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The door to privatization of Medicare is already open with Medicare Part C.
Yes, and we vote.
Those whippersnappers who still haven't even seen their 60th. birthday don't vote in anything like the percentages that seasoned citizens do.
not like my generation will ever get to enjoy medicare or Social Security. Although we are paying in, at a higher rate than you ever did, for you current care. We won't have the same luxury with how things are shaping up. So I for one hope their chickens have come home to roost. I hope their entitlements get gutted. And they go back to dying in poverty like before WW2. This liberal republican is tired of Baby Boomers strutting in like the **** of the Walk, and ****ting all over everything and expecting to be thanked for it. Except for the Hippies, you guys are cool.
Tl: DR version. Old people voted for these ****s, so they have it coming when they send them back to dying in poverty. And when they do, all I am going to ever say to Baby Boomers "Best pull yourselves up by your bootstraps! Show me how it's done..."
Given that the oldest demographics were instrumental in giving the GOP total control of government, there is a certain logic to the sentiment that when the GOP starts to gut Medicare those reforms should apply to current beneficiaries.
So is offering an ever declining payout to potential care providers. A big difference between SNAP and Medicare is that SNAP covers 100% of the retail market price while Medicare falls well short of doing that. If SNAP offered 60% (or less) of the retail price then it would be accepted by many fewer food outlets.
Oh. The King. So what position in Chess is the current idea, where we ignore the problem that outlays will outstrip our ability to pay until the system collapses, and we are forced to start tossing seniors off nilly willy?He might try. He has, after all, championed a lot of bad ideas. He does seem to be backing off on the worst of them, so maybe he won't try to "privatize" i.e. put a cap on Medicare.
Giving seniors a fixed dollar amount with which to purchase insurance in a market where the price keeps going up and up and no one really wants to insure the most expensive demographic is the king of bad ideas.
Moreover, inelasticity of demand due to the predominance of third-party-payment systems (like current Medicare) is the main reason why we have that inflation in the first place.No insurer pays full price for medical services. Look at any EOB, they always have negotiated a lower rate. Moreover, if food had an inflation rate over over 10% a year, I would imagine that SNAP would work different than it does now.
From the opposite end of the political spectrum: agreed. Boomers made this bed, ordered this bed, insisted on this bed, and angrily refused any suggestion the bed be adjusted. Let them lay in it.I hope he does privatize medicare, because then baby boomers will stop voting against their own interests. Now that there are no safeguards or checks in place against their choices, they will finally see that the Conservative right just likes to scare them into voting their way and have little or no interest in making their lives better. Neither do the liberals, they just don't pretend to be to overly concerned like the right wing does about the elderly. "Oh veterans need this, Seniors need this, ISIS is coming to main street because they hate your freedom. Only us Warhawks that's been around a war or two can bring back the quiet terror of the Cold War your parents shielded you from as a child." Now that you've won, will you fix what you said? "Of course not, how am I supposed to win the next election if I fix it this term? They'll forget what I said in a couple years, then I'll blame the coloreds, recipe for success that is..."
So yeah, I really hope they privatize medicare. And I hope Trump starts a company through his blind trust to run the thing. And I hope they gut social security, and any other entitlement program (yes, they are entitlements because more benefits are drawn out than is paid in premium by a lot) the entitled generation has while calling mine the entitlement generation because we don't want crippling debt when we try to navigate the world they flipping created.
Aside from the hippies, who all agree with me, the Baby Boomer Generation needs an awakening in the form of a swift kick. If you can't use a computer, you should accept your usefulness to society is over and just mind your own business. If I have to explain to you five times how to login into your email, chances are I'm not going to trust your opinion on whats wrong with my generation. So let's take their social security, and their medicare. Both things instituted by seriously racist right wing democrats trying to switch the paradigm of the two party system and pick up voters from the liberal republicans.
And don't worry boomers, if you worked hard your whole life, like you claim. You should have enough money to not have to depend on the governments hand outs. If not, you can pick yourselves up by your bootstraps, which you claim to be good at, and try the job market you left us with and see how far you get. And no I don't care if you're to old or two sick, because while your drawing benefits and judging others, you don't care about the less fortunate in the slightest. In fact you blame them for most of your problems. While applauding the people who are actually sticking it to you.
