Slashdot Mirror
Amazon's Push Into Healthcare Just Cost the Industry $30 Billion In Market Cap (qz.com)
Today, Amazon, along with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan, announced a plan to launch an independent company that will offer healthcare services to the companies' employees at a lower cost. The venture, which will be managed by executives from the firms, will be run more like a non-profit, than a for-profit entity. Even though the plans are vague, the news caused the market value of 10 large, listed health insurance and pharmacy stocks to drop by a combined $30 billion in the first two hours of trading. Quartz reports: "The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty," said Amazon's Jeff Bezos in a statement. "Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare's burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort. Success is going to require talented experts, a beginner's mind, and a long-term orientation." Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, likened America's mushrooming healthcare costs to "a hungry tapeworm on the American economy." How the venture will provide less pricy healthcare to the 1.2 million employees of the participating companies isn't yet clear. The new company will leverage "technology solutions" that provide "simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost." Not much else, including the name of the company, is known.
Let me restate that, you got caught responding to a headline after parsing it incorrectly and failing to read TFS or understand WTF you were talking about.
Then you replied to yourself trying to sweep your failure under the rug.
Let the "for profit" blood suckers get rocked on their heels a little. After all of the reasons that they have found to deny people care that need it, fuck those big boys.
Their intentions aren't so honorable. They're just trying to break up the demand for real universal health care.
Just curious, how do you figure? Of course their intentions are anything less than honorable. They're trying to boost their own bottom lines.
The UK's system is widely recognised as the most efficient, so the basic model - of single payer contracting with controlled hospitals - has a lot of efficiencies to offer in the American context. In the light of the news that the arrival of an Amazon distribution centre LOWERS the wages of warehouse workers, perhaps we will see this happen to doctors...
https://www.economist.com/news...
Let me restate that... Insurance companies got caught in the market day.. Not by Amazon's roll your own insurance thing.
The overall market fell by about 1%, mostly because of the fall of the health industry, which represents about 18% of the American economy. Some health companies fell nearly 9%. If you take health out, the rest of the market barely fell at all.
I am skeptical that Amazon et al will be successful in this, but I wish them well. If the politicians can't fix healthcare, many nerds can.
The rest of the modern world looks at the USAs health system and just shakes their head.
Every other modern western country uses government run primary health care, usually overlaid with a smaller private system.
The private system gets used for those who want a specific surgeon, less wait time, or elective procedures.
but, in the land of the free, home of the brave, god forbid if someone who made poor health choices got treatment from my tax dollar: let the loser die or least be a debt slave for life.
Bezos should be advocating for government funded primary health care: not yet another private system.
46137
IIRC, the german public health insurance companies are basically companies who are competing with each other, but may not turn a profit.
It would be quite ironic if some billionaires will manage to basically set up socialized healthcare in the US this way, and out-compete the current HMOs!
Maybe you should not have considered that as your money in the first place? You have your life savings in something that is not risk-free. Oh well.
I do IT for a small grocery store chain and we went self insured a few years back now and we've saved a ton of money doing it.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
How the venture will provide less pricy healthcare isn't yet clear
Unclear whether this is a typo for less pricey or less privacy. Knowing Amazon it might be both...
Although with how Amazon works if they can make it work for their employees you can bet there will be public offerings as well.
Indeed. AWS started as an internal service. Today, Amazon is primarily a Cloud Provider, that just happens to do online retailing on the side. AWS makes 3 times the profit of their retail operations.
And that would be capitalism. The FUD campaign waged by medallion cab drivers against Big Bad Uber is a child's sandbox fight compared to Amazon going up against America's most monopolistic industry.
How do health care 'er' cough, cough, make money. They charge more in premiums than they allow in payouts. Hmm, compulsory health care for company employees, how do you reduce cost, deny payouts. I doubt very strongly that if my healthcare was dependent upon a company who first and only goal were returns for shareholders and they were deciding whether they would pay out or not, that I would be willing to work for that company.
Think about euthanasia laws, how many corporations would put you down, if there return on your future employment was lower than the cost of health services, if they could get away with it (just remember all it takes is a tiny handful of them to bring in those laws, couple of hundred control freaks and no matter what tens of millions say, it happens).
Single payer sounds a whole lot better, than allowing my employer decide whether I live or die, especially when their publicly declared number one priority is returns to shareholders and their desire is ZERO payouts.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Unnecessary tests and pharmaceuticals. Doctors use unnecessary tests to protect themselves from lawsuits. Then there's the medication problem.
the-myth-of-drug-expiration-dates
The government needs an independent lab to determine the expiry dates, not big pharma.
drug-firms-shipped-208-million-pain-pills-to-west-virginia-town
drug-company-payments-mirror-doctors-brand-name-prescribing
I also have to wonder if doctors prescribe drugs as the easy solution instead telling the patient to make lifestyle choices.
These are big companies with lots of employees, they are already bleeding huge amounts of cash to fund health programs for their employees in a broken healthcare system. They're going to pool their resources together to create a new company, not with the goal of making money out of the venture, but with the goal of reducing the costs they already have within their existing companies. Due to their size they'll receive immediate benefits by having the clout to bargain with the big pharmas and that clout will only increase as they offer this to the rest of corporate america.
It's another game changer from Amazon.
"Oh yeah right. The NHS is widely known as the most efficient. Give me a break..." compared to the US model, with the outcomes it has right now, the total cost , and the coverage ? Yes it is far more efficient than the US model.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The NHS costs rather less than half the percentage of GDP that the US system does and produces better health outcomes, with 100% free coverage for citizens.
Apart from a charge for each prescription of about $12, there are NO other copayments for most conditions. There are charges for dental and optician care, but that's pretty much it. It's not perfect; there are queues and delays, but in terms of bang for your buck, it's massively better than the US system.
Nope. Obama failing to hold out for single payer and settling for Romneycare is what cost you. Countries with actual single payer systems spend half or less per capita with better outcomes for all.
You say that like it's their fault. Think of the stock market as a big grid on the ground and a million chickens. Occasionally someone tosses in a handful of corn and occasionally someone blows and air horn. The chickens respond as chickens will.
You pick a square or two on the grid. At the end of the day, if your square has the most chickens on it, you win a prize.
It's a bit like no limits cow patty bingo for city folks. If you don't believe me, how come 3 guys making noise in the corner caused such a change in the market?
Periodically, the SEC makes a move to keep the market moving. The decision making process can be a bit confusing. Here's a helpful video.
health care. You can't have a for profit system built around something complex, expensive and life or death. Because people can just keep raising the price and you'll pay it or you'll die. Hell, our for profit system of agriculture only barely works with a _lot_ of government interference and subsidies and even then it relies heavily on borderline slave labor. This is why America spends more and gets worse outcomes to take care of less people. It's also why it costs $32k to give birth here and we still have the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world.
Anyway, Single Payer Now. Medicare for All.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
with fairly healthy people. My bro worked for a small company that tried the same. He had some health problems so he was politely told if he signed up for the insurance he'd be fired.
The best way to do insurance of any kind is to have as many people chip in as possible. Buying power gets rates down, and that's what's got the health care industry worried. As more and more companies consolidate an buy each other out we've got fewer and fewer employers, but that also means that if a few of them get together they can exert enormous pressure.
Of course, if you take this to it's logical conclusion the largest pool of insurable people is everybody; e.g. single payer health care. But once you've got a for profit insurance industry it's almost impossible to do away with it since they'll spend every penny they have to make sure folks don't realize they don't want or need yet another middle man.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I wonder what else the USA is going to "invent" by copying off other countries.
True single payer health
The metric system
Gun Control
"Single payer sounds a whole lot better ..."
Yeah, good luck with that.
