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Comments
1. Phase out Medicare
2. TBD
3. Freedom
Oh, plus sex workers. Legal or at least decriminalized in many western countries. 1%ers and politicians in other countries wanna enjoy their hookers & rent boys without risk of arrest!
They'd rather destroy the whole freaking KKKountry than help someone who's poorer and darker-skinned than they are.
Add a safety net for the poor and unemployed (this would the remnants of Medicaid), and let young people who get sick borrow tax-free against future earnings regardless of credit status.
It's the perfect Republican solution that actually makes sense. but you'll never hear it from the likes of Jeb! or the rest of the GOP. Why? Because it puts their lobbyist buddies from the insurance companies in the unemployment line, and it involves at least one mandate, which of course is unheard of in America *cough*carinsurance*cough*.
Keep at it boys.
I prefer the Underwear Gnomes plan (which incidentally was also the GOP plan for the Iraq War) :
1) Phase out Medicare.
2) ?
3) Profit!
That's precisely the point - it doesn't. Even if you start putting into a HSA in your early 20's, there's still a very good chance you won't have enough accrued by your 60's or even 70's to cover truly catastrophic procedures such as chemo/radiation, organ replacement, or cutting edge genetic-based treatments, so you'll still either have to sell all your worldly goods, or rely on the generosity of friends and family. And heavens forfend you get sick in your 30's or 40's, because then you're well-and-truly screwed. But, according to the GOP that's the price you should pay for having the moral depravity to get sick in the first place.
Harvest away - that's what I say! (yes, I know Raindrip's premise is inherently flawed, but I thought I would respond in a way that was equally simple-minded, but on the other side. )
Reference a country where they don't think of jailing stone throwers for up to 20 yrs for your example next time, maybe.
Most doctors prescribing medications don't have a clue what they cost. They don't know and they don't care. They prescribe what they think will work best. How is a patient supposed to exercise market choices in that kind of situation?
Market forces work great for commodities that are plentiful, easy to understand and compare. Market forces have already proven to be very ineffective in health care, where even the medical professionals don't know the cost of treatment.
Finally, if market forces worked, we should have pretty cost effective medicine already. We don't. Canada and all European countries with single-payer systems provide better health care for less money than the US.
It can't be because there's a lot of money to be made in covering the young and able-bodied, is it? And because those companies making all that money contribute heavily to the GOP? After all, one man's inefficiency reductions is another man's lost profits.
Here, watch "Why Are American Health Care Costs So High?"
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qSjGouBmo0M
It's a fairly short video and it'll give you a completely new perspective on that whole "preserves market forces - i.e. competition and consumer choice - driving prices down" thing.
(Sorry for the rotten mood; I've been hearing a lot of ghastly evopsych LMB-worthy stuff this evening that would be quite adequate grounds for suicide if I believed a tenth of it.)
Insurance has one price component for expected risk, and one for the variance in that risk. Lets forget for a moment about he factor for the greed of the executives. The larger the pool the lower the need for the variance protection. Law of Large Numbers. So to take things to the logical conclusion, single payer is the only way to minimize the cost of providing risk management. And it is trivial to show that this solution delivers pareto optimality and maximizes social benefit or minimized social cost.
This isn't liberal clap trap thinking, it was I fucking learned at University of Chicago when I was still a conservative "George Bush" republican. This was or less on on the first day of Micro form Nobel Winning Economist Gary Becker. The protege of Milton Friedman. I mean this is as fucking conservative an idea as is fucking possible.
.But just as I lost the wool over my eyes and realized that the conservative agenda I was being force fed was all bullshit, conservatives for got about this little lesson. The result today is I am happily bisexual, my wife and I are swingers, my conscious is clear that I support and agenda to the left of Bernie Sanders and I realize my privileged status. The fucking conservatives , on the other hand, found Jebus and and are committed to a fuck the unlucky economy. And HSA's are just that. There is no smaller pool than an HSA. GUess wrong or get cancer young and you're fucked. Just like you were if you had a lot of stocks in your IR and planned to retire in 2010. Fuck you for not being in the 1%
Great book on the topic: Catastrophic Care by David Goldhill
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/034580273X…
The prurient ape's defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.”
Yes it is a bloody business but it is the 3rd oldest profession. Right after prostitution, and motherhood.
Do we harvest the results of infanticide of course we do. Sometimes years after the result see the industrial prison complex. Or more commonly the military, there is a reason we call it an "infant"ry That's Capitalism we monetize everything.