If Northampton resigns and Fairfax is elevated, how is the new Lieutenant Governor picked?
Mizzou yearbook ftw!
I agree there is big difference. I would have been in favor of ACA if it focused on healthcare reform and not health insurance reform. But I have yet to see an analysis that shows how we could save more than $500/year/person ($1,000 absolute tops) on with the government replacing private or company health insurance.
The savings would not come from eliminating the costs associated with insurance providers. The big money is in the bargaining power that Medicare For All could wield.
Of course, you have to defeat the healthcare providers’ lobbyists.
That’s true, but that isn’t what I see presented in the plans or even on the forum, perception is we just cut out the greedy insurance companies, get rid of all their bureaucracy we will save trillions and have plenty of money to provide health care for all.
Beating the providers lobby a pretty big ass battle to win. It seems like almost every year, that claim for budget balancing purpose they pass a Medicare appropriation with lower payouts to Medicare and they go back and up the Medicare payments to doctors.
Put me down in the skeptical column that Congress, and the folks in Medicare can win fights against doctors, nurses and hospitals.
The big savings will come from prescription drugs, and that’s the lobby they will need to defeat. Part of the current costs for healthcare stems from having to care for people without insurance, so savings should be realized there too. For example, I was billed for >$10,000 (see below) for cataract surgery (which is a minor medical procedure. Lord knows what real surgery costs.) The cost for the same procedure in Europe? (To be clear, the $10,000 dollars was the amount listed, my out of pocket came to $2k.)
Mean total costs per cataract intervention varied considerably from country to country, ranging from 318 euros in Hungary to 1087 euros in Italy.
Without insurance, cataract surgery cost $3,600 to $6,000 per eye in the U.S. in 2017.
I had surgery for a retinal detachment (my phone tried tried to autocorrect that to “rectal” detachment. Wouldn’t that be something) in one eye 15 years ago or so and it was upwards of $40,000, just to provide a data point on cost of more complicated eye surgery. While the out of pocket was less, it was still close to $8000. Quite the fun experience for a broke 20-something, took me ages to pay that off.
Winner, understatement of the year award
Damn, that sucks.
USA! USA!
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GND is going to be an actual bill now, spelling out specific initiatives.
Long piece by Dave Roberts, haven’t had a chance to read it yet though.
Overall, prescription drugs account for about 10% of spending on healthcare. They are the fastest-growing category, so I agree it’s important to address them. But they’re not the big bucket.
Oh, thanks for the correction!
Now there we go, the dawn of an era.
This is precisely the type of forward looking, shift the Overton window, proposal that @inactive_user have been harping about.
As the end of the article states, time to get on board, or we’re going past you. No more starting with ‘triangulation’
Nope not true. We spent $325 billion on prescription that’s almost exactly $1,000 per person/year. It is the same order saving of eliminating insurance company, if you can somehow magically drive the cost to zero. Average medical cost in the US drop form $10,300 to $9,300 still way higher than the rest of the world.
It is optimistic to think the actual cost saving will be $500 for either one. Combine the two and you maybe get $1,000/person/year saving. Now that’s still a lot of money and worth doing, but hardly a panacea.
But you actually identified the big source of medical spending in the country, it is in the hospitals. The vast majority of which are not-for-profit (as is Kaiser, and a number of Blue Cross affiliates insurance companies) . It is even harder to raise money out of non-profits since you can’t tax them.
Fucking A this is my jam. Thanks for linking the Vox article.
Look who’s racist now!
I believe this is when the Secretary of Education assumes command.
The Republicans are just giddy about all of this.