I hope Amazon et al shake up the "health care" industry.
Making money on providing medical care should be illegal. It's certainly immoral in my book.
The Europeans have good systems which provide good care at much less the cost than what we all pay. But here in "America First" we've got this huge insurance bureaucracy which is expensive ... all for the purpose of improving the bottom line for the insurance companies. So our insurance premiums go in part to pay the insurance companies to work to keep their payouts as low as possible. What a great system for them! What a lousy system for the patients.
So if Amazon et al can come up with a system which delivers better care for less, good for them.
And if your risk pool is large enough and broad enough, you can save a SUBSTANTIAL amount of money.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
We don't have to nationalize anything, but the government should be allowed to compete. Then we can have more clout in determining prices and services. The law you speak of was specifically set up to benefit the insurance industry. Through a much older law, the government is specifically prohibited from negotiating for better pharma prices. These are the things, among others, that make medicine expensive in the US.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Err...if you didn't allow anyone to make money (a profit) with healthcare, why would anyone go into that industry for a lively hood?
I doubt seriously there are that many altruistic people out there.
I mean, if you're a Dr...why would you sacrifice 4 years of medical school, plus internship years, plus extra years if you are specializing...on top of college, if you didn't see a payoff in the end that was worth your sacrifice up front?
Why would anyone develop medical equipment if they weren't going to be rewarded for it?
Hell, why does anyone do anything if they couldn't make money at it?
Seriously, where is this mythical Shangri-La that you are referring to where people work healthcare, the long hours, research etc.....and don't count on making money at it...?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No, I think the market was down because the bond market is taking a hit now that the Fed is trying to sell all those treasuries, which is going to drive up insurance rates, which cools down the economy, which causes the market to fall. Round and round we go.
Who is John Galt?
Money is the root of all evil?
Nice miss-interpretation, make a lot of money in the industry do you?
As I am *sure* you know, your example is BS.
There is plenty of competition at the staff level, so income is in general sensible.
There is practically NO competition at the insurer/provider level. This has been remove from the system through regulatory capture and other techniques for a lot time now, and the price is being paid.
If there is no competition, then the consumer suffers, and 'suffers' in the context of health is, eventually, dies early.
So, the cost of the high profits of insurers and providers is the deaths of consumers.
Care to try and defend that?
The only two solutions are enforced REAL competition (which does not mean two 'friendly' huge providers colluding), or state regulation of prices.
Obamacare quadrupled your wife's health insurance? Are you sure that's not hyperbole? A number pretty close to 60% increase in premiums is the typical number. Of course, the ACA also required that the insurance packages provide more benefits. Better insurance, higher costs. We can debate the merits elsewhere, but I'd be interested to hear details about the 4x increase.
The fed is trying to cool the economy down. If it heats up to fast because of a tax cut there is zero the fed can do yo recover except for negative interest rates. All other tools have been expended.
The good news is that Europe is growing faster, and Trump's anti imigrantion stance kills manufacturing and farming, so that should drag down the economy.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
It might do better if it was allowed to negotiate drug prices. Beyond that, I made clear I was speaking of OTHER COUNTRIES that have single payer. Does medicaid fit that description?
The Fed affects the economy by raising or lowering interest rates, but this is different. The Fed is trying to unload $4.5T in treasuries that it has bought since 2009, but China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia have all cut back on their purchase of treasuries, so rates are rising to make them more attractive. But this is also going to cause rates on everything else to rise, including corporate debt, with many corporations will be unable to shoulder those higher rates.
This isnâ(TM)t good.
The majority of the health insurance companies in the country are led by CEOs who are either billionaires on their own or will be by the time they cash in their retirements. Many of them decline $30B worth of claims - or tell providers to eat $30B worth of billable service - in a week without thinking twice about it.
On top of that, the health insurance industry bought Washington DC years ago. They got most of their ROI in the form of the ACA back when Obama was president; they know where to turn if they need another bailout.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Seriously: our health care "system" (in quotes for a damned good reason!) is a complete and total clusterfuck. Yeah, if you have squillions of dollars and/or the most super-ultimate health insurance (at the moment...), you can get pretty damned decent care. Fall off of THAT island, though, and you land in a swamp of uniaginable, Rube Goldberg-like complexity that is designed to do one thing and one thing only: separate you from as much of your money as possible. Period. End of fucking story! I once spent 9 years working for a company that provided IT systems to hospitals for billing. We had the most technology in the hospital....for billing. The scope of change needed is vast and while I'm a tad skeptical, Warren Buffett's involvement gives me more hope. He's a Good Capitalist.
Amazing! An amalgam of successful capitalist thinks a nonprofit is better than capitalism for "reducing health care's burden on the economy while improving outcomes ". They should know.
If as a consumer you want to save your hard-earned dollars (e.g, you have an HSA) when you need healthcare in the US, tough luck - you can't. The US health care system is not set up to enable anything like the usual way we shop. It's like being forced to buy things on recommendation from a stranger without knowing the prices for anything until you get your credit card statement. And then experiencing utter sticker shock at the cost!
Case in point: I went to the doctor for a check up. The doctor had no idea how much it would cost me for the checkup or how much any of the recommendations she made to me would cost me. So I asked the insurance system. They couldn't give me a price or even a quote, and only pointed me to a web-based useless "calculator" that gave rough numbers. It's not surprising, because the actual cost had been negotiated by some unseen, unknown entity (my employer? the company my employer contracts with?) and it certainly wasn't ever to be shared with a lowly patient/employee. The only time I could find out how much it cost was when I received the bill. And it was outrageous! Over $200 for a simple look-see. The doctor had claimed it was the "annual checkup", which was much more expensive. Apparently, there are multiple types of check up, with the cheapest being $60, but there's no way to request that, or know what you are getting in advance. Other procedures are completely opaque too and often involve bills from multiple entities. My wife received bills from approximately 6 different entities after an ER visit for concussion, including the individual doctors, the MRI, the CT staff along with billing for various bits and pieces (tubes, packs, etc.) that apparently were used. What a load of crap.
Another area that the health care system needs to address is their methodology of tracking the status of health issues. Currently, they run completely on the squeaky-wheel system. If the wheel don't squeak, it's not an issue any more. (Doesn't matter if the wheel has crumbled into dust or not!). As engineers, if we find an issue we usually have a process to track progress to resolution. Not in the health care system! It's completely random and ad hoc. You as a patient have to manage your own "bug tracking" because no one else will. They seem to be pretty good in tactical situations, but anything that isn't an easy fix, or takes a long time isn't handled well at all.
I'm glad that this is happening. The system needs a really big kick up the butt.
You can make better investments.
lol.....you think tax cuts are a driver of economic growth.
It's only hilarious because the Democrats let the Republicans have a seat at the table. So how come the Republicans couldn't repeal it with both houses and the presidency?
The entire selling point of going with Romneycare was to preserve the Democrat's control of Congress. It didn't work, but that was the real argument. Obama and the Democrats would rather stay in power than give us decent healthcare.
Actually, you can by looking at comparable economies and/or by judging in terms of the country's GDP.
Note how those other countries spend less of their GDP on healthcare and how their populations last longer. Before you claim it's better eating habits, have a look at the U.K.
Honestly, no sane person honestly thinks any Western nation spends more on healthcare than the U.S. and no sane person honestly thinks health outcomes in the U.S. are even in the top ten.
it's just no one with the authority to do so has the spine to make the decisions necessary to make it happen.
Well, that and *campaign donations* tend to ensure the status quo remains the status quo.
"Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare's burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort."
The only thing you need to do is take away the health care and Big Pharma industries ability to charge whatever they want for their products or services and you'll stop this problem stone cold.
