are also fudging the figures?


What seems obvious to you seems insane to me.

We should make them, but Sanders needs to be honest on what it will cost initially, how long it will take to achieve cost savings, how the health care system needs to change, etc.

I think Clinton offers the faster and cleaner way to universal health care at this point in time.

than projections and they were wrong.

You seem to be making the same argument and I disagree with it.

Also

How will Hillary's plan cover:

A) The Homeless? Medicaid requires that you apply for it and can prove you qualify for it. Without an ID or address that is impossible.

B) Undocumented Immigrants? Similar issues as with the homeless. No documentation means no way to prove qualifications.

C) People in red states where they refuse to expand Medicaid? Hillary claims that Bernie's plan will leave coverage up to (R) state governments when the opposite is true. A Federal single payer plan would bypass state governments to provide coverage. Hillary is the one who wants to leave people who need Medicaid at the mercy of the (R)s.


So how is it that Clinton's plan "offers the faster and cleaner way to universal health care"?

appropriate money for single payer. Add a public option to ACA, increase subsidies, reduce out-of-pocket costs, etc., will happen faster than scrapping ACA and starting all over.

How will Hillary's plan cover:

A) The Homeless? Medicaid requires that you apply for it and can prove you qualify for it. Without an ID or address that is impossible.

B) Undocumented Immigrants? Similar issues as with the homeless. No documentation means no way to prove qualifications.

C) People in red states where they refuse to expand Medicaid? Hillary claims that Bernie's plan will leave coverage up to (R) state governments when the opposite is true. A Federal single payer plan would bypass state governments to provide coverage. Hillary is the one who wants to leave people who need Medicaid at the mercy of the (R)s.

By the time a Congress is elected that would even let Sanders' proposal out of committee, ACA could be expanded to accomplish most of that.

How will anyone without a government issued ID get coverage under Hillary's plan?


Bernie covers everyone. Everyone in, nobody out. Hillary excludes people from government insurance and forces them (under the mandate) to pay private insurance premiums.


There is absolutely no comparison between the two. Hillary's plan will not expand coverage the same way as Bernie's.

Polls show 58% of populace say they could accept single payer. Well, that means 42% don't want it. And I bet a bunch of that 58% would balk if they had no choice of plans.

I believe expanding ACA will get us there quicker.

As to the bull of how you sign up homeless, etc. You give them a card or a membership number once you convince Congress to fund it. Very simple.

I agree that single payer is best long-term, but lots of folks, including majority of Congress, don't. We might as well refuse to recognize cancer.

and other rich bastards in their 35 year orgy of greed and acquisition, thus not realizing the far lower per-capita costs and improved outcomes of all of the other modern industrial democracies.

If some guy runs a company that develops a cure for a serious disease, runs a decent health plan, etc., I'm not going to gripe about what they make. I agree drug costs are too high, but salaries aren't the big reason for that.

There is no freaking reason for that at all.

We are paying absurd prices for drugs - way over what the rest of the world pays. Again, no reason at all for that.

annually. Out of that they must take risk and plow money back into their systems. Our current Congress is not going to allocate money to do the things they do, so it's really a waste of time arguing about it.

The ACA mandates that 80% of premium revenue gets spent on actual healthcare - and that was a significant step forward as those fuckers were selling plans where they were spending considerably less than 80% on health care.

it goes mainly to claims administration, underwriting, marketing, etc.

But a public system could perform the same task at considerably lower overhead - as is done by other countries with public insurance systems - as we do ourselves with medicare.

The 80/20 rule in the ACA is forcing private insurance companies to limit their overhead to 20% of premiums paid. There are exceptions to this, but it is a reasonable baseline for this discussion. Your post talking only about those salaries is just terrible.


Medicare on the other hand:


http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/09/20/medicare-is-more-efficient-than-private-insurance/

^snip^


According to CMS, for common benefits, Medicare spending rose by an average of 4.3 percent each year between 1997 and 2009, while private insurance premiums grew at a rate of 6.5 percent per year. (See Table 13)


According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, administrative costs in Medicare are only about 2 percent of operating expenditures. Defenders of the insurance industry estimate administrative costs as 17 percent of revenue.

a year. We only spend & 300 Billion. So unless he's going to ban every drug but generic aspirin, it's impossible. He also claims savings from preventive care, reduced overhead, etc. People have been claiming that for 30 years or more, haven't seen it yet. Most of all he claims he can cut today's $3 Trillion to $1.38 Trillion. Plenty of folks, like Krugman and Klein, think that's impossible.

I believe Clinton's plan is the fastest way to universal care.

The tax cut for people who have health insurance was what the ruling was about (unless I was mistaken). The tax imposed for not having health insurance is what the SCOTUS called a "tax bill" because that is what it is.

The premiums we pay are not taxes.

What would happen under Bernie's plan is that we would no longer pay premiums to private companies and instead pay slightly higher taxes.

'Bernie wants to raise taxes on Main Street'. Which is patent nonsense.

Was constitutional because it was written as a tax bill. Meaning that all of the cost to individuals as a result of the ACA derived from a tax bill and Burnie's plan to offer Medicare for all would result in an over all cost saving to the middle class there for one can see it as a "tax cut" since the taxing cost of health care would be less on most people.

My aca premiums total $16,000 annually. I'll take a tax hike if those premiums would come down.