Do Democrats Know How Radical Bernie Sanders' 'Medicare For All' Plan Is?

  • Thread starter Thread starter MonteRCMS
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
JimG said:
If all insurance plans are to be outlawed in favor of a single federal plan, how will physicians who now have direct primary care practices be affected? Many physicians have DPC practices which charge a monthly fee for care but accept no insurance whatever, federal or private. There are even some specialty groups which do the same, or simply work on a fee for service basis, usually with far lower prices. Would they be forced to go out of business or work for the government?
Click to expand...
Most countries with single payer healthcare allow private insurance, do they not?
 
I think the real question is why we have medicare at all? What nobody has ever been able to explain to me is why medicare for all is bad, but medicare for some is good.
 
martyfran said:
I think the real question is why we have medicare at all? What nobody has ever been able to explain to me is why medicare for all is bad, but medicare for some is good.
Click to expand...
I think it’s based on the premise (real or not) that senior citizens are poorer than the younger, working population because they have limited income, and that we should as a society help those who are most vulnerable.
 
Last edited:
JimG said:
If all insurance plans are to be outlawed in favor of a single federal plan, how will physicians who now have direct primary care practices be affected? Many physicians have DPC practices which charge a monthly fee for care but accept no insurance whatever, federal or private. There are even some specialty groups which do the same, or simply work on a fee for service basis, usually with far lower prices. Would they be forced to go out of business or work for the government?
Click to expand...
Outlawing private insurance would be unheard of. Private insurance is still the go-to for most of the wealthier in countries that are held up as “single payer” examples.
 
In many cases it is a patently false premise. Plus, we already have a health insurance plan for the poor, medicaid. There is no need for medicare on top of it.
 
martyfran said:
In many cases it is a patently false premise. Plus, we already have a health insurance plan for the poor, medicaid. There is no need for medicare on top of it.
Click to expand...
Whatever their particular views on single-payer, it’s pretty clear that just about everyone seems to agree the US health care system as it stands does not serve everyone. It may work for you, but there are millions for which even under the ACA there is a lot of improvement to be made.
 
tomarin said:
Most countries with single payer healthcare allow private insurance, do they not?
Click to expand...
Yes.
Vonsalza said:
I mean that poor baby Charlie Gerard was just in the news.
Click to expand...
I’m not sure if his parents had private insurance, but this story was widely picked up by anti-NHS and single payer systems groups as a reason to oppose it. It’s understandable that his parents would wish him to live, but it was not meant to be. What gets me a bit about this whole story is that we paid extreme attention to a nearly hopeless case of a very sick boy and yet go along not really thinking about the perfectly healthy children that die due to disease that is easily treatable in the West or ones unfortunate enough to be born into war zones.
 
Last edited:
If you believes that they will get really good healthcare under the Bernie system, they are fooling themselves. There will be rationing and the quality of care will be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
 
Other than perhaps one or two Dems in congress, I would think all of them would be happy to approve it. It doesn’t matter whether you call “Single Payer” “Medicare for all” or what you call it.

I’m not a betting man, but if I had to bet or die, I think that’s exactly what we’ll end up with, along with a massive increase in the deficits going forward and extreme pressure on everything else in the budget.

Wish it weren’t so, but that’s where we’re headed unless the Repubs come up with something less burdensome and get it passed. Obamacare can’t last, and won’t.
 
Xanthippe_Voorhees said:
Outlawing private insurance would be unheard of. Private insurance is still the go-to for most of the wealthier in countries that are held up as “single payer” examples.
Click to expand...
That’s my understanding, but I don’t know if Sanders’ plan would allow for private insurance. Or for direct primary care. If doctors are forced to become bureaucrats, we will get fewer of them.
 
There are different ways of doing public healthcare. In the UK, most medical providers are essentially public workers. However, in a single payer system, the medical providers remain privately run. The state just provides the medical insurance for everyone, would negotiate insurance rates, etc… Some exceptional doctors might refuse to accept the public insurance, but most doctors would, and would probably have business tax incentives for doing so.

For the most part, private insurance plans would still exist. These would probably be supplemental policies, or something for the fabulously wealthy to choose instead (that’s two different examples, not one).

I cannot imagine the state paying for anything and everything. I just don’t see that yet being economically feasible. For over 99% of Americans, whether public or private, with the advanced medical care we have today, some type of managed care will be involved as to what is eligible for coverage under the public single-payer plan. People should still be able to pay out-of-pocket for things not covered by the public plan, or perhaps instead buy supplemental insurance policies that would cover such situations.