You need only speak the words that shall not be spoken ( Regulation ) within earshot of said industries and watch how quickly they'll be willing to compromise on what they charge. They do for a while until the latest scandal becomes a fleeting memory, then it's right back to business as usual.
Quit threatening it and just do it.
When a single trip to the hospital is capable of bankrupting all but the insanely rich, it's time to burn it down and rethink the issue.
I don't want, nor need, vouchers, coupons or reduced insurance premiums that do nothing but increase over the long term. Fix the problem at its source and you fix the " economic burden " it has become.
When people have more money in their pockets to spend on something other than ludicrously priced healthcare, the economy tends to benefit from it.
and raise you an NPR Article and a BBC one too.
Our health care sucks, particularly in rural areas. And you can't blame that on the US being spread out. Look at Canada. Better outcomes and just as if not more spread out population centers.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Profit != income. I'm like, wtf is this guy talking about? Does he think everyone working at a nonprofit is volunteering with no salary? Surely, he's not that dumb. People become doctors for several reasons. It could be for money and prestige, it could be to fucking help people, like firemen and cops aren't in it for the money. I know several of both kinds of doctors.
Did you sell today? Only if you sold did you actually lose $5K.
single payer healthcare, just like the rest of the civilized world.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
America has the most expensive healthcare in the world, there is plenty of room for improvement. As for euthanasia, to keep most dialysis patients healthy you need to provide 5 hour treatments 3 times per week. That's not what most American insurance companies pay for. Yes, countries with single payer healthcare DO consistently get better results at lower cost.
There is practically NO competition at the insurer/provider level. This has been remove from the system through regulatory capture and other techniques for a lot time now, and the price is being paid.
Brilliant! THANK YOU! And yes, I meant to use all caps for that.
Finally someone who understands what has happened to our government.
I'm tired of hearing the term "big government" or the claim that it's the source of all our problems. That is a distraction from the real cause which is big business which now essentially owns the government. That allows them to generate the influence to effect regulatory capture. This is why people have been saying "we are owned."
For me, the day "Citizens Divided" passed was the end of our democracy. And that should be the name of that crap rationalization of a legal concept. Calling it "united" was a slap in the face to all of America. That was the "owners" version of giving us a spoonful of sugar to help swallow the poison.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Next step is for Amazon to open up their insurance to Amazon Prime subscribers and become the largest health insurer in the U.S.
Americans take trips to Canada to buy American drugs, at a fraction of the price. And the drug companies don't sell at a loss.
s/healthcare/law enforcement/. Funny thing, there's plenty of cops out there.
s/healthcare/military service/. There's plenty of soldiers. Literally an army of them.
Your logic seems a bit flawed somewhere.
P.S. "livelihood". One word. It's not some kind of headgear.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
you miss the part in the summary, this is going to be ran as a non-profit?
I find this argument hilarious given Democrats had both Congress and the Presidency and when it was passed nobody said anything about keeping costs down.
It's only hilarious because the Democrats let the Republicans have a seat at the table. So how come the Republicans couldn't repeal it with both houses and the presidency?
Health care is the Gordian Knot of US economy and society. The left struggles to involve the government selectively in order to bend the cost-curve downwards. And the right tries to fix the problem by opening up the private sector. Obamacare was a herculean attempt to join those two propositions, and it just made it past the post, with the barely-required 60 votes in the senate. Republicans discovered that moving in the other direction was just as difficult, and failed repeatedly to change anything. (Except for repealing the individual mandate, which amounts to sabotage rather than reform.)
Meanwhile, all other industrialized nations have realized what the US may never realize: you need a national health-care plan to ensure that everyone gets care at a reasonable cost. The left would love to see that happen. The right sees it as fire-breathing Marxism, and fights with all it has to keep it from happening.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
My buddies an I often sit in front of the fire and solve the worlds problems. Healthcare is one of my favorites. We like to look at what exactly causes the high costs and address them one at a time... (Completely ignoring things that work or don't in other countries, because those are saved for discussions like "what works and doesn't in other countries") Here are some of our ideas relating to healthcare.....
Tax rebates for high cost medical equipment. This addresses the high costs of medical equipment at least a little, and helps maintain profitability in creation/manufacture/research of said tech.
Transparent pricing, no hidden fees, like every damn thing else traded for American dollars. That $.03 asprin is only $25.00 because you can't just say "no thanks, I can't afford that today.", so the market will bear any price. If it's painful, good, get your shit together healthcare. It's damn sad that I can check the costs of airfare across nearly an entire industry run mostly by brain-dead customer service people (which is also bogged down with massive regulation hoops and legal liabilities) in two minutes, but an industry run by over-schooled and highly paid professionals who are often smarter than I am can't seem to write a complete legible sentence or count past $100.00 without the insurance mans help.
Free government funded tuition for in demand medical field studies, paid for by taxes paid on medical practitioners earnings. (much like the industrial taxes I pay now pretend to cover industrial overhead) This addresses the licensed doctor shortages... For profit schools will love this shit, and the socialized education camp gets a win. Free doctor/nurse/med-tech/ect... training!
Immunity to malpractice accusations and court nonsense on all non-trivial procedures. People are going to die under the knife. You can choose to just die, or ask for help. With transparent pricing and lower overall prices, it's on the consumer to do their research when seeking a "family doctor". This all but eliminates the insurance against insurance bullshit driving costs through the roof. Personal responsibility time folks. Buyer beware. I know a LOT of people that travel to other countries to have medical procedures done and take a vacation while there- for half the price of half the care in America. They do their research before they buy a ticket. Seems to work.
State level cooperatives negotiating pharma prices, which are allowed to shop outside of the country. This addresses 500% increase games on life-saving drugs due to the captive market, and ends the market for smuggling life saving drugs that is fueling organized crime. This is so fucked up by the way... and also leads to the next one....
University and government funded research CAN NOT BE PRIVATE. Breakthroughs and moonshots in the medical field should be shared if funded on the public dime, and works and studies encouraged. Patents never granted on medicines derived from government (citizen) funded research. I've never understood how breakthroughs achieved and sciences explained/attained at state universities is not public by default. Who in the hell came up with the current system and how can they sleep at night?
I'm just another nerd pissed off about 15k emergency room visits and $30000 stillborns. I have no idea how these things would pan out, but nobody else ever seems to put forward any ideas addressing what seems to me to be the sources of the high costs of care that require the money sucking insurance companies to begin with. You gotta do more than creative accounting to fix this, and lives are at stake.
I imagine Amazon will drive costs down by sheer volume, access to data, simplicity, reliability, and scope of options. (Based on your shopping habits, you might also like.... a colonoscopy! available from these practitioners...)
The only thing more fun to discuss than American healthcare is American law enforcement. Hooo-boy do the tempers flare on that one.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Then you should be able to name the specific provisions or amendments which came as a direct result of a republican sitting at the table... and not general hand waving towards Romney and Massachusetts.
Nice attempt at distraction... but I think we are still talking about the original enactment... and not the failed attempts to repeal it in whole... granted even Gruber admits, the individual mandate is the key requirement, which as we heard tonight again... is dead... all thanks to Obama's favorite tool... a pen and a phone.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
And worse (for the Democrats)... helped to lead to the wiping out massive portions of their backbench and bullpen for years to come as a result of their narrow mindedness.
Obama's legacy, may just end up being the difficulty the Democrats have fielding a viable candidate for the Presidency for years to come.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
America has higher prices mostly because we pay for most of the world's medical research. Sure, there's some overhead from insurance companies (mostly from the lack of standardized claims reporting - the government should fix that), but that's only one factor. Higher drug prices (in the private sector) is a big part of that: it pays to acquire the pharma startups that do the actual research (much like the big tech companies rarely invent anything, but they buy tech startups for crazy amounts, which in turn funds most of the actual advances in our field).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So it's just a coincidence that EVERY country with a single payer system spends less than the U.S. on healthcare per capita than the U.S.?
