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It's not just about how much in taxes you would pay; it's about the risk of you actually getting quality care for what you are forced to pay in taxes. The risk

It's not just about how much in taxes you would pay; it's about the risk of you actually getting quality care for what you are forced to pay in taxes. The risk of that care not being adequate is significant...consider that Bernie Sanders is Chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee which oversaw people dying in waiting room floors of VA hospitals. Sanders originally tried to blame the Koch brothers for this episode instead of fixing it. The voters had very little recourse like they do in the free market where they can just go to a different healthcare provider, because they are forced to pay taxes for the VA hospitals either way. The same goes for the Flint water issue in Michigan as well. The citizens of Flint are being forced to pay for water that they can't drink or use, and they were lied to about the risks it posed to their health for almost a year before the truth came out. This is the real risk you face with any government program, regardless of how little a tax calculator website will tell you it is going to cost you.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>The voters had very little recourse like they do in the free market where they can just go to a different healthcare provider, because they are forced to pay taxes for the VA hospitals either way. The average voter does not have enough income to have an actual choice. The way it goes is that you pick your GP from a list (so you have a little bit of choice there), and when you have a significant issue, your GP works with a specialist and your insurance company to decide if you qualify for any further care. You can get it without the insurance helping you, but you are risking bankruptcy doing such. As it stands, other countries spend less on health care with better outcomes. So we can definitely improve the system. That being said, I'll support privatized healthcare if we can get the same done for police care and CPS. If you don't like the people protecting you, then you can get seek out new ones.
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  Here's a program for market-based healthcare reform: 1. Eliminate incentives for employer-based insurance. Give legal protection to insurance cooperatives, where individual people could come together to buy insurance as a group. 2. Eliminate restrictions on buying insurance across state lines. This will take care of state-level regulations that drive costs up. 3. Eliminate artificial caps on the number of seats in medical schools, currently set by the AMA with government backing. 4. Loosen other requirements for medical licensure, like four years of undergraduate study in a totally unrelated program. Why are the people of America paying for Doctors' underwater basket-weaving courses? This and the previous point are a political minefield, so you can accomplish mostly the same by letting Nurses or Physicians Assistants to do most or all of a doctor's job. People can still choose to spend more on AMA-approved doctors, but it should be their own prerogative with their own money. 5. Institute an (at least initially) government-backed catastrophic insurance program for when people have ridiculous amounts of medical bills that they can't afford. This is probably what the market would have produced over the last century if not for government meddling. 6. High-deductible plans + health savings accounts are actually a pretty good idea. It puts people directly on the hook for their routine medical expenses, so they shop around and find lower prices. Milton Friedman wrote a great piece with some of these ideas in 2001: http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archives/2001winter/article1.html http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archives/2001winter/article...
  - bmelton 11y ago
    Allow the FDA to recognize drug approvals already approved in other comparable countries. Eliminate Certificate of Need programs for the establishment of new hospitals. Along with your #3, you could work to increase the number of fellowships that doctors use to restrict the supply of doctors ready to replace them. Make HSA dollars be giftable, and/or don't allow them to be use it or lose it. Make all medical spending be tax-free.
mtgx 11y ago
Right now there are still 29 million who are not covered and most of them probably never will be because it will be too expensive. And the current system doesn't cover everything for most people who are insured. Single-payer would cover everything from drug addiction to mental issues to cancer. How many families go bankrupt from having to deal with things like cancer? And prescription drugs are too expensive, and currently Obama is trying to make that a reality all over the world, not just in the US, thanks to TPP and TTIP. Obama was also the one who banned Americans from buying cheaper meds from Canada to maintain Big Pharma's monopoly in the US. Not sure I understand about going to a different healthcare provider. You can still go to a different hospital if one is too full.
- bsbechtel 11y ago
  Yeah, but if there is only one insurer - the U.S. Government, if they deny your claim, you can't choose a new insurer next year.
deleted 11y ago
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wrong_variable 11y ago
Bernie never spoke about banning private healthcare. I find it amusing you think there is a free market for healthcare in the US. Bernie's main idea is to destroy all forms of monopoly in various industries in the US - banks,healthcare. It's no different than state capitalism ( in USSR ). Bernie is not against the free market. He wants single payer to leverage the free market in healthcare which is dominated by big players on the supply side. You as an individual are free to afford whatever you want. But the govt's concern is improve the standard of living for the average citizen. And all of the world it has been proven time and again that single payer is the best system - empirically. So any arguments you make without any data but on some notion of "choice" will not be as convincing - sorry.
- jeremyt 11y ago
  Bernie's whole plan is predicated on eliminating private health insurance. In order to achieve the "savings" that he promises, he needs to be able to go to doctors and hospitals and say "take this, or you get nothing". Without that bargaining power, he'll just push the entire health care industry private. That's already happening with Obamacare now (reference all of the health insurance companies stating they are considering withdrawing from the exchanges).
  - notahacker 11y ago
    Not really. Private health insurance and fully private hospital care exists in most (all?) states with full state-sponsored medical coverage. Ultimately, if people don't have to pay for health insurance any more, a huge proportion won't. Which means the state becomes the single largest buyer of healthcare, probably bigger than all the other players put together, and so should be able to get better value for healthcare than the private companies ever did. Better cheap treatments than a half-empty hospital. And a state health insurer also doesn't need to advertise itself to consumers or pay shareholders, so it should come out ahead even if it's unable to pay any less per treatment than the private companies. Of course, it's still dire for the health insurers because their customer base shrinks massively when private health insurance becomes a luxury to get people more expensive and faster specialist treatment as opposed to the only way to be able to afford to not die from expensively treatable ailments. But there's no reason to assume that some/most wouldn't continue to provide the option of more expensive and more exclusive healthcare for those that don't trust the publicly funded system or want to beat the queue.
hackuser 11y ago
> The voters had very little recourse like they do in the free market where they can just go to a different healthcare provider Many have no healthcare providers. > It's not just about how much in taxes you would pay; it's about the risk of you actually getting quality care for what you are forced to pay in taxes. Americans face the same risk now. Many Americans have no effective access to health care, and, for example, hospital error is a leading cause of death (as of a few years ago, at least). The rest of the rich world manages to implement national health care systems, pay (very roughly) half of what Americans pay, and get the same results - much better because all of their citizens receive health care. It seems unbelievable to me to suggest that the U.S. couldn't do the same. Why would anyone insist on paying twice as much for a worse product? It is really a choice of dogmatic ideology over rationality.
deleted 11y ago
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Lawtonfogle 11y ago

