WARREN BUFFETT: SINGLE PAYER IS ‘THE BEST SYSTEM’ FOR AMERICA

[Proud Tiger 4,261]

1 hour ago, TexasTiger said:

What did you have?

What I wanted by choice.

[DKW 86 7,438]

Just now, AU64 said:

Did you miss the 40 Trillion dollars ?  ....and that's for a program that people like me have been contributing toward for their entire working lives?   ACA started from scratch paying benefits to people who never contributed anything toward their coverage.  The future cost is incalculable.  Whole different ballgame IMO.

And you do now that every other country in the world does this right? What are you going to say to the 25 yo mom with a kid with luekemia? How about a man that is 55 worked all his life but his company cuts its insurance so the CEO can get a newer home in Aspen? Suck it?

I am sorry, if we can bailout the 1-Freakin-%ers in 2008, we can bailout the Middleclass too. 

[TexasTiger 12,992]

3 minutes ago, Proud Tiger said:

What I wanted by choice.

No medicare? VA?

[DKW 86 7,438]

4 minutes ago, TexasTiger said:

No medicare? VA?

I am trying to convince people that we can get by on Medicare and you go bring up the VA. Likely THE WORST RUN agency of the Federal Govt. <smdh>

[TexasTiger 12,992]

9 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

I am trying to convince people that we can get by on Medicare and you go bring up the VA. Likely THE WORST RUN agency of the Federal Govt. <smdh>

Medicare for all! Supplement insurance for those who want more options.

[AU64 10,122]

30 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

And you do now that every other country in the world does this right? What are you going to say to the 25 yo mom with a kid with luekemia? How about a man that is 55 worked all his life but his company cuts its insurance so the CEO can get a newer home in Aspen? Suck it?

I am sorry, if we can bailout the 1-Freakin-%ers in 2008, we can bailout the Middleclass too. 

And wonder where the money comes from?...maybe those personal income tax rates of + / -50% ...even for middle class workers...and of course the VAT / Sales taxes that run up to 20%.  

Let's try to pass some tax increases of sufficient effectiveness to pay for this coverage and see what happens.   There is no free lunch....people can have anything they are willing to pay for...that's the real world we live in .....not some dream world where a bunch of 1%ers are going to support the other 99 %.  .

 

And in Europe, things are not always what they seem...

http://www.howtogermany.com/pages/healthinsurance.html

[Proud Tiger 4,261]

32 minutes ago, TexasTiger said:

No medicare? VA?

As I said my choice.

[TexasTiger 12,992]

Just now, Proud Tiger said:

As I said my choice.

Man of mystery-- weirdly mysterious.

[Proud Tiger 4,261]

So not wanting to air out my personal info on a public board is weird. YOU have weird way of thinking.

[homersapien 11,425]

3 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

What did you have?

Luck and charity. 

[homersapien 11,425]

5 hours ago, AuburnNTexas said:

Single payer, Obamacare, the current Republican plan basically they are systems to make sure that medical costs are paid none of them really address why Medicine in the US is so much more expensive than in other countries. Single payer does remove a layer of cost the insurance companies but that comes with a couple of things. The Bureaucracy that the Government will have to put in place to replace what Insurance companies are doing and even thought you may not realize it. The Insurance companies negotiate with Medical providors to keep the costs down.  Now the government will have to do the same negotiating.

Next how is the government going to get the money to pay the medical costs. Are they going to require companies over a certain size to pay about the same amount to the government instead of to the Insurance Provider.  So would each of us also pay a tax/fee to government based on our Salary.  

There will be rationing of medical care. There already is to an extent as insurance companies ration care now. To keep costs down you have to ration it more than now.  We have different issues with medical care in rural areas because of small population and large distances there is often a lack of Doctors and facilities. In Suburban areas we often have way to may beds and way to many facilities Medical Equipment like MRI machines are very expensive to defray cost you need to use them on a regular bases but today since we have more of these expensive machines than needed. We use them less so the company charges more for each use to recoup their costs. You would think the marketplace would cover this but it hasn't. If we did single payer the government would do this. Often cutting down the number of facilities to the point of long waitings lists. Ask the Canadians.  I don't have a solution but I have seen the issues.

 

Our whole approach needs to be changed.  We need to abandon the current fee-for-service (procedure)  - in which no one has an incentive to reduce cost - and replace it with a outcomes-based system.