When you pull the door and it doesn't open, do you keep pulling or do you try pushing?
I see that health care costs are going up all over, but looking at Canada for example, the rise flattened out for a while when single payer came into effect. So even as costs went up, they went up slower with single payer. Of course, with an increasing population, increase in expendature is to be expected. The U.S. could use slower increases in expenditure for a while.
So let's look at a larger sample. Indeed, it's going up for everyone, but nowhere is it going up faster than the U.S. and nowhere is it as expensive as the U.S. Can you explain why the U.S. would be a special case other than we are the one without a single payer system?
They say you get what you pay for, so the U.S. should be at the top of the charts for healthcare. OOOOps, or not.
Well, Americans must live longer and so cost more. Dang, wrong again.
Looks more like a fool and his money are soon parted.
So it seems if we want to spread that more fairly around the western world, we will need to similarly clamp down on prices. It's the only way to make the rest of the world pay their fair share.
Billing codes. The body mutilator!
Really though, One of the things I've said about health care is that we could easily care for patients without all that overhead. Thing is, just like Brawndo, the economy sort of depends on it. Until the plants actually start growing again, this is going to hurt.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Apparently you are a pretty poor investor.
A few years back someone I know touted how great the Facebook IPO was going to be and that he was happy to have them make him money... that back on May 18, 2012... a Friday.
The following Monday he was up in arms about how there were lawsuits pending about the overvaluation and that he got out before things got 'too bad', but not much above the eventual price a day or two later. Hearing this I chuckled, then purchased some FB out of pure spite (and believing it to be then properly valued).
Ever since then, I've held on to those shares... which are up nearly 400%... all because I didn't view them (a small part of my 'life savings') as vital to anything in the short term.
Long term thinking my friend... always think long term... which in retrospect I wish I would have done more of as I only purchased two shares :)
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Erm, how do you think Obama and the Democrats -- or indeed any political party -- could have given you decent healthcare while not being in power?
I am skeptical that Amazon et al will be successful in this, but I wish them well. If the politicians can't fix healthcare, many nerds can.
This has been done before, Kaiser about 80 years ago. They created their own medical care for on the job heavy construction site injuries, doctors with modern and sufficient equipment to stabilize the injured so they could be transported to a "big city" hospital. This quickly expanded to cover health care in general. Then it expanded to cover the worker's families too. And now we have a major non-profit healthcare provider covering the western US.
So if as you state, no other country had their health care costs cut in half (or even decreased) when they switched to single-payer, then you've pretty conclusively proven empirically that there is no reason to think your original assertion that health care costs would be cut in half if the U.S. switched to single-payer is true. Thanks for confirming that for us.
If you want to discuss why the U.S. spends more on health care than other countries, you'll want to come up with something which explains why the U.S. spends more on just about everything than other countries. Or alternately, what are the things driving up health care costs in the United States. Guess what? Laws and regulations are the largest component of why health care is expensive in the U.S. (And please don't cite people who were completely wrong about what Obamacare would do to costs to try and argue otherwise, they've already discredited themselves on the subject.)
Trying to show causation between having a single-payer system and lower costs requires you to actually show empirical evidence that it was single-payer which makes a difference. Otherwise, you might as well claim that countries without as many paved roads causes health spending to be lower, which happens to be a true correlation, but doesn't mean much in terms of causation.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I hope Amazon et al shake up the "health care" industry. Making money on providing medical care should be illegal.
Amazon et all seem to just be replicating Kaiser which created not-for-profit hospitals to provide their employees and their families with healthcare about 80 years ago. Today Kaiser is a major healthcare provider for the general public in western states.
Various churches also offer not-for-profit hospitals. Locally we have Loma Linda University Medical Center, a full service and level I trauma center for the county.
Not-for-profit hospitals aren't really anything new. And companies providing medical facilities for employees and their families isn't exactly anything new either. Besides the large scale like Kaiser there are also small clinics on various corporate campuses, some with capabilities on par with small urgent care facilities. Best of luck to Amazon, perhaps they can help modernize these sort of efforts.
Err...if you didn't allow anyone to make money (a profit) with healthcare, why would anyone go into that industry for a lively hood?
The employees at not-for-profits get paid.
I'm sorry that you lost money, but you need to diversify if it's not money you can afford to lose. Hopefully you can recover and diversify.
Mostly because people see what they have as better than what they did. Too bad that folks who make more than 400% of the poverty line (about 30K for an individual, at $15/hour that's not difficult) end up paying 1K/month in premiums, eh? Sucks to be them!
Exactly. And many of we right wingers think that Romneycare was an utter failure - Romney is more of a D than an R anyway.
"Romneycare" was implemented in Massachusetts, by an R gov, but "D" everything else. It would not have existed without the Democrats wanting it. Period. Sorry, you're wrong.
My understanding is that the main opposition political right has to national health care plan is that it will significantly raise taxes on everyone, while lowering the quality for the top payers.
Which is true. That is how socialized medicine works. To most of us across Europe, that is an acceptable deal. US has a much more "free do succeed or fail" spirit, which makes it unacceptable.
Even here in Finland, if you want high quality care in many fields, you have to go to private sector. We're considered what, top 3 of the most efficient medical system in the world, and right now, it's quite grim. I had to book an appointment for dentist to check my teeth for my once-every-two-years dentist check (they won't allow you to have them more often, and yearly check is done by a hygienist, not a doctor). They couldn't even give me a date when it would happen. Six months wait minimum I was told, and they'll tell me some time in the future when my place in queue is up which of the local private providers I will have to go to to get my teeth checked and when.
Or I can just go pay a lot of money at a private clinic. Being healthy and never really having had any significant teeth problems throughout my life, I don't need to bother. Most people, not so much. So they pay an arm and a leg for private care. Care quality will be the same, because guess what? It's a "purchased service", which is the phrase used for "regional government (which has to provide universal healthcare) buys the service from private sector".
Situation is better for GP, where I only had to wait about a month for my yearly appointment to get a basic health check. Specialist care? Same thing as with teeth checks. Expect three to six months wait, where you can't even ask for specific date for an appointment. You're just given one at some point, and if you don't like it, back in the end of the queue you go. For this reason, private health insurance for children has skyrocketed. You can wait to get medical care for yourself, but your child? Not so much.
And if you're employed at a sizable company, guess what? You get private healthcare because it's mandated by law, to be paid by your employer. Which doesn't have those queue times.
So to pretend that there aren't pros to private-only system is folly. You need to understand that there are pros and cons to each system, and when you misrepresent this in an attempt to sell universal health care, you'll get overwhelming rejection when people notice that they have been fooled. Not a good long term strategy, as people are discovering with "you get to keep your doctor" and other Obamacare debacles in US. Be honest, inform people of pros and cons of each system, and put it to a national vote. I imagine you could probably win that one on universal healthcare. Time seems to be ripe for that in US.
Because in the end, the best system is to have public system that ensures that everyone is provided with minimum healthcare level that lets people stay productive.
The overall market fell by about 1%, mostly because of the fall of the health industry, which represents about 18% of the American economy
Sounds like a high chance that some buying opportunities have been created.
Whatever Amazon is planning is not going to have an affect on the entire insurance industry overnight; the market tends to react irrationally lately ---- whenever Amazon suggests they might be entering a new business suddenly market cap evaporates from any of the perceived competition.
But Healthcare is very much unlike retail Amazon is familiar with in so many ways.
In other words.... The Fed will not be able to keep the interest rates low, because the fed's ability to lower interest rates requires that there actually be demand for the treasury notes --- lesser demand would mean the notes will be auctioned off at a lower bond price = higher interest yield.
