A ONE PAGE Health Care Bill

"Beginning January 1, 2010, all Americans will be eligible for Medicare coverage from the moment of their birth."


Problem solved.....





:shrug: :fistbump: :headbang:

The second mention of Medicare for All which I have come across.

Remember that it must be Medicare for All without the cuts in Medicare benefits to bring it to everyone.

Proposing Medicare cuts will send the seniors running in the other direction. After all, they've already "got theirs" and can be expected to resist diluting it.

It's only the muddleclass that is important.

Remember that.

You want this bill to pass, right?

"Abortion coverage will be provided to females only."

And, "Insurance Company employees will be provided with extended unemployment benefits and free job retraining."

good one!

Seriously, though, the one stumbling block i have with the idea of something like this is how to deal with the people it would put out of work.

Certainly not unsolvable, though.

And at least, while they're unemployed, they and their families will still have health care coverage!

If their job skills dont translate to work in the medicare office, we will retrain them, pay unemployment, and find new jobs. It will still be much cheaper than a fake solution.

Which is fine.

no longer have to pay premiums for health care coverage.

As it stands, the Federal government spends more on Medicare/Medicaid as it is than it does on defense. Even slashing the military budget by 10% (that is to say, a complete halt to all procurement and research) wouldn't pay for expanding Medicare to everyone.

"As it stands, the Federal government spends more on Medicare/Medicaid as it is than it does on defense"

:rofl:

Dude, are you drunk?

:rofl:

(And for completeness's sake, Social Security, $612B) I don't get the reaction. It's well known among anyone with a functional brain (well, maybe there's the source of the laughter) that entitlement programs take up about half of the Federal budget, with that number increasing every year and projected to continue to do so.

You know, you give yourself away when you use the term "entitlement."

:eyes:

The term "entitlement" is, in law and in politics, value-neutral. It simply means that the programs constitute a right granted to anyone who meets certain criteria--that is to say, that anyone who meets the criteria for the program is legally entitled to the benefits of the program. The term has been used for decades, and is the accepted term among, well, everyone.

http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=7851
http://www.aarp.org/research/socialsecurity/entitlement/
http://www.c-span.org/guide/congress/glossary/entitle.htm

We rank poorly in terms of health care performance.

to look at fixing the inefficiencies in our health-care system as well as fixing the coverage gaps.

..while the other is mostly a matter of dollars and cents.


Let's put our priorities in order. This is a national crisis! Thousands of Americans die unnecessarily every year! So - FIRST we announce that all Americans will be covered by Medicare beginning next year. Then we set Congress to the task of hammering out the details. Yes, indeed, Medicare has its problems. Inefficiency, however, doesn't top the list. Medicare operates with an overhead of approximately 3%, which is pretty good compared to the 20-30% overhead for private insurers.

SIMPLIFY! SIMPLIFY! SIMPLIFY!

Get rid of Medicare "Parts A,B,C,D,E,F,G..."

Get rid of the need for co-pays and Medicare "supplemental insurance".

Medicare should cover ALL medical expenses, including dental, long-term care and prescription drugs.

Then figure out the best way to pay for the whole thing. And I don't want to hear, "We can't AFFORD it!" Congress manages, somehow, to blow hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax dollars every year on God-Knows-What.

Think about this for a minute: Great Britain enacted their National Health Service in 1948. 1948! They were just beginning to recover from 6 years of war that had left them bankrupt and bombed to shit, yet they set the health and well-being of their fellow citizens as priority #1.

How often do we hear, "Well, health care reform is a complicated issue."?


Only if we choose to make it so.....









:pals: :toast:

Now imagine, if you add tons of people who are less likely to cost much paying into it.

Just saw Kathleen Sebelius on the Jon Stewart show talking about 1000 page reports.

Why? It's not necessary for anything to be that complicated.

She also admits that healthcare costs twice as much in this country as it does anywhere else. And why is that?

Because of the GREEDY FUCKING CORPORATE PIGS, that's why.

And it's time to cut them off.

Not "compete" with them. Not write a thousand pages of bullshit designed to enable them forever.

Cut them out entirely like the cancer they are, and replace them with what we KNOW will work, because it fucking works everywhere else on the planet.

Are you not planning on reworking/streamlining the claims, coverage, reimbursement, provider costs, and direct consumer costs of Medicare? What about prescription drug coverage; are we just going to use part D as it is? Is enrollment automatic? Are we going to allocate any funding towards ensuring Medicare can handle the massive increase in workload? Is the Medicare framework even capable of withstanding such an enormous and immediate expansion? Medicare spending is expected to double in the next 40 years as a result of an aging (and longer-living) population and increasingly expensive care; is it financially feasible over the long term to increase the program with only a short-term tax increase to cover costs?

