This would be like the for-profit insurance you have.

Medicare for all will secure the financial
future of Medicare.

Enough is enough. Everyone needs to be insured.

... but you'd think it was some kind of fringe concept.

Medicare works, it's efficient; everyone who has it likes it. And we stumble along with a half-assed system that still largely depends on employers administering health insurance, a task they hate and are ill-equipped to handle.

I used to be the one who bought health insurance for my company. We were small and did not qualify for the rates big (and I mean big, big, big because we were not tiny) employers could get. At that time, the insured pool, the risk pool was the employees in our workplace. That was years ago.

Do you realize that at one time a lot of the health insurance in the US was non-profit? Those were the good old days. A lot of cheating went on when non-profits went private. A lot of non-profits back before their privatization had received tax-free donations - - charity.

At least in California, and I believe generally, tax free donations are dedicated to non-profit or charitable purposes and cannot be used willy-nilly for for-profit purposes unless certain requirements are met such as for hospitals establishing non-profit, charitable organizations that spend the money. Tax-free donations are supposed to be accounted for carefully.

It was quite tempting for companies to handle that tax-free money sloppily. Quite a problem.

A single-payer system could make all health insurance non-profit. Much of our insurance would go back to what Blue Cross and other non-profits did years ago.

I associate the move to for-profit insurance with the rest of the Reagan scams but it may have started earlier. We may have always had some for-profit insurance, but a lot of it was non-profit.

We need to return to non-profit insurance at the very least and single-payer at the best.

We've seen these numbers before, and they don't add up.

Also, I'm not convinced i want single-payer. But I do want a public option.

European countries all have various forms of single-payer insurance, and their insurance is not only cheaper, but their life expectancies and their infant mortality rates suggest they are getting better medical care than we are.

Right now, a lot of employers pay premium rates for the insurance of their employers. Single-payer would lower their costs and raise the costs on some of the policies we now allow that really don't cover a patient's needs.

We have a lousy insurance system.

Let me tell you an anecdote about an doctor I saw when I was in my 50s.

She noted that I had high blood pressure and suggested I listen to music and relax in the evenings. That was absolutely the wrong thing to tell me. I'm a musician. I listen to a lot of music. I have a great family life. I just have high blood pressure. Maybe I am a Type A personality, but what am I to do about that? Anyway, I went back to the doctor for another work-required checkup and, again, I was told I had high blood pressure. This time instead of my doctor, I saw a resident. Shew was also very nice, saw my blood pressure reading and asked "Why aren't you taking your blood pressure medication?" I told her none had been prescribed. She looked confused, disappeared, came back, looked shocked, and that was it.

I went back to school and was uninsured for years. When I finally returned to work and was insured, I was again required by an employer to visit a doctor. And this time, this time, the doctor was upset and prescribed blood pressure medicine.

The first doctor just didn't want to prescribe anything for me because she wanted to save the insurer money.

I took blood pressure medicine for years, retired, and guess what???? I don't have high blood pressure anymore. It was the stress of work that caused it.

That's how bad our medicine is. And our poor health is not always due to bad diet or even genetics. Sometimes it is due to our work or other issues.

A European doctor probably would not have hesitated to give me the medication I needed. There was no for-profit company to report to. Clearly I should have been prescribed medication.

I would love to see this, but talk about an uphill battle.

Peace

Medicare for all means that their health insurance is truly portable. (The one insurer does not have to be the government.)

We lived in Europe. Every country we lived in (and we lived in several) had some form of single-payer insurance. At a minimum, I could go to a new doctor with no restrictions other than that he/she accepted the dominant insurance company of the country (which all of mine did) every so many months or weeks.

The great thing about single-payer is that it is portable.

If you live in Maine and go to visit your sister in Texas, a simple, quick phone call gets all your costs minus at most a small co-pay covered.