My dad financially ruined himself with *JUST* healthcare premiums between ~2000 and ~2010. His medical insurance for the past 40 years kept jacking rates up on him after he retired from corporate life to find a more fulfilling personal job.
From ~150/mo per person for a 4 person family up to 750 each for two of them and 350/mo for the other two. At once point it was based on age, at another it was based on 'pre-existing conditions'. Needless to say blowing over 2 grand a month just on medical insurance sent him from having a nice comfortable retirement next egg to basically destitute before he reached 'official' retirement age. And subpar coverage that entire time. Now all of a sudden when there is medicare to suck off, they started providing him all the tests they'd been denying him for the past 15 years. He switched providers ASAP once he had medicare supported options, but the pre-existing conditions axe weighed heavy on his choice not to change providers.
I personally haven't had medical coverage since my 20s and haven't been to a doctor since, knock on wood. At this point in time I'd sooner die than trust my life to another random health insurance doctor, and in my region that is all we have out here, unless you can pay top dollar for a private doctor (which aren't necessarily any more competent or lifesaving than the aforementioned.)
Odd how again, your focus is on the 'big businesses'... and not say... the labor unions who also benefited from that
The Labor unions ARE among big businesses. Just because they call themselves non-profit unions, does not detract from their large size and unjustifiable influence in affecting our government.
I am skeptical that Amazon et al will be successful in this, but I wish them well.
This shit is simple. Lots of companies have replicated non-core business functions to reduce cost, often eventually spinning them off as separate businesses, selling them at a profit and continuing to buy from them.
Woking in telecom, some of the most used subscriber tracking programs are spinoff companies from other telcos. GMAC is not a division of GM, as they started, but is a separate company, and unrelated (and since, renamed).
Health Care is easy. Price books, discounts, and tricks that are well known. Negotiating for the insurer discount off the price book, and you are 99% of the way to solving the problem, from there you simply set up fraud protections and spread the cost. Easy. The problem is it takes enough spread of risk to cover everyone, something that 3 large companies covers.
Learn to love Alaska
No. The fed could pay 90% interest on T-bills, while charging banks 1% for the FED rate. Sure, that would cause problems with debt, but there's no physical reason why it wouldn't work.
Learn to love Alaska
Paying a doctor for his time is different than a for-profit pharma, who all spend more on marketing than R&D, and for-profit insurance company paying a for-profit hospital. About 50% of health care expenses ar profit-related. This is new. Previously, almost all hospitals were non-profit, and many insurance companies started as non-profit. Everyone trying to profit from it is the #1 cause of the increasing costs.
Learn to love Alaska
Lots of companies have replicated non-core business functions to reduce cost
Including Amazon. AWS began with someone noticing that they needed a load of computers to cover their peak demand, but most of the time they were below that peak and wondering if they could sell some of their excess capacity. It was never intended to be a large part of their business, just a way of reducing the costs of operating their store. It turned out to be quite profitable...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I mean, if you're a Dr...why would you sacrifice 4 years of medical school, plus internship years, plus extra years if you are specializing...on top of college, if you didn't see a payoff in the end that was worth your sacrifice up front?
I once sat next to a doctor at a dinner party, and boy, he was a real grade A asshole. Patients should pay out of their own pocket for treatments, so they could better appreciate the service he delivers them and that Scandinavian countries with free healthcare are communist hellholes doomed to financial fail. (Although all credit agencies beg to differ with him on that last one). So yeah, money plays a role for some, although mostly, it's about seeking to be an authority, worshipped as a healing demi-god.
Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
Slowing an increase over a period of years is also known as a decrease. I never said they cut their costs in half, I said they cost half what the U.S. pays now. If you actually looked at the pretty graphs and charts in the links I gave you, it would be obvious. Those are in terms of GDP by the way, so differences in currency value are already factored out. They are modern western countries, and all somewhat left of the U.S. so it's bizarre that you would claim U.S. regulations are making all that difference.
I have no idea why you are determined to sacrifice yourself for the sake of GOP ideology, but it has become apparent you can't be convinced of the facts because you fervently want to believe something else. I might as well try to convince a born-again fundamentalist to join me in celebration of Darwin's birthday. I can tell because when confronted with facts and figures, you fell back to the previous argument/talking point even though it was already shot down, as if you have forgotten already.
That 1.2 million includes me, and though we just got a new plan option that saved me a boatload, I'm looking forward to the possibility of saving even more.
As long as they're not directly hurting other people, I don't really care. Let them live life and be happy.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
No. The fed could pay 90% interest on T-bills, while charging banks 1% for the FED rate.
The Banks would borrow out their maximum from the fed window and use ALL the money to buy the T-Bills and profit from that arbitrage instead of using it to make loans that carry risk; there would likely be some forms of collusion games where financial institutions would make deposits with each other to increase their borrowing power... consumers suddenly wouldn't be able to get mortgages or auto loans --- even with perfect credit you're more risk than a T-Bill; credit cards would be priced out of the market unless they can charge consumers 120% interest.
Those same single payer countries also charge a hell of a lot more in personal income tax. The money comes from somewhere, it's just not labelled the same way it is here in the states.
On average, the total spent on healthcare is less because the the young and/or wealthy pay some of the costs for the old and/or poor.
You apparently don't know how averages work. Think about it a minute and you'll see your mistake, I'll wait....
Next up, they also don't t have to pay an insurance company for their health insurance. Would you rather send a private corporation $1000/month or send the public insurance $500/month for the same service. Cue Jeopardy music...
America has higher prices mostly because we pay for most of the world's medical research
Except that's not actually how it works. It's the same company selling a drug to both the US and everyone else. For example, in the listing below Mirapex is owned by a German company.
Mirapex, for Parkinson's disease: $157 in Canada vs. $263 in the United States.
Celexa, for depression: $149 in Canada vs. $253 in the United States.
Diovan, for high blood pressure: $149 in Canada vs. $253 in the United States.
Oxazepam, for insomnia: $13 in Canada vs. $70 in the United States.
Seroquel, for insomnia: $33 in Canada vs. $124 in the United States.
A better argument would be that drugs cost less for everyone else BECAUSE they are able to charge more in US markets. As in premium US prices allow them to give discounts to others. But in reality it's simpler than that - drugs cost more in the US because the US health care system gives the drug companies a huge negotiating advantage compared to single-payer.
One of the features of being an EU citizen is that you get equal access to other EU countries' health systems - but need to apply for a card to obtain it. I applied on line, and it arrived within days. You were obviously unlucky. And remember, you wouldn't have needed the card to get medical care; turn up, explain the situation and you would have got treated.
Top payers in medical care are not a mythical one percent. It's closet to universal 20/80 distribution. Weatlhiest people paying most into the system tend to also be healthiest, and vice versa.
This is something we tend to discover in countries with universal health care. Wealthy and healthy people get annoyed that they pay a lot of taxes, and they still have to sit five hours in ER queue with all the junkies and alcoholics. It's a real problem. So they end up paying extra on top of the high taxes paying for universal health care. And then they wonder why is it that they have to pay for public healthcare which they don't use.
Which provides them with incentives to vote for the parties that essentially push to defund public sector in favour of private one. Which is now the most popular party in my country, in some part due to this. It's a genuine problem in long term, and your denials of this will create problem on your end, because while you can refuse to address reality, you cannot refuse to address consequences of your denial of reality.
That is why your desperate attempt to build a caricature out of my arguments so you can easily debunk them is not constructive. You're the one who needs to win hearts and minds to get universal healthcare to pass in US. I already have it and I wholeheartedly support it for US, so strawmanning my points on the negatives of the system will not convince anyone who isn't already on your side, and will most certainly alienate those that aren't, because they can actually read my points, and see that you're not actually addressing them.