>The voters had very little recourse like they do in the free market where they can just go to a different healthcare provider, because they are forced to pay taxes for the VA hospitals either way. The average voter does not have enough income to have an actual choice. The way it goes is that you pick your GP from a list (so you have a little bit of choice there), and when you have a significant issue, your GP works with a specialist and your insurance company to decide if you qualify for any further care. You can get it without the insurance helping you, but you are risking bankruptcy doing such. As it stands, other countries spend less on health care with better outcomes. So we can definitely improve the system. That being said, I'll support privatized healthcare if we can get the same done for police care and CPS. If you don't like the people protecting you, then you can get seek out new ones.

marcoperaza 11y ago
Here's a program for market-based healthcare reform: 1. Eliminate incentives for employer-based insurance. Give legal protection to insurance cooperatives, where individual people could come together to buy insurance as a group. 2. Eliminate restrictions on buying insurance across state lines. This will take care of state-level regulations that drive costs up. 3. Eliminate artificial caps on the number of seats in medical schools, currently set by the AMA with government backing. 4. Loosen other requirements for medical licensure, like four years of undergraduate study in a totally unrelated program. Why are the people of America paying for Doctors' underwater basket-weaving courses? This and the previous point are a political minefield, so you can accomplish mostly the same by letting Nurses or Physicians Assistants to do most or all of a doctor's job. People can still choose to spend more on AMA-approved doctors, but it should be their own prerogative with their own money. 5. Institute an (at least initially) government-backed catastrophic insurance program for when people have ridiculous amounts of medical bills that they can't afford. This is probably what the market would have produced over the last century if not for government meddling. 6. High-deductible plans + health savings accounts are actually a pretty good idea. It puts people directly on the hook for their routine medical expenses, so they shop around and find lower prices. Milton Friedman wrote a great piece with some of these ideas in 2001: http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archives/2001winter/article1.html http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archives/2001winter/article...
- bmelton 11y ago
  Allow the FDA to recognize drug approvals already approved in other comparable countries. Eliminate Certificate of Need programs for the establishment of new hospitals. Along with your #3, you could work to increase the number of fellowships that doctors use to restrict the supply of doctors ready to replace them. Make HSA dollars be giftable, and/or don't allow them to be use it or lose it. Make all medical spending be tax-free.