It's not like my generation will ever get to enjoy medicare or Social Security. Although we are paying in, at a higher rate than you ever did, for you current care. We won't have the same luxury with how things are shaping up. So I for one hope their chickens have come home to roost. I hope their entitlements get gutted. And they go back to dying in poverty like before WW2. This liberal republican is tired of Baby Boomers strutting in like the **** of the Walk, and ****ting all over everything and expecting to be thanked for it. Except for the Hippies, you guys are cool.
Tl: DR version. Old people voted for these ****s, so they have it coming when they send them back to dying in poverty. And when they do, all I am going to ever say to Baby Boomers "Best pull yourselves up by your bootstraps! Show me how it's done..."
Moreover, inelasticity of demand due to the predominance of third-party-payment systems (like current Medicare) is the main reason why we have that inflation in the first place.
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According to multiple reports Monday evening, President-Elect Donald Trump has settled on Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) as his nominee to become Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Price, an orthopedic surgeon and Budget Committee Chair in the outgoing Congress, is an arch-critic of 'Obamacare' and a top supporter of Speaker Paul Ryan's plan to phase out Medicare and replace it with private insurance and vouchers.
On November 17th, when TPM asked Price about his timeline for moving Medicare phaseout legislation in the next Congress, Price said he did not believe it would be in the first legislation Trump and the Republican Congress would tackle in the Spring. He said he expected it would come mid-year in the second phase of the budget reconciliation process. "I think that is probably in the second phase of reconciliation, which would have to be in the FY 18 budget resolution in the first 6-8 months," Price told TPM.
Democrats have promised to oppose any effort to phase out or privatize Medicare in the next Congress.
The vast majority of medical services are not for emergency or inherently high-cost items, yet we insist that insurance cover them. That's like insisting that car insurance cover oil changes and gas refills. If your insurance bought gas for you, would you ever car pool or buy anything other than Premium? Neither would anyone else. Ask any waiter how they feel about businessmen traveling on expense accounts (they love them). Within the field of chronic care, many procedures are done defensively, rather than out of a realistic sense of need for the patient. While the latter has a critical tort reform piece to it, both of these issues are primarily solvable by returning price pressure a market far too long without it.The vast majority of healthcare costs are for critical care and chronic conditions. Do you honestly think we would have less of a need for critical care and chronic conditions if we did not have Medicare and private insurers?
Oh. The King. So what position in Chess is the current idea, where we ignore the problem that outlays will outstrip our ability to pay until the system collapses, and we are forced to start tossing seniors off nilly willy?
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The vast majority of medical services are not for emergency or inherently high-cost items, yet we insist that insurance cover them. That's like insisting that car insurance cover oil changes and gas refills. If your insurance bought gas for you, would you ever car pool or buy anything other than Premium? Neither would anyone else. Ask any waiter how they feel about businessmen traveling on expense accounts (they love them). Within the field of chronic care, many procedures are done defensively, rather than out of a realistic sense of need for the patient. While the latter has a critical tort reform piece to it, both of these issues are primarily solvable by returning price pressure a market far too long without it.
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You are confusing visits with overall costs though.
Yes, the majority of healthcare services are delivered via routine visits. This is because more people are apt to see their doctor each year for routine care than to visit the hospital. However, that is not where the majority of costs are.
http://www.nihcm.org/pdf/DataBrief3 Final.pdf
HSAs are going to do nothing to curb overall health spending
For example, I am 40 years old. I have been an avid runner my entire adult life. I have ate a strict whole foods diet my entire adult life. I have strength trained regularly my entire adult life. My routine healthcare for my entire life thus far has been just a few hundred dollars a year on average, and that is before insurance so my out of pocket has been much less. Back in August, while out riding my road bike over my lunch hour a woman that was looking at her cell phone rather than at the road plowed into me from behind at 40 mph while I was stopped at a stoplight. It resulted in a broken back, broken ribs, broken scapula, bleeding on the brain, a tear in my face extending to the skull and other injuries. As a result I spent 2 days in ICU and 4 days in the hospital. Had I not been in such good shape and health I would have been in the hospital much longer and it quite possibly would have killed me. Nonetheless, just 4 days in the hospital resulted in $50,000 in medical bills. So here I was a guy that was doing everything right in terms of my health and yet just one accident resulted in much more health spending than a lifetime of routine care had. That is the problem with thinking that consumer driven plans will drive down overall health spending / inflation in this country. Its the big stuff that's the problem and you can't address those costs with a HSA plan.
