/looks at tax plan and it’s -$1.5 trillion
Yeah… about that.
I think the actual rule is revenue neutral after ten years. That’s why the Bush tax cuts were designed to disappear after 10 years. I think the current plan is to remove the individual tax cuts for middle-income people in 2027, but keep the corporate and high-income tax cuts.
Here’s an excellent Vox video on the cost and price of health care in the US. Without using any fancy econ terms like inelastic demand, Ezra lays out the big picture problem with health cost and price in the US. It’s really quite good, and something that a person without a lot of econ knowledge can understand easily. This video is a good example of something you could send to friends and relatives who are “liberal-curious” on health care and give them some good info.
Not a bad video but… He starts of showing show public vs private spending and shows that private spending exceeds public spending. But here is the thing, last time I ran the numbers about 110-125 million out of 326 were covered entirely by the public systems. There are some folks like Veterans which are often covered by both, and how Medicare advantage spending is it treated (public or private) is a mystery to me.
So simply showing that we spend more in private spending doesn’t make his case that US government is more efficient at delivering health care than the private sector. What matter is the per capita spending. I’ve previously posted data (like all healthcare data it needs salt), that showed single payer, single providers system like the VA had the highest per capita spending, Social Security was modestly above the average $10,300 and Medicaid was slightly below.
Now as it was pointed out, it is also not fair to compare the cost of seniors, and veterans health care and the population at whole. I’ll readily agree that other countries governments provide the same or better healthcare than the private sector in the US. It just that I’ve not seen good data that shows the same thing is true in the US.
Just for grins, I looked at military spending per armed force personal. Once again the US tops the list $460K vs $250K France, Germany and $380K UK and Russia at $70K. I’d say that in this case the money the US government is well spent, so not everything the US government spends is wasteful.
Yeah that comparison of public versus private sector in the US was both inaccurate and somewhat disingenuous, so I will give Ezra Klein 10 demerits for that. However, I do think the overall point is correct and the video is helpful.
What that chart really shows is that the US is bad at controlling health care prices, full stop. We really need systemic reform to properly take on the health care pricing issue.
The Trump plan to torpedo Obamacare is working well I see,
Our 2017 plan is no longer offered and the “equivalent” plan is 50% more expensive and has FAR worse coverage.
The market is now saturated with “basic” plans that give people the “freedom” to choose coverage so worthless that it was inadmissible under Obamacare previously,
Fuckers.
SMBC has a big long comic up today that’s basically just a blog post about how the current US system is screwing small business owners in their neck of the woods. Massive costs, only one provider, rules that make no sense for subsidies. No surprise to those of us who have been following the policy, but this may reach a good number of people who haven’t been.
Collins looks pretty weak over this whole thing, IMHO. She’s clearly trying to stay middle enough to keep Maine voters and her donors both happy, but all it really looks like is that she’s A) dumb enough to believe McConnell’s promises and B) doesn’t understand how insurance works.
I’m sure Reddit will save us.
This is awful reporting on CNN’s part.
We do need some organization to protect us from ineffective and/or sham treatments.like laetrile cancer treatment, that ended up cost desperate people billions and killing lots of them.
Given that they did approve a more expensive treatment for her, it is not clear at all it is about saving Aetna money.
Good reporting would have been CNN calling up other insurance companies and seeing if they covered the treatment, along with investigating if it is been covered by Medicare, VA, and medicaid in various states.
For any type of treatment, there is a S-shaped adoption curve. It sounds like from Aetna description that we are pretty early in the cycle. It is easy reporting to make the insurance company look like the bad guy, and making life horrible for this pretty young girl.
Agreed. The other little tidbit hidden in the article was that the new procedure seems to work about 50% of the time whereas the the more invasive, more expensive, approved procedure works about 70% of the time.
I’m pretty sure laser ablation is not yet FDA-approved for epilepsy, it was only authorized for investigational use last year. And all insurance companies are reluctant to pay for experimental therapy, for obvious reasons.
So, yeah, garbage reporting by CNN.
Karma’s a bitch:
Well it does prove his thesis though. He said people who lead good lives, and Mo Brooks is very much the cowering GOPer who has not.
I’m sure he’s rather glad that he has a government-funded health insurance plan now.
I really hate the half-assed way we passed Obamacare. My son talked to me last night. He hardly earns any money, and since we’re in Virginia, a state that didn’t expand Medicaid, he doesn’t qualify for that. And he only has 5 plans from which to choose - the cheapest of which is $278 a month (with a $6000 deductible!!). I don’t know what he is going to do except just go without insurance.
Is it possible to get halfway decent health insurance by going out and dealing with companies individually, not using the Marketplace? He doesn’t need much, but if he goes without all I’ll do the next year is worry about him getting into a car accident and ending up with thousands and thousands of dollars in hospital bills he can’t pay.
Agree. While it has helped the healthcare crisis somewhat it is still a shitty law made much much worse by Republicans this past 12 months.
We needed and still need universal government run and tax payer paid healthcare like the rest of the civilized world. Its not difficult and a helluva a lot cheaper than the present and past clusterfuck of private healthcare in the USA.
Obamacare is less bad than before and obviously infinitely superior to the Republican “just go ahead and die” plan but its still bad. We can and need to do much better when Democrats have a super majority. Literally many peoples lives depend on it.
I don’t know the Virginia market, but yes it’s possible. Of course, the best scenario is to get subsidized health care from either a company or the state.
I’ve had Cadillac employer-based health insurance and then the very-expensive post-layoff Cobra equivalent. The confusions, frustrations, surprise bills, headaches, unexpected denials of coverage, etc., that my wife and I have had to deal with are almost too numerous to mention. And we have never been without coverage. It is our top expenditure priority after rent.
Point is, even if you’re covered, our system is a massive stress-inducing shitshow. It’s broken and it needs to be fixed, but because our government has evolved past the naivete of actually governing, I fear it won’t be.