I don't think it's possible to do that outside of a single payer system.

[TitanTiger 20,509]

Somehow ever other major industrialized nation on earth finds a way to do this and pay less per person on health care than we do, but if the US does it, costs will skyrocket and you'll wait 8 years for an appendectomy.  Go figure.

[TexasTiger 12,992]

8 minutes ago, TitanTiger said:

Somehow ever other major industrialized nation on earth finds a way to do this and pay less per person on health care than we do, but if the US does it, costs will skyrocket and you'll wait 8 years for an appendectomy.  Go figure.

Interesting folks have more confidence than some many countries than our own.

[DKW 86 7,438]

Elizabeth Warren: ‘The next step is single-payer’ health care

Explaining myself. I loved my old healthcare. But ole 'If you like your plan/doctor, you can keep your plan/doctor" was just a lie to pass a fair to middling half assed attempt at NH. Many of yall know I worked 2-3 jobs while my daughter was in college. I worked for a national auto parts store, one of the two biggest, as a part timer. I honestly worried about my co-workers. These were excellent people that had been so marginalized by Lean Philosophy that their medical plan looked like, "Go to the hospital, File bankruptcy." I am not kidding here. Anything other than minor medical trips to the Doctor or ER was going to break you financially. They had insurance, but nothing worth talking about if you really got sick. I wondered and yes even talked with my God about these folks because guess what? Cancer happens. Car wrecks happen. Stuff happens. These salt of the earth folks were and are getting shafted. Now, we as college educated men and women have been lead to sneer down on them as less intelligent than us, less capable. and therefore screw them. I am no longer that way. All jobs, all honest hard work should be honored for being just that: honest hard work. No honest, hard working American should be forced to live in fear of the day they get sick and everything they worked for getting destroyed. that is not right. Everyone that does honest hard work, not the free loaders, should have good to great medical care. If their employers cannot get it for them, the Federal Govt must step in and provide some base level care for all. The rest of us can option up as we can afford to do.  

You should not have to go thru life in an honest, hard working profession and still have crap-for-nothing healthcare. We need some fairness in the world. The 1%ers have had it their way too long. Trickle down no longer works, if it ever did. 

You folks that think that "well, you get what you earn." BS. Ask the people at Enron if they got what they earned. There are so many times and examples of the middle class playing by the rules and a couple of people with sharp lawyers screwing everyone. It is time we in the middle class took care of ourselves. We arent asking for the moon. We are asking for fairness and dignity when it comes to health care. That is all.

[TitanTiger 20,509]

8 hours ago, Proud Tiger said:

So not wanting to air out my personal info on a public board is weird. YOU have weird way of thinking.

No one was asking for your medical history and Social Security number.  Don't make a point of your own experience as part of your argument if you can't be bothered to explain it even in general terms.

[Strychnine 1,803]

The last figures I saw indicated that over $50 million had been spent on a special election here in Georgia.  $50 million, for one election.  People are debating whether or not health care should be a fundamental human right, or whether or not we can afford to provide health care for our people, while hundreds of millions of dollars are effectively wasted every election cycle on political campaigning.

[TitanTiger 20,509]

Read this today and it captures much of how I feel when this health care subject comes up and people seem ok with tens of millions not having basic health care or arguing that health care should be treated like a "want" or a luxury rather than a fundamental human right just like food, water, clothing and shelter.

 

Quote

I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People

Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society.

06/26/2017 09:57 pm ET | Updated 13 hours ago 

Like many Americans, I’m having politics fatigue. Or, to be more specific, arguing-about-politics fatigue.

I haven’t run out of salient points or evidence for my political perspective, but there is a particular stumbling block I keep running into when trying to reach across the proverbial aisle and have those “difficult conversations” so smugly suggested by think piece after think piece:

I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.

Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 percent for my fast food burger if it means the person making it for me can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.

I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I’m childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye.

If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP. Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world. If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.

I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. I cannot have one more conversation with someone who is content to see millions of people suffer needlessly in exchange for a tax cut that statistically they’ll never see (do you make anywhere close to the median American salary? Less? Congrats, this tax break is not for you).

I cannot have political debates with these people. Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters.

There are all kinds of practical, self-serving reasons to raise the minimum wage (fairly compensated workers typically do better work), fund public schools (everyone’s safer when the general public can read and use critical thinking), and make sure every American can access health care (outbreaks of preventable diseases being generally undesirable).

But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you.