No, I wasn't, but I wasn't drawing the point out clearly, for which I apologize. The healthcare market is dominated by services that are neither emergency nor inherently high cost. Hence, measures that return price-pressure to the healthcare market by allowing insurance to function as insurance will have broad effect.
The same would continue to be true of car insurance, for example, if we switched from the hypothetical in which everyone gets gas, but a few people get into car wrecks with $500,000 liabilities due to deaths, to the system we have today where car insurance covers only those catastrophic costs.
Correct. As your source does an excellent job of highlighting, the majority of costs are concentrated among our Medicare-using elderly, particularly at the end of life. Generically speaking, we aren't paying $300,000 to give a 40 year old mother of three a chance an even shot at another 40 years, but rather $500,000 to give a 85 year old less of a chance at another 9-18 months.
Now, at some point, we lose the ability to fund ever-more-expensive care for ever-reducing odds of diminishing returns. The decisions about that point can either be made by a government body deciding that your life is no longer worth spending money on (as occurs in single-payer healthcare systems), or it can be a decision made by patients and their doctors.
But so long as price is no object, we will continue to pay every skyrocketing costs for an ever more sclerotic system that focuses ever more resources where they do the least good, while raising prices for those who can least afford it.
Interesting. How do you then account for the fact that they have already done so?
I don't have a WSJ subscription, so I cannot read it. However, I would point out that it is an Op/Ed.
The Commonwealth Fund looked at HSA's and found the following:
Patients' Use of Information Alone Is Not Likely to Dramatically Reduce Health Care Costs or Improve Quality
It is unrealistic to expect that patient financial incentives, even if better information is available, will lead to dramatic improvements in quality and efficiency.
Most health care costs are incurred by people who are very ill, often in emergencies. Ten percent of the sickest patients account for about 70 percent of all health care spending.
Payers, federal and state governments, accrediting organizations, and professional societies are much better positioned to insist on high quality and efficiency.
Health Savings Accounts and High-Deductible Health Plans: Why They Won't Cure What Ails U.S. Health Care - The Commonwealth Fund
This makes perfect sense as even high deductible plans are obligated to cover chronic and catastrophic care and that is what accounts for the majority of our health spending.
continued...
No... HSA's come married to Catastrophic Health Insurance Plans, which are designed to A) give you lower premiums while B) covering precisely that kind of incident.
No, I wasn't, but I wasn't drawing the point out clearly, for which I apologize. The healthcare market is dominated by services that are neither emergency nor inherently high cost. Hence, measures that return price-pressure to the healthcare market by allowing insurance to function as insurance will have broad effect.
Car insurance is not comparable to how health insurance must work at all
For example, when you buy a new car, your car is insured for the fair market value of the car.
That value year by year and thus the amount the car is insured for reduces year by year. Moreover, the insurer caps overall costs to the value of the car.
If health insurance worked the way car insurance works, then your insurer would determine a fair market value for your life and not insure you for a cent more. The older you got, the less your life's value would be, thus the lower your policy limit.
1. Originally in the ACA there was a provision for doctor's to be reimbursed for time they spent with patients for end of life planning. That was derided as "death panels" by Palin and many other opponents of the ACA.
2. If you leave those decisions between the patients and their doctors, then that is exactly the system we have now.
Interesting. How do you then account for the fact that they have already done so?
I don't have a WSJ subscription, so I cannot read it. However, I would point out that it is an Op/Ed.
The Commonwealth Fund looked at HSA's and found the following:
Health Savings Accounts and High-Deductible Health Plans: Why They Won't Cure What Ails U.S. Health Care - The Commonwealth Fund
Even if we switched to HSA's and High Deductible Plans, once you exceeded the amount of the deductible then there would be no financial incentive at all for a patient to spend less at the end of their life as the insurer is the one that is on the hook for the bills.
My wife works at a Corporate / Insurance Defense firm. She looks at medical records and bills all the time. The problem we have in this country is a neurologist can charge 5000 grand for 10 minutes of their time to glance at a CT scan. A Hepatologist might charge 3k for a couple minutes of their time to glance at a metabolic panel.
Personally I think our best bet would be to block grant all federal health spending out to the states with the strict conditions that providing coverage and health care services is all they can do with it, and let each of the states build their own systems.
Goodness. That sounds to me like consumers of these specialists’ services aren’t being very price-sensitive, and they are completely free from any competition whatsoever.
As I understand it, that is the House GOP plan for Medicaid.
You have no idea. That's Trump.