits. If everyone in an insurance policy buys insurance to cover the doctor visits, then each goes twice a year, the insurance company *must* increase the cost of each policy by the amount of those visits. Thus, the average increase in insurance cost will be higher than the costs saved by not just paying for the checkups directly.


The reason to use insurance to pay for such things can't be to lower prices for the consumer, because it'll raise them on average. The only reason to create this kind of system is to subsidize the costs. By hiding the direct cost from the consumer, you can make some people pay more and some people pay less for their insurance. Advocates of socialized medicine do this because it's a means to draw people into a socialized system without telling them it's socialized. The government simply mandates coverage of the insurance companies, and then provides the payment for lower income people. The net result is that the middle class folks and wealthy, who can afford to buy insurance pay full price for stuff that they wouldn't choose to use insurance to pay for if they had a choice. And on top of that, they pay the taxes which pay for the same thing for the poor. So a small number of poor people maybe make out (a bit), but everyone else gets screwed because the costs have been shifted to them.

Which is why this is sold to lower income people as a means to provide them with "affordable health care". But it's not really affordable, someone else is paying for it. But folks like Obama don't care about that. They want you used to the government stepping in an providing health care, so that down the line they can make the exact argument being made in this thread that it would cost a lot less just to take the private market parts out and have the government handle everything directly. End result is yet another industry taken over by the government. Yay socialism!


It is not about making health care more affordable. It's about making it *less* affordable so that more and more people feel they must turn to the government to help them pay for it.

It wasn't that long ago (less than 50 years), when pretty much anyone could afford basic health care. Today, most people can't afford a 15 minute checkup. Something any working class person could pay for out of pocket back then. Why do you suppose this has changed? It's not like a basic checkup, or treatments for simple infections, sprained ankles, etc have gotten more complicated or more difficult to do. Quite the opposite. Medical technological advances should make most treatments much less expensive. Yet instead, costs have skyrocketed.


It is because we have eliminated competition from the market that this has happened. As I noted a couple weeks ago, you can contrast the cost changes for things like MRIs compared to procedures like laser eye surgery to see this directly. The former is covered by insurance, the latter is not. Guess which one has increased in cost over the last 20 years (dramatically), and which one is about 1/5th the cost today as it was 20 years ago? Why? Both are relatively new medical technologies. Both involve complex equipment. Why has one gotten more expensive and the other much less expensive?


Same reason why the average TV or home computer is tens of times more capable today than it was 20 years ago, and likely also about 1/5th the cost relatively speaking. Competition drives down prices. When you have a free market, new products are created all the time and improved all the time and providers find ways to make them less expensive. When you don't have a free market, improvements are slow, and costs tend to stay high.


How much do you suppose a home computer would cost today if the government had decided 20 years ago to mandate that every home must have one, and it created a program to pay for computers for any household who couldn't afford to buy one themselves? We'd all be running MSDos on 486 processors in computers costing $4-5k. Why would anyone drive the prices down? Why improve the computers? If the government's going to make up the cost for anyone who can't afford your product (and guarantee a sale), you have absolutely no reason at all to improve it or reduce the cost. Why can't people realize that this is why health care is so damn expensive? Heck, you can pretty much look at the list of things that stay expensive and don't improve much over time and correlate that directly with how much the government involves itself in that industry.

Or perhaps you just have a rather pollyanic view of the past. How many of those medical practitioners had degrees? How many people still died w/o care? It's your argument that everything was wonderful back then, you back it up.

Yeah, blame everything on big government!

Yeah, medicine is an extremely new field in human history, but people tend to act like it's been a part of human culture for a long time. It wasn't until the 40s that most women even began giving birth in hospitals, and seeking medical care for lesser things was even more unheard of... unless you were rich.

And that's how insurance formed. Medical care was way too expensive on its own, but as the benefits of it began to be increasingly apparent (benefits that, truthfully, hadn't even appeared until recently anyway), more and more people sought a way to gain ready access to it. But even then, insurance was pretty much limited to the wealthier. First plans emerged in 1930, and by 1940 under 10% of Americans had it. And most of those were covered by community plans, where they were only serviced if they went to the specific hospitals they paid out to.

Nationalized healthcare was supposed to be a part of the New Deal. The lobbying campaign against it was the most costly in US history (at the time, of course) costing 1.5 million. McCarthyism followed those debates in post-WWII America, labeling it socialism. My favorite part about that, despite anti-communist sentiments in the US before WWII, the two were not connected until two decades later. The AMA's prime complaints was that it would put unreasonable restrictions on doctors. Those restrictions happen to all be things that are now considered common or necessary, like accountability and treatment restrictions.

But now we find ourselves in an era where we could realistically provide healthcare to every citizen, but we are still stuck thinking that it's something only the elite should be able to have access to. And that's really fucking sad.

I like how he complains about this. However, he, and people like him, are the problem in this scenario.

I first saw it on tumblr, with the original poster claiming to be the photographer. I like to think it's true as well.