And by the way. US is not a "private only" system. Emergency care is still universal. Child healthcare is still universal. Elderly care is still universal.
Amazon.com looked at their bottom line, and they saw one very large expenditure that they had zero control over, and no ability to optimize. What do you think that was?
Employee healthcare costs!
Now, I recently had to get an albuterol inhaler. Albuterol is cheap, it was created in 1966. But inhalers, where they put a tiny bit of albuterol into an aerosol spray run like $65 after insurance contracted discount. That is INSANE!!!!
I'd be surprised if those inhalers cost more than a $1 to manufacture. So imagine, AmazonBasicsHealth offering a similar inhaler for $4. This monstrous price hike is extremely common. CPAPS are basically over-glorified aquarium air pumps. Yet, they cost around $2,000. And many who have utilized, will attest to the fact that the designs are often poorly thought out and build quality lacking. But hey, that plastic tubing is FDA approved, so you get billed $20-$80 for a hose that probably cost 79 cents.
So Amazon looking at this, can easily be like,....well we don't need to make a profit. Because, if we simply sell RX and services at cost, we can reduce our employee overhead by around 10%-15%. For Amazon, a 15% reduction of employee costs is a huge profit margin increase. And Amazon.com is big enough, that once they get it on the ball, can be very disruptive. They can go, and say to a manufacturer, we want a good CPAP for $500. If they don't relent. They design and build their own, and then sell it for $200. The companies will either have to come to the table or face eradication.
But the big thing is services....the doctors and nurses themselves. I've thought that the solution to this problem is to actually fund free medical school - with the catch being that half of a doctors time for the first 20 years or so is obligated back to either the company or community.
"Slowing an increase over a period of years is also known as" speculation.
You've never addresses the original fact that the U.S. spends more on most everything. For example, education. You haven't provided any evidence that single-payer plans would save money in the U.S. Simply saying one of the many difference between countries is single-payer or not and one of the other differences is how much a country spends isn't evidence of anything., it's an unsupported claim to relate them causally.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Stating you don't actually know something, then drawing a conclusion from your lack of knowledge is an interesting approach, but if you read the rest of the thread, you'd note that spending wasn't reduced by introducing single-payer elsewhere, so there is no reason it would be reduced in the United States by introducing single-payer. (Also, we're talking about spending. "Costs" is a different concept, because it doesn't reflect the interaction of demand vs supply which determines spending.)
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Single payer sounds a whole lot better, than allowing my employer decide whether I live or die,
Except now you have government deciding whether you live or die. You can change employers. Good luck changing the government.
Nonaggression works!
Try to provide evidence of your assertions, rather than taking a point-in-time correlation and trying to turn it into causation because it fits your preconceived notions.
Also, we were talking about spending levels, not about "costs". There is a difference between the two concepts.
Either way, looking at this chart, can you tell when Australia (to use your example) introduced single-payer? How about any of the other countries? Guess what, their spending per capita went up after introducing single-payer, not down. There's no reason, nor evidence, to suggest the experience in the U.S. would be different. The economic evidence is that costs would go up after switching to single-payer.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
You mean other than the fact it has worked every single place it has ever been tried? Given that, the onus is on you to show why it WOULDNT work in the U.S. since that would be the unusual situation.
As for education, guess what, in the other countries where it is cheaper, the government pays all or part of the tuition rather than saddling students with loans (for higher education) or pushing it off to the local government (for k-12).
I'll just leave this here
Health insurance companies make their money that way on smaller clients. Most larger companies self-insure. In those cases the insurance company makes their money off of fees for managing the plan. The actual costs for care are directly paid by the company. That is why at many larger companies you can get stuff that is not technically in the plan covered anyway if you can convince HR. The insurance company has no skin in the game so if the employer says they'll pay for it they will cover it.
My problem with euthanasia is anybody you put in charge of it is incentivized to kill you when you get expensive. The various national health systems have proven to be at least as slimy as private insurers when it comes to saving money at the patients expense. I do not want my doctor incentivized to do me in when my care becomes expensive.
How the fuck do people keep forgetting that Democrats controlled the House and Senate when Obama became president?
Attacking the "evil" insurance companies is a great way to get a +5 but is completely divorced from reality. Nobody pays claims anymore. When you go to a doctor, they get pre-authorization from your insurance company. I've never heard of a visit being pre-authorized and then denied. Sure they could deny the visit up front but that's not really denying a claim. And insurance companies aren't in the business of denying care. They'd rather you get something addressed right away when it's cheaper to fix. They way you save money as an insurance provider is (1) Encourage people to get healthy and save medical costs. (2) Encourage preventive medicine like an annual physical (3) Negotiate for discounts with the doctors. None of those amount to denying claims. Also insurance has to pay out 85% of premiums as medical care. It's a requirement of the patient protection and affordable care act.
I'd rather have health care advance quickly, even if we have to pay more. America is a wealthy nation, after all.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Somebody has to pay for the research. Should we pay the same per dose as Uganda? No, I don't think we should. Maybe it's not the most fair pricing for us, but it's not very far off.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm quite happy for US citizens to subsidise my heath care, but I'm not convinced that 'if we implement socialised health care then our costs will go down but citizens of other countries will go up' is actually a compelling counterargument for the average US taxpayer.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
profits come out of Amazon pockets. To lower healthcare cost you have to remove the profit and the overhead. They need to create a nonprofit healthcare service company that will own hospitals and clients and that has doctors that work for them. They can then offer this as an health care option to their employees at zero out of pocket cost.
You mean some Americans are wealthy.
But tell me, do you routinely pay double the sticker price for things in the hope it will advance improvements to the product? Do you try to make others do the same?
OH, I see, we're uniquely challenged. Not at all like the influx of refugees to Germany and the U.K.
I guess you're saying it's too much of an authoritarian hellhole to have good health care?
Personally, I think it's still salvageable.
But no matter how hard they wave their wallets, the thing they talked about can't really get going for a year or so. But the chickens are clucking and scurrying now.
Kinda like last month when a couple random companies said the word "blockchain" without demonstrating that they even knew what it was.
Right, but normally the Fed would just have to deal with sluggish demand, which would be bad enough, but now they're having to do a lot of selling when demand is low, which is going to make their job (controlling interest rates) that much harder.
I'm not saying QE was a bad idea, I think it was a good idea. I just think that the Fed is always late to the party: they wait too long to lower interest rates and inject money into the economy, and then they wait too long to raise interest rates and pull money out of the economy. They should have begun slowing their purchase of treasuries years ago, not wait until there's another bubble.
Until we again separate banking from investment banking, we're going to continue with these boom/bust cycles, and people are going to get hurt.
Good reference. I just finished that again, after reading it 35 years ago.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
How the fuck do people forget that A) The Democrats only had a filibuster-proof majority for 9 months, B) the GOP demonstrated a willingness to filibuster any and every proposal, and C) even with the filibuster-proof majority, the Democratic party is not a monolithic entity that demands every member toe the line like the GOP does? For example, the Democrats had to keep the votes of blue dogs to pass anything, and they nixed the Public Option, which would have been the primary mechanism to force private insurance to compete throughout the country. Without it, many places - particularly rural areas - didn't have competition between insurance companies, thus completely undermining the power of the market to provide a better product.
Written by that bastion of liberal thought and Democratic stronghold that is the Heritage Foundation.
His use of "misnomer" qualifies as one.
The fault lies with you and me.
We enjoy a duality that is at odds
1.) We desire fair play from corporate America.
2.) We expect asymptotic earnings over time increments measured in nanoseconds (in lay terms: "greed").
We vote 2.) and we bitch about 1.).