:shrug:

Now let's imagine something that costs more per year than our wars have to date, and that will not ever end, but rather will become more and more expensive every year from here to eternity. Does funding that entirely in debt really seem like a great idea?

I'm not saying medicare-for-all is a bad idea; I think it's a good idea. However, it would require not only a massive reprioritizing of Federal funding, it would require a major change in the way this country sees taxation. Both of which can certainly happen, mind you, but "here's a one page solution" isn't sufficient.

:spank:

...roughly equivalent to the insurance premiums currently being paid by both employers and individuals?
so, that's really a wash...
my concern is what to do with the people who work for insurance companies suddely out of a job.

The tax code would have to be reworked top-to-bottom to fund this program without laying unacceptable burdens on the lower and middle class. Which can certainly happen, but not feasibly in the short/medium term, and certainly not in the space of one page.

and the OP was a deliberately glib poke at what looks to be an unnecessarily complex and bureacratic (not to mention catering to insurance companies who've helped create this monster) "solution" to the problem of healthcare in this country.

Fantastic, isn't it?

Other countries somehow managed to do it.

With programs that had a bit more thought put into them than, "hey, let's take a inefficient program facing a long-term funding crisis--a program that was designed as a safety net in a for-profit health care system--and extend it to everyone without a single thought as to how we're actually going to make that work."

There'll be plenty of time to work on the details.

Currently, it has 85 co-sponsors in the US House.

The act calls for the creation of a universal single-payer health care system in the United States, the rough equivalent of the United Kingdom's National Health Service and other similar systems in existence in every other industrialized nation; in which the government would provide every resident health care free of out-of-pocket expense, funded instead through U.S. federal taxes.

In order to eliminate disparate treatment between richer and poorer Americans, the Act would also prohibit private insurers from covering any treatment or procedure already covered by the Act. The bill is currently in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as well as the Committees on Ways and Means, and Natural Resources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Health_Care_Act

Medicare's dead without us. Medicare NEEDS the young and healthy paying premiums into the system.

That program basically pays private entities to deliver certain services under the notion that private industry can run it more efficiently thus lower costs. The studies indicate otherwise. Plan details often change from year to year, and costly duplication of activities exist with multiple private entities providing the same or near same services. Worse yet, if you are a state employee and are retired and have moved out of the state and are on the state's Medicare Advantage program, very few if any doctors in your new state will even bother taking your insurance card.

If only someone would have the balls to actually put it into effect

:)

Currently, about 60% of our health care system is financed by public money: federal and state taxes, property taxes and tax subsidies. These funds pay for Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, coverage for public employees (including police and teachers), elected officials, military personnel, etc. There are also hefty tax subsidies to employers to help pay for their employees’ health insurance. About 20% of health care is financed by all of us individually through out-of-pocket payments, such as co-pays, deductibles, the uninsured paying directly for care, people paying privately for premiums, etc. Private employers only pay 21% of health care costs. In all, it is a very “regressive” way to finance health care, in that the poor pay a much higher percentage of their income for health care than higher income individuals do.

A universal public system would be financed in the following way: The public funds already funneled to Medicare and Medicaid would be retained. The difference, or the gap between current public funding and what we would need for a universal health care system, would be financed by a payroll tax on employers (about 7%) and an income tax on individuals (about 2%). The payroll tax would replace all other employer expenses for employees’ health care, which would be eliminated. The income tax would take the place of all current insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket payments. For the vast majority of people, a 2% income tax is less than what they now pay for insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments such as co-pays and deductibles, particularly if a family member has a serious illness. It is also a fair and sustainable contribution.

Currently, 47 million people have no insurance and hundreds of thousands of people with insurance are bankrupted when they have an accident or illness. Employers who currently offer no health insurance would pay more, but those who currently offer coverage would, on average, pay less. For most large employers, a payroll tax in the 7% range would mean they would pay slightly less than they currently do (about 8.5%). No employer, moreover, would gain a competitive advantage because he had scrimped on employee health benefits. And health insurance would disappear from the bargaining table between employers and employees.

http://www.pnhp.org/facts/singlepayer_faq.php#raise_taxes

:patriot:

this is easy, debate and vote then write a 2000 pages of documents and irrelevant
policies to suit the special interests..... see how easy that is(?)



:evilgrin:

"Beginning tomorrow, free health care for all elected officials is being taken away and all elected officials must get their health care, like every other American, in accordance with the legislation they pass".

So simple, it'll never fly.