The American people need to stop seeing the other party as the enemy. As long as that’s in place, the parasites at the top will remain in power.
Unfortunately, it’s easy for them to create conditions to perpetuate and widen the American political schisms. And they’ve convinced both sides the common historical solutions (nationalism, limited democracy, religion) are for low IQ bigots. Things are likely too far gone.
Consider what happened with the public option in Obamacare. Both parties played a part in defeating it. The Democrats’ part was that they had 59 Senators in support, and one single dude opposed. The Republicans’ part was that they had 40 opposed and none in favor. Because a 60% majority was required, it failed.
That does not look to me like both sides are at fault and we need to think of it differently. That looks to me like Democrats are imperfect but largely aligned with what I want, whereas Republicans are resolutely in opposition.
The slain CEO was a Democrat, like many of his peers. Again, it's not about political party. Red vs Blue partisan theatre is a tool used by the united ruling class to divide the exploited classes.
Here's my semi-cooncrete mechanism. Seniors seem to love Medicare...
Every year for 10 years, reduce the age of eligibility by 1 year. At N+10, it will cover 55+.
For the next 10 years, reduce the age of eligibility by 2 years per year. At N+20, it will cover 35+.
You can also set up Medicaid to cover all children in a similar way (after all, most children have no income, so should qualify if judged on personal income rather than family income). Set a date and if you're born after that date, you get medicaid until you're 20.
At year N+20, there will be a 15 year gap for young people. Which is hopefully time enough for them to earn enough social security credits to qualify for Medicare.
And yes, medicare and medicaid taxes would have to go up. But private healthcare premiums should go down.
Rolling it out over 20 years allows for adjustments to be made as things go along. Criteria based on years is for simplicity... A better method would be increasing eligible population by 1% the first year, 1.1% the second, and so on until you're done.
If people really don't want to just pay for it socialized. Just make it possible to self pay for medicare at more ages; this is something that seniors without enough social security credits can already do. Again modulating the eligible age over time to allow for a transition without overwelming the system.
>Give me universal health care...but don't increase my taxes!
Yeah, why not? The US already spends more tax dollars per person in healthcare. The excess gets funneled to the insurance companies. There's no reason why we can't implement universal healthcare without increasing taxes.
Well, the events you are seeing unfolding is change around the established systems.
Civil disobeyance is nothing new. The fact that is is so little pronounced currently is probably a signal that there has been alignment for quite a while.
Bit when politicians do not take their jobs seriously, change finds other ways.
I thought it was because of Joe Lieberman, a Democrat turned independent, from a state that tries to bill itself as the "Insurance Capital of the World" [2]
If it had been 39 Republicans, it would have been 2 Democrats.
Obama campaigned for Joe Lieberman afterwards as an independent against Ned Lamont, who had won the Democratic primary. Lieberman tanked the public option for the Democrats, and Obama was paying his debt.
Democrats would have paid the price at the polls for getting rid of the public option. Lieberman took the hit for the rest of them; he was the cheapest, because he already publicly held right-wing positions. If they had needed another vote, they would have had to find another Democrat to risk their political career to do it. Probably with a cushy lobbyist job at a health insurer after getting voted out.
There are lots of people who get freaked out and go to the hospital for every little thing. We used to have a term for that: "hypochondriac." Now it's become socially acceptable, so you don't hear the term as much.
Everyone knows Americans pay the most for medical treatment, but the life expectancy is not that high. If you know your behavior isn't good for you, but you can't stop yourself, well, that's an addiction.
On the contrary, if the healthcare system in the US weren't such shit, more people would probably be going to primary care doctors and getting Preventative Care before it becomes an emergency, and requires a trip to the hospital.
But many people don't, because visiting a primary care / walk-in clinic / urgent care is expensive, so they ignore it, until it becomes un-ignorable. Now it's an ER visit.
> Everyone knows Americans pay the most for medical treatment, but the life expectancy is not that high.
Sure.
> If you know your behavior isn't good for you
This doesn't follow. Our healthcare system might be worse than some but that does not imply it's bad for you. That same logic would imply getting punched in the face is good for you because it's better than getting shot.
I was thinking about condensing my thoughts into a post, but I'll make one point on the issue of premiums. In the article, it says the cost of insuring a family of four is $25,000 a year. That sounds accurate to me.
I know from experience (being self-employed for a period of time and having to figure this all out myself) that if your family is healthy, you can replace all 4 full-term plans with 4 short-term plans and pay about $4,000 a year for the same coverage. The only difference, really, is that your insurance coverage ends after one year and you have to apply for it again. This used to be seen as risky, but with the ACA, someone will always be forced to insure you. So, it's not the same anymore.
That's not even all we could collectively do to solve this problem. Just imagine if all the healthy people in America just did that. I know, there aren't many healthy Americans left. And a lot of people have health insurance as part of their benefits package.
But many of those people are paying their dependents' insurance out of pocket. So, someone on a full-term plan could switch all his dependents to short-term and save about $5k per year per person. And it doesn't cause any noticeable difference to someone's coverage.
Imagine if only 1 million healthy Americans went from full-term to short-term. The health insurance industry would lose 5 billion dollars of income a year. That's not huge for a $500B industry, but it's not nothing. Corporate America sits up and starts paying attention to what's going on at ANY loss of revenue.
This is not insurance advice, but just thinking out loud. Verify everything yourself, but my point is that there's a lot everyday Americans could do to hurt these companies in their wallets. We just need to come together, share ideas, and trust ourselves and each other more than nameless, faceless companies.
Here's a goalpost for you: a healthy person should not spend more than $2,000 a year, total, on any health care related expenses. Even that number is ridiculous. But it's probably about half of what people are paying. If we all focused on that, and helped each other achieve that totally achievable goal, we'd change a lot about this rotten system.
I’m against vigilante killings because I don’t want to live in that kind of a society. But a couple days later, Anthem decided to end their insane time limits on anesthesia. I’m hoping the public’s reaction to all these events has put a bug in the ear of politicians who ran partly on the idea of “repeal the ACA”: maybe this isn’t a great time to start slashing coverage. People seem pretty upset about it right now.
I agree with your general points, but if we can trust Vox, the Anthem situation wasn't quite what people thought. The policy was to prevent overpayment to anesthesiologists, because they get paid partly by the hour and there's evidence that they tend to inflate their times. The policy would not have increased costs to patients, because of this:
> “Say there is a contract between an insurance company like Anthem and an anesthesiologist,” Garmon told Vox. “What is always in that contract is a clause that says, ‘You, the provider, agree to accept the reimbursement rules in this contract as payment in full.’ That means the provider cannot then turn around and ask [the patient] for money.”
There was also a process for anesthesiologists to apply for extra payment if surgery went extra long.
They make a larger point that the main reason Americans pay so much more for healthcare is that we pay our providers a lot more. Nations with more reasonable costs and high-quality results have controls in place to keep costs down at the provider level.
Vox might be right but under no circumstances would a company admit "hey we're changing this unpopular decision because we're personally afraid of being killed". Tying good patient outcomes to dead CEOs would be literally suicidal for Anthem execs.
They know. They don’t care because they think it doesn’t affect them. They’ve largely been right so far. But this should be their sign to fix it before discontent boils over.
Most people in positions of power realize that it's bad in some ways and good in others. It's bad in cost effectiveness and universal access to affordable primary care. It's (relatively) good at other things like 5-year cancer survival rates, waiting times for elective treatments, trauma care, and drug development. There is little agreement on how to fix the bad while preserving the good.