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
US is not a "private only" system. Emergency care is still universal. Child healthcare is still universal. Elderly care is still universal.
"Universal" in that you still have to pay for it... I ended up in the hospital via ambulance for two days once. If I hadn't had insurance, it would have been $700 for the ride, and over $50,000 for two days/one night in the hospital. Sure, they'll still "universally" pick you up and take you, but then most people would have to declare bankruptcy.
The defunding is also not a easy issue.
Defunding is never done in a linear manner. It usually starts off with the upper class realizing that they can pay to skip the queue, and then slowly try to influence their local positions about this. The problem only appears as you have the media, a political party, and a few voters, straggling alongside party politics. Slowly, the private offering will increase in quality, slowly it will penetrate the part of society willing to pay.
In most Nordic countries, everyone who can bother, can pay for private insurance to cover this, meaning its not a issue of money, but more a issue of social class(and their way of managing money). The interesting part, is that since the class of people paying for the part is loop sided, the feedback is loop sided.
So, running this experiement live, in Norway, since the The Grand Adventure of Oil started: The Politicians kids are now adults, from those times. As a weird upperclass crust, they most likely grew up with the extra protection the upper class is willing to invest into. From higher sport participation, more activities as kids, to more networking, to better public morale, and simply to having better health insurance.
So what is happening, is that those kids are now becoming politicians, and since the parties are basically aristocratic dynasties in many ways, the pile of class have a impact. And thats before you consider that the upper class has rather normal ways of networking: Newspapers and social circles.
What is interesting, is how this ends up being portrayed. Currently, local doctors are the more stressed parts of the public sector, is basically crying wolf. Because of the state media, their cry get heard. But because of rather harsh populism and tabloid culture, there is no digging into WHY they are crying wolf, and how it has been adapted into their workforce since at the least the war.
So basically: The local doctors(needed to get access to the rest of the public health sector)
Are in this situation where they are understaffed, because they need to do somebody elses job. This much is obvious, but beyond that, why they needed somebody else to do their job is not researched, or why we live in a era of extra paperwork.
Still, this feeds into the feed back loop causing the issue: So if the public sector is getting worse(a little), regardless of the issue, it will result in it getting further slashes down the road, because the aristocrats influencing the political cabal do not care about its ability in the long term.
The political situation in other nations with universal health care is similar: Not the same, but in broad strokes, the pattern is there. And it really doesn't have anything to do with the base quality.
You mean some Americans are wealthy.
If you make $30k/year, you're a 1%-er by world standards. The median family income in the US is amazing in the broader view. It's good to sometimes take the broader view, it helps your perspective.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Immaterial. You're clearly from the People's Republic of Vermont. How does an industry with no industry to speak of, no income work for ya? Oh wait, you're probably on a trust fund! Those of us in the real world have to have real world solutions.
Three of the most richest men in the World... sat together for a talk about something that doesn't concern me... and it cost my life savings $5K within just one day.
And how much has your "life savings" increased over the past year or so? My retirement and investment accounts went down by about 1% yesterday, but they're still significantly higher than a year ago. If it's your "life savings", you shouldn't care what happens on a day-to-day basis.
The ACA was a real mess, but there was an attempt to involve Republicans in the process.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And $30K/year will allow you to buy only the most basic drugs in the US. If you need insulin, and you don't have some sort of insurance or assistance plan that covers it, well, sucks to be you.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I haven't forgotten. But you apparently have forgotten the comment you made in the post I replied to: "Obama and the Democrats would rather stay in power than give us decent healthcare."
Implying the moral thing to do was to give up power and give the US decent healthcare. Those are, um, incompatible actions.
Nice post. I especially like the part where you make up a bunch of crap about someone you've never met as a way to deflect from the fact that you have no support for your argument. When you don't have facts, intellect, or class: attack!
US is not a "private only" system. Emergency care is still universal. Child healthcare is still universal. Elderly care is still universal.
Emergency care is private and unfunded. It's a cost of doing business, like marking parking lots with fire lanes, and having handicapped spots.
Child-only care that's income tested isn't "universal" and neither is an age-tested system. That you don't understand "universal" doesn't make it true.
Medicare and Medicaid are government paid plans, who only pay private for-profit providers who opt-in to their system (also note, Medicaid is a state system, not federal, though uses federal funds). You should have gone for VA. A medical system overlay, the only government medical system with no "profit" in it. Deliberately kept at bare minimums to "prove" how bad government health care would be.
The VA would be a better basis for Universal Health Care than the Medi[care|caid] system. Fund the VA, and send all Medi[care|caid] to the VA, shutting them down as the care transfers to the VA, then expand the VA until it can serve the entire population. It would take years to do gracefully, but would be an effective and reasonable path to universal care. No changes to the private system, but creating universal care.
Wealthy and healthy people get annoyed that they pay a lot of taxes, and they still have to sit five hours in ER queue with all the junkies and alcoholics.
Healthy people don't go to the ER. And in my Universal Care location, I can go to my GP and get a referral to the hospital and get no lines. And yes, that even works for ER, with private ERs referring to the hospital and eliminating the wait, so you have to go through triage at the "free" ER, then skip to the front of the line. And there are lots of private facilities you can go to and never touch the public system. So the 20% (since apparently 1% offends you) gets private insurance, and goes to private doctors, and doesn't use the public system if it's that important to them.
And yes, one thing the rich do best is complain about taxes.
Learn to love Alaska
Care to try and defend that?
Okay. Insurers and providers don't have high profits. I posted this the other day in response to someone blaming everything on the ACA, but: Health insurer profits, which were never extraordinarily high, are down since 2007. I don't have a convenient link for hospitals, but they're also in the 5% range.
Pharmaceuticals are the most profitable sector of the healthcare industry (by a pretty good margin), and they are responsible for a good portion of the increase in costs in recent years, but even they can't be blamed for everything. A lot of it is just ridiculous inefficiency: you've probably heard that filing health insurance claims, just doing the paperwork, costs hundreds of billions per year. Some of it is high salaries - that competition in staffing that you're talking about doesn't work very well, since patients can't really comparison shop between doctors. And doctors who work in hospitals can demand compensation based on how many patients they bring in... which is independent of how much they charge those patients, since the patients can't comparison shop.
Anyway, if you need to blame a single industry then you can blame the pharmaceutical industry, not health insurers, but that's not really accurate either. It's a big complicated problem without an easy scapegoat.
Then they would be investment companies, not banks. It would take some changes in rules for banks to allow them to only grant loans to the fed. The liquidity and such are designed for consumer loans and such, not super-long-term T-bills.
But, as you say, the fed could easily change the rules to allow banks to become buyers of T-bills, and if the rates continue to increase, they may do that, in an attempt to limit the interest rates they have to pay, as higher rates mean greater debt/deficit. But if consumer credit is stifled, the entire economy will collapse.
If interest rates on T-bills climb, the government will do something to encourage *anybody* to buy them including banks, so long as it doesn't shut off consumer credit.
Learn to love Alaska
The focus is on who's winning. Unions are besieged. Companies run things. Putting pressure on unions isn't going to help much of anything on a national scale. Getting government somewhat independent of big business would pay off big-time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
While you're running your prejudices, other countries, with much more government involvement, have significantly higher life expectancies while paying maybe half we do (per capita). Try a little empiricism sometime.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Pre-authorization? Yes, I make sure I schedule all my heart attacks, strokes, and traffic accidents at least a month in advance, to get the paperwork in order.
Sometimes, when I find out about a medical condition, there's time to plan out how to do it and get everything in order. Sometimes there isn't.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Sure, but average age of death is fairly unambiguous.
Now, as soon as rent and mortgage payments come down to 3rd world standards (not to mention food and drug prices) that might matter.