I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to their fellow human beings. The fact that such detached cruelty is so normalized in a certain party’s political discourse is at once infuriating and terrifying.

The “I’ve got mine, so screw you,” attitude has been oozing from the American right wing for decades, but this gleeful exuberance in pushing legislation that will immediately hurt the most vulnerable among us is chilling.

Perhaps it was always like this. I’m (relatively) young, so maybe I’m just waking up to this unimaginable callousness. Maybe the emergence of social media has just made this heinous tendency more visible; seeing hundreds of accounts spring to the defense of policies that will almost certainly make their lives more difficult is incredible to behold.

I don’t know if what’s changed ― or indeed, if anything has ― and I don’t have any easy answers. But I do know I’m done trying to convince these hoards of selfish, cruel people to look beyond themselves.

Futility can’t be good for my blood pressure, and the way things are going, I won’t have health insurance for long.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to-you-that-you-should_us_59519811e4b0f078efd98440?utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages&utm_source=main_fb&utm_medium=facebook&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063

 

 

[bigbird 60,578]

To me, before we can move forward on healthcare there needs to be a complete restructuring of the tax system and Medicaid system(particularly trying to get beneficiaries off of it- hand up...not hand out) Otherwise, we will not be able to afford any of the options being proposed. 

As was mentioned earlier, we should be able to take the good parts of all the plans and form one good system. However, DC is too hung up on who proposed it or what side of the aisle it came from.  The ACA allowed me to put my son on my insurance and off of Medicaid. We still spend 1-2 million a month, but its not from the Medicaid pool.

[Proud Tiger 4,261]

3 hours ago, TitanTiger said:

No one was asking for your medical history and Social Security number.  Don't make a point of your own experience as part of your argument if you can't be bothered to explain it even in general terms.

With all due respect I will decide what of my personal info I choose to post here. If I break a board rule then delete the post.

[TitanTiger 20,509]

6 minutes ago, Proud Tiger said:

With all due respect I will decide what of my personal info I choose to post here. If I break a board rule then delete the post.

With all due respect, if you're going to make an argument you can't back with even the most general and vague of explanation because it's "too personal", keep it to yourself in the future.  It's a waste of everyone's time.

[Proud Tiger 4,261]

What argument did I start?

[TitanTiger 20,509]

Just now, Proud Tiger said:

What argument did I start?

You didn't "start" an argument, you made one.  Don't be dense.  You used your own personal anecdote as an opposition point to single-payer healthcare, then declined to elaborate in even the most general of ways on it when challenged.  In the future, if you're going to put forth a counterpoint/argument that you're unwilling to expound on because it's too personal, just don't bother.

[Proud Tiger 4,261]

1 minute ago, TitanTiger said:

You didn't "start" an argument, you made one.  Don't be dense.  You used your own personal anecdote as an opposition point to single-payer healthcare, then declined to elaborate in even the most general of ways on it when challenged.  In the future, if you're going to put forth a counterpoint/argument that you're unwilling to expound on because it's too personal, just don't bother.

The only thing I refused was TT's request for my ins. That wasn't required for the discussion. Over and OUT!!

[TitanTiger 20,509]

2 minutes ago, Proud Tiger said:

The only thing I refused was TT's request for my ins. That wasn't required for the discussion. Over and OUT!!

He wasn't asking for your insurance company, group number or anything of the sort.  A simple answer like "I purchased private insurance (such as Blue Cross, Aetna, United, etc)" or "I carried only a catastrophic policy for serious accidents/illnesses and paid cash for routine care" would have sufficed.  You offered nothing except "my choice."  

As I said, if that's the best you can do when inserting your two cents into a discussion, don't waste our time.

[Strychnine 1,803]

23 minutes ago, bigbird said:

To me, before we can move forward on healthcare there needs to be a complete restructuring of the tax system and Medicaid system(particularly trying to get beneficiaries off of it- hand up...not hand out) Otherwise, we will not be able to afford any of the options being proposed. 

As was mentioned earlier, we should be able to take the good parts of all the plans and form one good system. However, DC is too hung up on who proposed it or what side of the aisle it came from.  The ACA allowed me to put my son on my insurance and off of Medicaid. We still spend 1-2 million a month, but its not from the Medicaid pool.

 

While we are at it, why not shuffle a quarter (I would argue more) of military spending into providing healthcare for our people?  $150 billion should be able to make a dent.