In a modern society where technology is both destroying the middle class and creating great efficiency and wealth the idea that the social safety net should be abandoned instead of expanded is insane. Now does that mean we install a national health scheme that's irrationally conceived and executed? The Republicans would have done everyone a favor by supporting a single payer system like Medicare for all rather then being on the side of higher cost for everyone with payoffs to big business and millions left out in the cold. I see young people today that are completely unprepared to wipe their ass on their own. The Republican answer seems to be to throw them into the deep end of the pool when they are sure to drown. The safety net has to be expanded but the key is how do we do it without bankrupting the country. Getting rid of it is an answer that will make us look like India 20 years ago. The family structure is falling apart. We are going to have to take on that burden through social and government agencies. The future can't be left to some fantasy of 50's values that was enforced by good blue collar jobs that no longer exists. Government is here to stay. The question is do those expenditures consistently go to the highest corporate bidder or do they go to the people who are most in need? That's what the opposition should really be about. The Republicans have it ass backwards.
I think there are some Republicans who do not support corporate welfare. But they tend to be drowned out by the majority. But yes, we all would be well served by focusing on ways to make government more effective. I have a list of things the government is doing that are just bad policy: EEOC initiatives against employer use of criminal background checks. Related to the previous item, general support for expansion of disparate treatment analysis to attack neutral local government initiatives, such as zoning (the S Ct will be ruling on this this year). HUD support for use of "service animals" for undifferentiated emotional support needs. Inadequate supervision of surveillance of private citizens. That's just for starters. And yes, the ACA's failure to incorporate a single payer makes it much more problematic. I can understand the political calculation, but the system just plain will not work as well as a result.
When you have people who think government is bad trying to run a government, you're going to get bad governing; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I mean, is it any surprise that the people who have the least belief in the ability of government to do good are the ones least capable of doing good when placed in governmental roles?
When opposition to the ACA was and is branded in themes of government run health care and socialism, a single payer system, for all its merits, was and is a politically unrealistic option.
The Democrats got destroyed in the House for the ACA as it was. It couldn't have been much worse than that. They lost the 2010 state races in enough states for the Republicans to gerrymander in unreasonable majorities probably until 2018 or so. They should have gone Single Payer and taken their lumps. The lumps came anyway.
The ACA was attacked by the Left because it originally was going to tax high end health plans that are mostly enjoyed by Union members. The elderly and wealthy attacked the ACA because they recognize they are now going to compete with the poor and lower middle class people for health care that is in short supply. Most of the opposition to the ACA is about the shortage of medical resources. People aren't going to be able to go see who ever they want, get the highest standard of care if they have to compete with more people to see those doctors and specialists. At the end of the day the ACA isn't going to insure everyone and it passed because people who have good care now are less afraid of waiting on line for care when they need it. Allowing individuals with money to buy a Medicare plan at any age and expanding Medicaid could have been done by the Democrats alone just like the ACA was done by the Democrats alone. The difference is the ACA isn't going to actually cover most of the poor and lower middle class who live in States that aren't expanding the coverage and those who have to buy individual policies will not be able to get top health care providers who will now be out of network. The President benefited from the Republicans stupidity because the shutdown and default battle took the ACA off the front page. The new budget negotiations are likely to do the same thing. Watch what happens as the implementation of the ACA moves forward. Unless the Democrats can get the votes to amend the law going forward they are going to have a tough time proving they can actually govern.
But, but, America has the greatest healthcare system in the world! That's why we spend three times as much for three-quarters of the results that the rest of the West gets! Blasphemy sirrah, you speak blasphemy. And every corporate shareholder knows it.
There is absolutely no doubt that the US has among the best health care providers, doctors, medical facilities and treatment plans for illness of any place in the world. People from all over the world travel to the US for treatment of Cancers, heart disease and other illnesses. US Cancer facilities, heart treatment centers, infertility clinics are filled with people from France, England, Germany and Japan. Those who scoff at the care available in this country are simply to stupid to realize they might need something out of the ordinary that if they died won't have a statistical impact on infant mortality or end of life survival that may have almost nothing to do with medical care and more to do with actual life style and diet a lack of guns or transportation systems that rely on private cars. Make no mistake we pay a ton more for medical care but the best medical care in the world is available in the US.
Hospitals should be allowed to turn away patients who don't have insurance. That way it is more beneficial for people to seek employment instead of sitting on their fat asses at home smoking rocks and collecting welfare.