mtgx 11y ago

Right now there are still 29 million who are not covered and most of them probably never will be because it will be too expensive. And the current system doesn't cover everything for most people who are insured. Single-payer would cover everything from drug addiction to mental issues to cancer. How many families go bankrupt from having to deal with things like cancer? And prescription drugs are too expensive, and currently Obama is trying to make that a reality all over the world, not just in the US, thanks to TPP and TTIP. Obama was also the one who banned Americans from buying cheaper meds from Canada to maintain Big Pharma's monopoly in the US. Not sure I understand about going to a different healthcare provider. You can still go to a different hospital if one is too full.

bsbechtel 11y ago
Yeah, but if there is only one insurer - the U.S. Government, if they deny your claim, you can't choose a new insurer next year.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

wrong_variable 11y ago

Bernie never spoke about banning private healthcare. I find it amusing you think there is a free market for healthcare in the US. Bernie's main idea is to destroy all forms of monopoly in various industries in the US - banks,healthcare. It's no different than state capitalism ( in USSR ). Bernie is not against the free market. He wants single payer to leverage the free market in healthcare which is dominated by big players on the supply side. You as an individual are free to afford whatever you want. But the govt's concern is improve the standard of living for the average citizen. And all of the world it has been proven time and again that single payer is the best system - empirically. So any arguments you make without any data but on some notion of "choice" will not be as convincing - sorry.

jeremyt 11y ago
Bernie's whole plan is predicated on eliminating private health insurance. In order to achieve the "savings" that he promises, he needs to be able to go to doctors and hospitals and say "take this, or you get nothing". Without that bargaining power, he'll just push the entire health care industry private. That's already happening with Obamacare now (reference all of the health insurance companies stating they are considering withdrawing from the exchanges).
- notahacker 11y ago
  Not really. Private health insurance and fully private hospital care exists in most (all?) states with full state-sponsored medical coverage. Ultimately, if people don't have to pay for health insurance any more, a huge proportion won't. Which means the state becomes the single largest buyer of healthcare, probably bigger than all the other players put together, and so should be able to get better value for healthcare than the private companies ever did. Better cheap treatments than a half-empty hospital. And a state health insurer also doesn't need to advertise itself to consumers or pay shareholders, so it should come out ahead even if it's unable to pay any less per treatment than the private companies. Of course, it's still dire for the health insurers because their customer base shrinks massively when private health insurance becomes a luxury to get people more expensive and faster specialist treatment as opposed to the only way to be able to afford to not die from expensively treatable ailments. But there's no reason to assume that some/most wouldn't continue to provide the option of more expensive and more exclusive healthcare for those that don't trust the publicly funded system or want to beat the queue.

hackuser 11y ago

> The voters had very little recourse like they do in the free market where they can just go to a different healthcare provider Many have no healthcare providers. > It's not just about how much in taxes you would pay; it's about the risk of you actually getting quality care for what you are forced to pay in taxes. Americans face the same risk now. Many Americans have no effective access to health care, and, for example, hospital error is a leading cause of death (as of a few years ago, at least). The rest of the rich world manages to implement national health care systems, pay (very roughly) half of what Americans pay, and get the same results - much better because all of their citizens receive health care. It seems unbelievable to me to suggest that the U.S. couldn't do the same. Why would anyone insist on paying twice as much for a worse product? It is really a choice of dogmatic ideology over rationality.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]