If Americans thought about the convenience, the flexibility and the portability (being able to carry it with you and use it where you are) of single-payer insurance, the system we have now would be gone -- in an instant.

Let's say I am on Medicare Advantage. I am scheduled to go on a trip and I am sick. It would be complicated for me to use my current insurance, Kaiser (which I love) in a small town in the Midwest where there is no Kaiser. It could probably be arranged, but if I get appendicitis or food poisoning or a stroke or anything else while I am traveling, I will feel great anxiety about how my insurance coverage will work in my family's hometown. Might slow my care and my recovery and taking care of the bills would be, or will be complicated.

If we had single-payer, everyone would be covered. Whether you are covered or not, how much your co-pays are to be, all of that business stuff would be so easily and quickly apparent. Our health-care insurance coverage now is for the Middle Ages when people traveled by foot and never very far.

Just don't get sick when you are out of state because your insurance coverage may be a hassle. With Medicare for all --- no stress over that issue. Medicare for All is even available when you are on vacation.

The reciprocity between Maine and Texas is an open question. If I'm on Medicaid in Maine (and Medicaid is what this is structually equivalent to) I can't just go to Texas and get reimbursed for my medical care.

insurer will tell your doctor who to bill and get any authorizations if needed. If you have an insurance card, great. If you don't have your card, any other ID will make it possible for your doctor to set your out-of-sate reciprocal insurance in motion.

The best system would be one insurance network for the whole nation with individual insurers as part of the network, in each state.

Everyone should be insured. And the CEOs of the insurance companies should be paid decent salaries, but not multi-millions in terms of today's dollars. No one should be getting that rich off other people's misery. The pay should go to the actual caregivers, and the companies should function as non-profits answering to, preferably, a single insurance watchdog in the nation.

We can still have private insurance companies, but everyone should be covered, and if you choose a private insurer, then it would be your risk if your can't be identified as insured or your insurance does not cover out-of-state costs or doctors.

Also, insurance companies should not have restricted lists of doctors that can care for you. In Europe, all the doctors I ever knew of were on one single insurance list. You could pick any doctor. That is the way it should be, first come, first serve, for the doctor's list of patients. And doctors could work in teams under a doctor who is sought after and can't handle all of his/her patients.

Our system makes no sense whatsoever.

I happen to have to go out of state, and at this moment, I happen to be sick. I delayed my trip so that I could call my doctor and get medication. My condition is not contagious. The only reason I could not leave on my scheduled flight is that I would have difficulty getting medical care where I am going on my insurance plan. That is ridiculous. My problem is quite simple but I could not put off getting medication. In Europe, that would probably not happen, not in my experience anyway.

Getting healthcare for all is not. It's just a matter of making sense of it and explaining the advantages. One of the advantages is that if you go to Illinois to work on a project for six months, you can easily use the insurance you purchased in Nevada. No problem. The rules are pretty much the same everywhere, and there is one provider network and one insurance payment and insurance management administration, and it makes everything easier.

In Europe each country had its own insurance system, but everyone was covered somewhere. It worked out fine. I had two babies. Each time, the baby was born in a country in which we were visiting -- in one case specifically to have the baby there. (We lived near the border of the country in which the baby was born.) In the other case, we had moved on the promise of a job that did not materialize.

The doctors were delighted to help me. No questions asked. My husband was working on the economy and had local insurance in different countries in each case. No problem.

Here, we over-complicate our health insurance issues.

If I am with Kaiser, I can't go to any doctor that isn't in he Kaiser network unless I get special permission. Why should that be? Why aren't all of our doctors, regardless what office they are in and with whom they prefer to work, on the same insurance schedule and list?

In my experience, it is our system that is full of red tape and unnecessary bureaucratic naysayers.

About damn time something reasonable was done...

And I still don't see a dedicated revenue stream in there. If even Sanders can't figure out a way to talk about how we're going to pay for this, I don't see much hope for it.

