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My ultimate goal is to have everyone covered under a federal plan which would provide, at the very least, catastrophic coverage and free preventative care.
Catastrophic is anything life-threatening or permanently disabling right? And preventive is pretty much everything else. Unless you'd care to specify what is altogether excluded from these two categories, I think we have to assume it's all-inclusive.
And they'd pay premiums for this insurance, if they could afford it. Otherwise they'd get subsidies to pay for it, which would be paid for out of the general tax revenue.
This is all going in the same direction, which is what I articulated. Over time, fewer and fewer people are responsible for more and more of the funding responsibility, leaving people poorer, more desperate/helpless and more reliant on the contributions of others to meet their needs. Meanwhile, nothing is implemented to suppress the actual cost of medical care.
People aren't going to care any more or less just because they're on a government plan. What's important, as far as getting people to care about the costs, is the deductible. And I would support higher deductibles for government plans (although I'd waive them for people who couldn't afford them).
You make people pay pricier and pricier premiums, as well as larger deductibles, until they can't afford it and then you waive the requirement. This is exactly as I described in my previous post. "Make them poor enough to need us."
Is there any conceivable scenario in which a person would be denied care? Of any kind? If not, this sounds like universal care, which we already have by virtue of our promise to treat anyone who shows up, and the glaring problem with universally guaranteed care is that it inherently fails to control for the rising cost of medical care, and heaps the burden onto an ever smaller group of people.
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