Name one of those "many countries"...just one. The fact is there are none. You can play accounting games all you want. It won't change the bottom line. It will not make healthcare any less expensive. At the end of a day, no matter how you divvy it up, an expense is still an expense. I know you are just repeating Ryan's explanation of Trumpcare. But at the end of the day, an expense is still an expense. Trumpcare was just a shell game operation to cover up a trillion dollar tax cut for America's wealthiest families. So you would put the high risk pool, which is essentially everyone over 50, into the VA system, an already over crowed healthcare system. Well that makes perfect sense! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It makes no sense at all. That's why no one with any kind of horse sense would do such a thing. You would over whelm the VA healthcare system. That's not how it was during the Civil War. It has never been that way. Veterans hospitals were created to care for veterans only. That's why they are called veterans hospitals. The US military services may treat injured civilians during times of crisis. But they don't do it all the time and they don't provide extended care. e.g. the US Coast Guard routinely rescues people, but it doesn't provide extended care. It's crisis intervention, and it has nothing to do with the veteran hospitals. The VA system is not a part of the US military. It's a civilian administration which serves American veterans. Transforming the VA system into a system which treats veterans plus high risk individuals couldn't be done quickly. It would take years. Thousands of hospitals and clinics would need to be built. The system would need to hire millions of people to staff those clinics and hospitals. It would be a massive undertaking, and it would cause existing hospitals and clinics great financial duress. Federal expenditures would soar. Your idea makes less sense than Trumper's great wall. This is yet again another case of where a little bit of knowledge goes a long way, and you have none.
I just saw on the news that revenue from marijuana sales will all go to Canada's health care system; it will be legalized come 2018. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Put that in your congress and smoke it! http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-legal-marijuana-pot-1.4041902
How about we have universal healthcare paid by taxing the rich? And if you want more than a basic level of medical care you can get supplemental insurance.
no country does that. its is an idiotic idea that would only serve to drive up prices. is there just something about being a right winger that makes you not understand how insurance works?
The best plan I've heard over the last 6 months is "Medicare for All". Now Bernie Sanders says he will introduce a bill to do just this. https://berniesanders.com/medicareforall/ It seems like a smart thing to do since it is single-payer and the Medicare structure is already in place. Just remove the "65 years old" minimum and let everyone sign-up. The health insurance companies can then expand their Medigap policies to everyone. Now, I realize this will cost a lot so let's do the smart thing and take the money from the defense budget. The $50 billion increase this year to the defense budget would have gone a long, long way to get "Medicare for All" going.
It's strange how right wingers simply cannot grasp the concept of insurance. Once a day you can see some right wing talking head saying "I'm all for health insurance, but it's totally unfair that I have to pay for someone else's care!"
Well, unfortunately, most of them are. Those who aren't are orchestrating this mess, e.g. the Kochs, Ailes, Murdoch, Mercers, et al. They mindlessly believe whatever they hear from right wing entertainers like Fox News, right wing radio, and blogosphere. They repeat it almost verbatim. They use the same words and same phrases. It's almost like the "Body Snatchers" made real, and I'm not joking.
All for it, but I doubt most Americas are considering the religiosity here. One step at a time. insurance is a lot of people pay into a system so that when they are sick the system can take care of them with that money, the result is yes a lot of healthy people paying for some sick people, but there is a middle man there: the insurance company, who skim a profit off the top and devise ways the optimize said profit by fucking over sick and dying when possible.
That issue is decades old now, and that obvious possibility has been blocked by Republican Congressmen, in particular and most effectively, several times. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/business/cheap-drugs-from-canada-another-political-hot-potato.html http://www.dallasnews.com/life/healthy-living/2010/09/28/20100927-To-cut-costs-seniors-get-8103 I didn't call it anything - I pointed out that as an attribute of doctors, your claim, it wasn't a major factor in the cost spiral. Your entire diatribe there was against the Federal government and greedy doctors and doctor supply and medical schools. The other 34 countries on this planet that get better medical care than US citizens at half the price US citizens pay all have Federal level governments, greedy doctors, a shortage of medical school grads, and a shortage of primary care physicians (an even bigger shortage - the US has lots more doctors per capita than most of the better functioning setups). What they don't have is medical care delivery dominated by private corporate for-profit insurance companies contracted by employers. That's terminally stupid, and nobody else has copied it.
That probably isn't the case. American drug companies recover their actual R&D easily at current Canadian prices, plus a solid profit. Even at the self-reported amounts spent on R&D, almost all drug companies spend much more on marketing, and most book more money as profit than R&D: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223 Then figure that the self-reported R&D covers a lot of activity whose real purpose is to extend patent protection and the like. It's possible that we might see more money spent on true R&D, rather than less, if we bled the big money from the pharmaceutical business.
It shouldn't be only the rich. Everyone must pay into it. But the best would be taking from the bloated, wasteful, defense budget.
Well of course everyone will pay, but the rich will pay more per percentage of their personal income then the middle class. I'm all for cutting the defense budget as well.
I would be happy if the rich just paid the same amount as the middle and lower classes. That would be fair. OK, maybe a bit more.
A simplified flat tax with not loop holes is a nice idea on paper, but in real life where the rich have all sorts of different income sources it would get complicated fast, more so it would greatly punish the poor due to how they need a greater percentage of their income for basic living expenses. It would not be some much more complicated to have a logarithmic tax.