Hospitals Stand to Lose Billions Under ‘Medicare for All’

[Moderate Right]

What a load of steaming, useless, and vapid bull ****.

Single payer is literally the only way to solve this debacle. And you know it. Deep down.

Radicals? Look who's ****ing POTUS.

There's nothing radical about health care coverage for all americans. There is nothing radical about it when you consider our foreign aid, our military bloat, the endless intervention everywhere, etc, etc.

The only thing RADICAL is those who insist we need to keep feeding a broken system, or, change that broken system back to the even more broken system that existed before.

NOTHING is impossible, and you saying so, shows us who you really are.

Your opinion noted and it is noted that it is only an opinion. I think you need to explain this to Nancy though and a whole lot of other Democrats.

 

[3leftsdoo]

What Sanders wants would benefit everyone. Healthcare is the sole reason my wife was unable to stay home and take care of our kids. Healthcare determined the outcome of my kids first few years of life. Healthcare determined where she was employed. HEalthcare offered at my company is expensive, constantly changes, has absurd networking restrictions, and is nowhere near as good as what my wife gets.

Why should my kids suffer because some rich asshole wants another yacht or some ****ing ****bag ceo wants another $10m house?

The republicans have offered NO solutions. None. Not a single thing.

What Sanders proposes helps -all-americans, a majority. No one gives a **** who their insurance company is. Companies deny coverage and cut coverage to save money and give it to shareholders.

It needs to come to an end, and now.

:applaud

 

[Deuce]

Exactly. Medicare for all relies heavily on screwing providers. I have pre-existing conditions and have talked to many others in single payer countries. They wait excessively for appointments, wait excessively while at the appointment, see nurses instead of doctors, when having issues are told to go to the emergency room because there are no appointments for months, have to travel to metropolitan areas for providers because there aren't any in rural areas, and can't receive the latest expensive medicines. The only reason why they like their health care systems is because they are basically free so they have financial peace of mind. The cold hard fact is that millions in the US are better off with our current system of employer based health insurance than they would be if we went to medicare for all. What we need to concentrate on is the people who don't have employer based insurance, which is less than 20% of Americans.


None of this even takes into account the economic devastation from basically eliminating an entire industry.

If the healthcare industry were basically eliminated we should all start praising the ****ing miracle and watch the unprecedented economic expansion as about 18 trillion dollars per year worldwide get freed up for **** that's useful.

 

[Deuce]

What Sanders wants would NOT benefit everyone. It wouldn't benefit me and it wouldn't benefit a lot of other people. Hell, many in the Democratic party realize that Medicare for all is virtually impossible. That's the trouble with you radicals. You justify in your heads that your policies will benefit everyone so you are going to cram it down everyone's throats like a mother forces their kids to take medicine.

"Virtually impossible?"

Oh man, if only we were as competent as a nation as *checks notes* ****in every other civilized nation on the planet.

It's only "virtually impossible" because business interests and right wing idiots oppose it, and the Senate is inherently structured to overrepresent rural states.

 

[Deuce]

I posted a link. As usual, both the left and the right claim that if they shove their policies down everyone's throats, it will benefit "over 90% of the population".

"70% of Americans are happy with their health insurance" does not stop them from benefiting from M4A. You brought up an utterly irrelevant, completely subjective data point.

Get us some data on health care satisfaction from people who have had a family member get seriously injured or sick. Bet you see something entirely different. It's easy to be satisfied with insurance you never have had to really use. I'm satisfied with the fire extinguisher under my sink, because I've never set my house on fire.

 

[ALiberalModerate]

Great, then you agree with me.

No I don't agree with you. Your argument seems to be that we should only do something about people that are uninsured and have no further reforms to the healthcare system.

My argument is that the healthcare system needs significant reform because the cost growth is untenable. That doesn't mean we do away with employer sponsored group plans.

 

[Obscurity]

Your opinion noted and it is noted that it is only an opinion. I think you need to explain this to Nancy though and a whole lot of other Democrats.

There's nothing radical about single payer, only to americans who are confused about what liberty is, and who blame government for absolutely everything.

 

[Deuce]

No I don't agree with you. Your argument seems to be that we should only do something about people that are uninsured and have no further reforms to the healthcare system.

My argument is that the healthcare system needs significant reform because the cost growth is untenable. That doesn't mean we do away with employer sponsored group plans.

Employer sponsored group plans are terrible though and we really should do away with them.

 

[ALiberalModerate]

Employer sponsored group plans are terrible though and we really should do away with them.

Maybe so, but there is no support for doing so.

 

[Greenbeard]

Mike Konczal writing in The Nation picks up on the politics of the point in the OP.

Thus far even the most aggressively pro-single payer folks have been hesitant to touch this issue out loud. Indeed, when pressed on what happens to workers displaced from the insurance industry they often claim they'll just get jobs on the health care provider side! Problem is their vision requires subtracting from the provider side, not adding to it. A more coherent picture of what happens next is needed.

Want to Expand Medicare? Then Answer the $5 Trillion Questions.

That’s true; over the course of 10 years, Medicare for All could save $2 trillion. But only about 20 percent of those savings would come from eliminating insurance companies, while another 10 percent would come from cost controls on prescription drugs. The remaining 70 percent would come from cutting rates for medical providers. Without those cuts, health-care spending could increase more than $3 trillion under Medicare for All. That’s a $5 trillion swing, all determined by the question of how to tackle the medical establishment.

But if the campaign fails to make the case that the prices charged by medical providers are too high, then the politics could shift against Medicare for All once the doctors start complaining. The medical establishment will insist that hospitals will close, especially in poorer areas, and without a set of responses in place, that argument could imperil the push for health-care reform.

The political instinct will be to buy off the medical establishment, even as that increases the cost of the proposal. When Aneurin Bevan, the architect of Britain’s National Health Service, was asked how he overcame the initial resistance of doctors, he replied that he “stuffed their mouths with gold.” Today, that would involve maintaining the current high rates seen in private-insurance payments.

If the answer to the first question is to keep paying doctors inflated rates, then the answer to the second question—who will bear the new taxes?—becomes even more important.