I did my budget just yesterday so that I could appeal to my employer.

My medical insurance premium is 20% of my income (without copays)
With medical work done, my medical costs can reach 36% of my take home pay.

There was a time when virtually all jobs included health care with no or low copays.

What the holy fuck???

From last April:

As prescription drug prices continue to increase, they are expected to become a top issue for candidates during the 2016 presidential election.

According to a recent report, prescription drug spending increased by 13 percent in 2014, which is the largest increase since 2001.

Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state and recently announced presidential candidate, has already drawn attention to the issue on the campaign trail.

"We need to drive a harder bargain negotiating with drug companies about the costs of drugs," Clinton said in Iowa last Wednesday

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/US/prescription-drugs-prices-Hillary-Clinton-Marco-Rubio/2015/04/21/id/639842/#ixzz3kyfu34Nu

I understand that Martin O'Malley will be introducing his healthcare plans later.

Still, credit where credit's due and that's better than anything we'll get from the GOP.

Assuming we'll only get 1/4 or 1/2 of what we fight for, we'd better ask for 4x as much as we need at a minimum.

We need to ask for full medicare for all along with a living wage, etc.

The OP related to drug prices, so I took it from there.

My daughter is in a similar situation to yours, and it is scary for me to realize that she and her daughters do sometimes go without timely and necessary care because of cost, even though she has insurance. I have Medicare and a good supplement, and I will fight as long as I have breath to achieve the same type of coverage for everyone.

The Democratic party, as well as all of the candidates, need to continue to push HARD to improve on the ACA with the ultimate (and I hope near) goal of universal coverage. The reality is that while republican politicians dig in their heels, the majority of Americans want, need, and deserve it. I do believe that eventually, heath care and a living wage will bring out the proverbial pitch forks.

I love Obama and don't fault him at all. My premiums under ACA are almost half what they were but they're still high.

Like the proverbial frog in a pot, these health costs and reduced coverage problems have been creeping up.

If not for ACA many of us would be, put simply, dead or bankrupt or both.

Still, a long way to go.

Take care, brer cat, and best wishes to your daughter and her daughters!

we need medicare for all and medicare itself needs re ramped , the 80/20 split has got seniors paying more for supplemental policies than i paid 15 years ago for my entire family

bernie is the only chance we have at fixing this

it will get worse with the TPP.

For that reason Doctors without Borders are
totally against this trade agreement.

I can't imagine a more selfless group that has done more to help people around the world. With US poverty rates continually climbing, they may be more needed here (the US) soon.

Fortunately they are an international group since if they were US based the Congress would be trying to close them down. It's really only the international NGOs and other non-pecuniary motivated groups that can speak on behalf of the un/under-represented.

Canada will simply ban it from their end or see their drug prices increase substantially. The negotiation for Medicare part D on the other hand is a partial solution. I would couple it with the Federal government funding research and development of new drugs with the tradeoff that companies get a limited profit off the resulting drugs.

what the drug companies spend a lot of their research dollars on is coming up with drugs to compete with other companies. Viagra is a good example.

because they are rich and it only affects the non rich. You know, 99 fucking percent of us!

I'm sure he didn't like, just to help national health care get its foot in the door.

Anyone running now should boldly propose single payer without making deals to pharma or the insurance industry. Good luck to the next Dem to tackle these greedy money-hungry people and make health care affordable.

have made these obscene profits part of the system. Getting PHARMA and the insurance gangsters out of our pockets now will be a big task.

getting rid of them has always been a big task

in some ways i think the aca has gotten many of my repub friends to say.....just go with medicare for all, they realize now it is a problem for everyone, that no one can pay a hundred grand for heart surgery by themselves, ect

the far left and far right agree on more than you think...trump has supported single payer in the past and it sure hasn't hurt him
////////////////


Half-True
Perry
Says Donald Trump is for a single-payer health care system.

— Rick Perry on Sunday, August 2nd, 2015 in an interview on "Fox News Sunday"
Is Donald Trump still 'for single-payer' health care?

By Linda Qiu on Sunday, August 2nd, 2015 at 5:03 p.m.
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry discusses Donald Trump's candidacy ahead of the Aug. 6, 2015, GOP debate on "Fox News Sunday" with Chris Wallace.

For all his success firing up the GOP base, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump may be a Republican in name only when it comes to health care, says former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Perry -- at 11th place in the polls and currently just shy of making it into the first Republican debate Aug. 6 -- has been trading jabs with Trump for weeks. Trump mocked Perry’s glasses in July, and Perry responded by calling Trump "a cancer on conservatism" and challenging him to a pull-up contest.

Perry switched up his attacks from the physical to the political on Aug. 2’s Fox News Sunday.

"He's for single payer," Perry said. "How can anyone who's a conservative stand up and say I am for single-payer health care?"

Perry’s campaign referred us to a Buzzfeed piece and a PunditFact article that noted Trump’s past support for a Canadian-style, single-payer plan.

Perry’s claim goes further to suggest Trump, like Vermont socialist and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, currently supports a single-payer system, which is a specific type of universal health care in which the government foots the bill for all residents.

We wanted to know if Trump still supports that model.

Trump’s campaign did not respond to our inquiry, and his campaign website does not outline any of his positions on major issues, including health care. So we scoured transcripts and videos from Trump’s public statements and interviews.

Trump has been a vocal opponent of the Affordable Care Act, but his general stance on health care is much murkier.

On the medical record

Trump has said multiple times that he would "get rid of Obamacare" as soon as he takes office. He’s also repeatedly attacked the Healthcare.gov website as a $5 billion failure that "has never worked" (which rates False).

But disliking the Affordable Care Act, which is not a single-payer system, is not the same thing as condemning the concept of health care for all.

During his short-lived 2000 Reform Party presidential bid, Trump supported universal health care without ambiguity, and he voiced support for a single-payer system in several instances.

• "If you can’t take care of your sick in the country, forget it, it’s all over. ... I believe in universal healthcare," Trump told CNN’s Larry King in October 1999.

• "I would put forth a comprehensive health care program and fund it with an increase in corporate taxes, " Trump told The Advocate right before he dropped out of the race in February 2000.

• "The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than America. … We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing," Trump writes in his 2000 book The America We Deserve.

Trump has said very little about single-payer health care since 2000, according to our search of the LexisNexis database./////////////////////////////////

i am no trump fan but i think it is good news that he has a known record of supporting single payer and it aint turning off repubs

drug makers, healthcare corporations and such.

However, she might make mention of it like she mentioned the problem of money in politics....while still raking in the corporate donations.

For pharma companies to take the pesky buzz out of the stuff and patent a product they can sell at 100 times the cost.

She knows which side her bread is buttered on!

eom

From the same article:

and education, decent jobs, or clean air, food, water and soil. How clearer could it be that our welfare and survival are irrelevant.


~ If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. ~ Thomas Paine.