I’m not saying managed care is a bad thing or a failure of public healthcare. It’s simply a reality.

The one thing I find terribly disappointing is that Bernie proposes that abortion be covered under the public plan. I am on board with single payer in general, but not with that. 60% of the population has consistently supported single payer. I hope that if momentum starts to swing towards it politically republicans use what pull they have to ensure that abortion is not covered under it, rather than be completely obstinate and have no role in shaping it.
 
Last edited:
This is false.

I live in MA and was on Romney Care, of which if I didn’t get health insurance, I would’ve died.

Also, I took my mother to the ER before Romneycare and After.

Before, the ER’s were so overcrowded that many shut down and told ambulance drivers to take their patients to another hospital some 40 minutes further away.

After Romneycare, the same ER’s saw a drastic improvement as people could go to their Primary Care Physician rather than use the ER.

I saw both worlds and Romneycare worked very well and the problems of ER overcrowding was eliminated. The ER and other healthcare issues was the reason why Gov Mitt Romney did something about it. Thank God !

Jim
 
JimR-OCDS said:
This is false.

I live in MA and was on Romney Care, of which if I didn’t get health insurance, I would’ve died.

Also, I took my mother to the ER before Romneycare and After.

Before, the ER’s were so overcrowded that many shut down and told ambulance drivers to take their patients to another hospital some 40 minutes further away.

After Romneycare, the same ER’s saw a drastic improvement as people could go to their Primary Care Physician rather than use the ER.

I saw both worlds and Romneycare worked very well and the problems of ER overcrowding was eliminated. The ER and other healthcare issues was the reason why Gov Mitt Romney did something about it. Thank God !

Jim
Click to expand...
No—Forbes and others disagree with you

www.forbes.com

Romneycare: More ER Crowding, Longer Doctor Wait Times

I thought I’d point you to two pieces, brought to my attention by Byron York, from the Boston Globe’s White Coat Notes blog, on trends in Massachusetts. The first piece shows that Massachusetts emergency rooms are busier than ever, despite the fact that Romneycare’s explicit purpose was to...
www.forbes.com www.forbes.com


It wasn’t until much later, that Obama care was introduced that ER vists actually fell.
 
If Medicare is so great, why do they have to make it mandatory? I never see that question asked. The operational assumption is that Medicare is great, but if it is, why does everybody need some sort of private supplemental insurance purchased on the free market? Everyone just assumes that only the government can afford to offer medical care to the elderly, but the existence of supplemental policies would seem to support the idea that a free market solution to health care is more than viable, and not just for the elderly.
 
Infant mortality rate is measured differently in other countries. In the US, if a baby dies right after it’s born, it’s counted. In other countries, the “timer” doesn’t start for some time after it’s born.
 
Xanthippe_Voorhees said:
Which is why, like universal medicare, it’s a bit silly to bring it up as something that can happen in the next few years. Our current systems (in both cases) simply cannot manage efficiently the money they do have. Getting a “bottomless pit” to pay for it would only do further damage.
Click to expand...
Not sure I agree. For health care, we spend 18% of our GDP on it already. It would just be a matter of funneling the costs through a government system instead of through private insurers.

For education, I think you could see ‘free’ college in the sense of paying tuition at a local community college (which tend to be much more cost effective than most universities about the tuition dollars going to the classroom work and not pie-in-the-sky research) and not making Yale free.
 
Actually, medicare is not mandatory if you choose not to receive social security. Even then, the only mandatory part is part A, the hospitalization component. Parts B and D are completely optional. One question one can ask is what kind of fool would voluntarily pay for part b and d?
 
To lump everybody in so nobody can sabatage it without sabataging themselves.
 
The problem with medicare as it stands is that it is a massive redistribution program from the young to the old, and from the working to the idle. The problem that nobody will admit to is that we cannot afford it. The reason we cant afford medicare for everyone is that we have run out of other people’s money. We already spent it on medicare.
 
martyfran said:
Actually, medicare is not mandatory if you choose not to receive social security. Even then, the only mandatory part is part A, the hospitalization component. Parts B and D are completely optional. One question one can ask is what kind of fool would voluntarily pay for part b and d?
Click to expand...
In essence, you have to pay something approaching $50k per year to opt out of Medicare. That sounds pretty mandatory to me. But you do raise an interesting question, if Medicare is so great, why do people feel they have to pay thousands of dollars per year for additional insurance? Maybe they are stupid, or maybe they understand that Medicare is pretty awful health insurance, having to live with it, and are willing to pay to get decent health care.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top