(And no, saying "it's cheaper overall" doesn't cut it -- somebody actually needs to say what money is coming from where. Owning a house is cheaper overall than renting an apartment, but that doesn't mean I can buy a house.)

People and their employers already pay for insurance out of their paychecks. So that would not change. Insurance costs money, whether single-payer or not. So the government now supplements some of the costs out of tax money, and those who can pay for it or their employers pay.

Nothing would change. Nothing at all.

People and their employers already pay for insurance out of their paychecks. So that would not change.

Except it would change. This is suggesting that the states, rather than employers and employees, pay. The states will (presumably) need to get money from employers and employees to avoid going broke paying for it.

On the one hand, it's going to be cheaper per person because of the benefits of the large insurance pool.

On the other hand, there's going to be 30 million people who aren't insured now getting insurance.

Will it end up being cheaper to actually provide the medical care people need than what we do now? I'm not sure, and I haven't seen any convincing evidence of that.

But putting the "it's cheaper" argument aside, saying "they already pay for it" isn't an answer, because it's not the case that everybody pays for it right now. Some pay a lot, some pay nothing. How much is this going to cost to spread it out evenly?

That's how it works in Europe.

The overall cost of insurance in Europe is less than it is here. We could expect a similar result. The costs of administering so many different insurance companies is quite high, I'm sure., Europe streamlines it, and it is cheaper.

Don't you want to know that the 30 million people who aren't insured have insurance? I do. Insurance is basic to our modern existence.

Besides, the fact that people don't have insurance doesn't mean they don't get hospital care. And when they do, you and I and everyone else pays the costs. That's one of the reasons that our individual insurance costs are high.

Everyone should have access to primary care and other care when needed. As it is, the uninsured still try to access primary care either through hospitals or free clinics in which doctors work at the cost of a non-profit or as volunteers.

All health care costs money. If you have a job, you should earn enough money to pay for health insurance because no one should be working and not be able to afford that necessity in life which is health insurance.

And those who have money should pitch in and help pay for those who cannot afford to pitch in. When we are doing well and earning money, we tend to feel rather good about ourselves and rather superior to those who are not doing well and don't have money.

But, the fact is, that at any time, a person who considers himself rich can lose everything and turn into a very poor person.

There are certain things like health care, safe drinking water, sanitary conditions, heat and other necessities that we who can afford them should work to provide for others. That is what a society that is harmonious and safe does.

Many do not see it, but there is a link between the excessive violence, disregard for the law and anger in our society and the unwillingness of those who have to provide the basic necessities for those who do not.

There is also a link between the extreme stress and anger in our society and the conditions we tolerate in our workplaces.

Democrats generally will agree with me on this fundamental social philosophy -- that we help each other and that one of the resources we use to do that is our government.

That is the basic philosophy of the Democratic Party.

Of course, there are people on DU who are not Democrats. Usually they don't last long.

Right now, for instance, people with a Bronze exchange plan pay nothing or next to it every month. How much will their withholding go up? Their employers pay a penalty to offset the exchange subsidies (and they do that because they've worked out that the penalty is cheaper than offering insurance). What will the employer side of the tax be?

Right now, a lot of insurance cost is invisible to employees; it's only this year that W-2's started showing that. Employers would not need to pay that much anymore. Will they give the money to the employees in the form of higher wages, or will they keep it? And if they do send the money back into wages, what will that do to income inequality? (People whose employers pay for their insurance are already for the most part making more than people whose employers don't.)

Vermont ran the numbers and ended up at about a 12% payroll tax, to be split some way or another between employers and employees. Are you willing to run a national campaign on that? Who wins and loses in that situation? (There are people who will be paying more than they are now, and it's going to be the people who can only afford Bronze exchange plans as it is.)

Everyone should have access to primary care and other care when needed.

I agree, which is why we need to get real, right now, about how we can pay for that.

~ Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class ~ Al Capone.

And yes, we can afford it.