If 25% of the people can't get access to healthcare and 50% of the rest can't get access to excellent healthcare then you don't have the world's best healthcare. BTW, if you want the worlds best healthcare for the 1% go to Switzerland hands down. They not only have all the treatments available in the US but they also have experimental treatments that you will never see made available in the US. If you want the world's best healthcare for the average citizen you cannot beat Japan and Sweden, both of whom have less than half of the infant mortality rate per capita that the US does. Both of whom have two-thirds the number of preventable deaths per capita that the US does. Don't look at the propaganda. Look at the numbers. This isn't debatable BTW. Every organization that has done a survey of the issue has found the US lagging a dozen countries in overall effectiveness and the entire western world in terms of cost to effectiveness ratio.
I agree about some of that,but there are a lot of hard working people who don't have it either. Like I've said before,if you stop giving care to illegals and letting them use the ER as a PCP,you would solve most of the problem. If you stop letting people abuse the welfare system,and live on it for life,then you force people into the work world where they have a better chance of running into legitimate paid healthcare. This country breeds and allows laziness,then tries to bandaid it somewhere else while blowing smoke up our asses
Sweden has under 10 million people, Switzerland under 8 million. What's the infant mortality of Swedish and Swiss immigrants who live in the US? The US has a multicultural society that's overall obese and has a failing family structure. Comparing health outcomes to relatively closed societies that have among the richest populations in the world isn't very convincing. Please tell me what the life expectancy of a Turkish Sanitation worker is in Sweden vs. an Italian sanitation worker in Boston. How about an obese Somali living in Basel, vs a fat Greek living in Brooklyn. Sweden and Switzerland I'll give you Norway and Lichtenstein. I would bet if we put everyone in the US on a typical 1960's Japanese diet, got rid of guns and took half the cars off the road, reduced births to 1.5 per women without doing anything else we would have less infant mortality and life expectancy would increase. Life style has way more to do with life expectancy and infant mortality than most people understand or will admit when talking about health sytems. Did you know you can increase your life expectancy by eating a better diet, exercising, not owning a gun and driving less? We need to insure more people and provide better basic health care there is no doubt about it. Health systems are only one small factor in birth and life expectancy.
Just pointing out that the US doesn't have the best healthcare system in the world, doesn't manage what we do have particularly well, and pays obscene amounts to be an average healthcare infrastructure when compared to countries that make healthcare a priority. 18.5%, that's the percentage of GDP that the US spends on healthcare, by far the largest amount in the world, and for that we get at best an average healthcare system by western or developed Asian standards. That's a far cry from best health care in the world. My hernia operation cost over $20K including $12K out of my pocket. The same procedure costs $1300 in Canada. Please...
How much did you pay out of your pocket for the hernia operation? How long did you wait? Where you satisfied with the outcome? You keep making comparisons to tiny countries with virtually no population growth. Did you know the US added 35 million people since 1990. Sweden added less than a million. We have a shortage of health care providers. When you have a shortage of providers prices tend to go up. Now we could do what other countries do and put price controls on medicine and make people wait for procedures and we may well get better statistical overall results? We don't have a private health care system and we don't have a public health care system. We have socialized medicine for the poor and elderly and private medicine for everyone else. It's not a surprise that the everyone else is fighting for limited resources. By the way US Unions did as much to undermine the ACA as insurance companies and big Pharma. The US Unions don't want people in the US to be able to get good health insurance without joining a Union. Just some of the problems this country faces in trying to put price controls and fairly allocating health resources.
Doctors should be able to terminate the lives of Medicare recipients who have used more health resources then they paid in. Let those old lazy asses get a job with benefits instead of using welfare and watching cable tv all day.
In 2010 among the employed population only 68.2 percent had health insurance offered through an employer. People who type things like ^ that are idiots.
being a crack rabbit is an expensive habit, if they have the $$$ for that then they get no sympathy for not having insurance.
Why do people feel the need to dump their uninformed opinions that they hijacked from bumper stickers into threads like this. If you don't know what you are talking about read up on it and offer something more.
You don't do enough political conversations outside your close friends is my guess. I'm 52 and what I've seen the last 4 or 5 years is enough to convince me that a solid 50% of the "informed" electorate gets canned opinions and then just spouts them on demand. The level of robotic discourse on politics and issues is at an all-time high, as the echo chambers on the left and particularly on the right discourage most attempts at independent thought.