Until that happens, the cost of medical care in the U.S. compared to income is ruinous for many people and is a drag on the entire economy. If you want to see research advance (laudable, BTW), donate some of your disposable income to that cause. Don't demand that people who don't have disposable income choose between their heart pills and rent.
Now, about the two questions I asked...
You seem to be quite generous with other people's income there. In particular, those who have a lot less of it than you do. Perhaps we should be paying more than Uganda, but should we really be paying double what Canada, the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, etc. pay?
Yes, DOUBLE.
How fair is it to have average Americans paying that much more to support the development of drugs they won't be able to afford? Should we be paying a food surcharge to develop a new $10,000/oz super caviar while we're at it?
We established (including via your links) that single-payer hasn't reduced spending from the pre-single-payer system anywhere else it's been tried. So you're going to have to define "worked" as something other than that if you want to claim switching to single-payer "worked" everywhere.
The primary causes of higher health care spending in the U.S.:
1. People in the U.S. are wealthier. Wealthier people demand, consume and pay for more health care than poorer people who have to prioritize spending on other things first. This is why, for example, people in India spend so much less on books than people in the United States and Indian books which are purchased tend to be lower quality (cheaper paper, bindings, etc...) in order to keep them less expensive.
2. The government in conjunction with the AMA restrict the entry of new providers into the marking, significantly reducing the supply. This is via requirements for practicing (especially those which don't recognize medical training or experience from other countries) and limiting residency spots.
3. The government distorts the health care market via laws, regulations and rules. This includes things like the tax law incentivizing employer-based insurance groups, restrictions on competition between health insurance providers, restrictions preventing opening new hospitals to compete with old ones, restrictions on what someone can purchase in terms of health insurance, medicare/medicaid/va-related distortions, etc...
4. The FDA regulatory process, especially requiring testing for efficacy (not just safety), requiring double-testing (no reason a drug or device which has proven safe in Europe has to start all over in the U.S., to give one wastefule example), ridiculous definitions and rules for "medical" devices.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
You're just repeating yourself. It has all been shot down before. You have yet to explain how such an impossible thing as single payer works everywhere in the world but somehow can't work in the U.S.
They should come over here. Then they can pay top dollar for private care AND sit for 6-8 hours with the junkies. then get lesser quallity care.
Funny thing I'be seen, the mere existence of public care reduces the costs of private care in most places just by providing an option.
Norway due to its unique economics makes for a very bad example for anything outside it. Literally worldwide, it's the only state that operates the way it does.
My native Finland is much closer to your typical Nordic system. We actually have severe money problems within the system, and can't just go the way of Norway and offer better salaries to vacuum doctors and nurses from other Nordic countries. Notably, this is the issue that Finland, Sweden and Denmark are facing right now - Norway can simply pay far better wages due to its unique economic structures, which is causing brain drain across its neighbours.
The Grand Experiment in Finland right now is essentially the same that crushed the quality of universal healthcare in Sweden about a decade ago to the point where people in Sweden now come here to Finland to do quality-critical things like childbirth. Population average ages and is less healthy due to problems like obesity. That means more demand. At the same time, doctors and nurses are more slowly becoming changing to female dominated field, and math on that one is brutal. Female doctor will on average do about 2/3 of work hours of a male doctor, typically due to wanting to have multi-year maternity leave and not wanting to do as much overtime.
So you have a classic "more demand, less supply" problem that keeps growing slowly, boiling the frog. Private sector is increasingly stepping in, offering things like non-emergency health care outside traditional work hours, little to no queue times and so on. All while being able to dump the actually difficult cases on public sector, because public sector must treat all patients. Private sector is under no such obligations.
So you get a system where public sector is for those who are the poorest, most ill people that need expensive treatment, while private sector skims the cream off the top and posts record profits year after year. And the wealthiest and healthiest who go to private sector for their overwhelmingly easy to treat problems start voting for the parties that want to defund public care. And private sector companies keep funding said party off their ever increasing profits.
And so, you have a self sustaining process which leads to disaster.
You really need to read the second to last paragraph:
>That is why your desperate attempt to build a caricature out of my arguments so you can easily debunk them is not constructive. You're the one who needs to win hearts and minds to get universal healthcare to pass in US. I already have it and I wholeheartedly support it for US, so strawmanning my points on the negatives of the system will not convince anyone who isn't already on your side, and will most certainly alienate those that aren't, because they can actually read my points, and see that you're not actually addressing them.
It depends a lot on the system. In Nordic system, where you have parallel private and public health care, what happens is that private healthcare gets to skim the rich and easy cases off the top, and dump the rest on the public system. Which results in massively overloaded public system which gets all the difficult and expensive cases, resulting in lowered quality of care as doctors who have a choice go to private sector.
This is a major problem across Nordics right now. Sweden is so bad at this point, that you have people coming to Finland for quality-critical deeply specialized things like childbirth. Rest of us are a decade or two behind them, which is why our public system at hospital level (specialized care) is still of generally high quality, while the local (i.e. health clinic) is in a downward spiral. I.e. one of the best cancer survival rates in the world, one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world and so on, because these things remain in high demand, cannot be easily delivered by private sector that finds it most profitable to treat rich with runny noses. A caricature, but it delivers the correct message in this case. In clinic, it may literally take you days just to get to see a doctor, even after you get sick, because of how badly clogged public system is at this point.
And the worst part is that private care does slowly go up in price, even when public option is available. It's just that we are at the start of the progression, while US is much further down the line. Specialized care in private sector is a small business, and while private companies are clearly lobbying hard for more universal payer system payments to private sector (hence allowing less wealthy people to get into the private system) and we have a major legislative package on the topic that has been on and off in parliamentary limbo for something close to decade at this point. The issue is incredibly explosive and painful, that even the main party pushing for defunding public care and shifting to private, that is currently the most popular party in the country simply cannot push the changes through the parliament. The rejection from the rest of the nation is simply too strong.
I pay for every doctor visit I do in Finland, with universal public healthcare, up to a certain annually reset maximum, at which point the national pensions organisation KELA will pay 100% of the rest afaik. I never needed any such services to such a costly extent as to hit the maximum. Same party also pays for a portion of medical purchases, after a certain annual minimum is fully paid by me. They also make decisions such as which medicines are partially paid for by them, to what extent, and for which illnesses. If your illness is not deemed "correct for this medication", even if medication is found helpful by the doctor, you pay for it in full. A very contentious issue for many patients organisations who lobby for new medications to be accepted on the list for their illness.
And you cannot even declare private bankruptcy here, as the private bankruptcy doesn't exist in the law. Which caused a severe issue with suicide after the economy crash of early 1990s. Instead you're could spend your entire life on the hook for debts in an endless debt spiral. I know they introduced some changes to it so that one failed business doesn't ruin your finances for life, but there's still no "private bankruptcy". We have a Nordic attitude to debt in general, where you are expected to pay what you owe. That's why we have such a major culture clash between North and South in Europe in relation to Greek debt crisis. We expect them to pay back their debts in full, just like we expect our own to pay back their debts in full.
Yeah, no.
I'm more convinced by the McKinsey analysis that RCA begins with than the rest of that article. And the Stiglitz report it links to doesn't prove what is claimed, at all.
That's because you still haven't provided any evidence at all that when single-payer systems are implemented, they reduce health care spending.
But hey, at least you finally got some mod points for your alt account.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
"Cows are cats. If you disagree, that's you building a strawman."
That's a joke. Reality isn't a strawman. I don't have to win any hearts or minds. I have better universal care than you do.
I was just correcting your outright lie that ER is a form of universal healthcare, and throwing in some other corrections. You are just being an arrogant prick. And you are factually wrong on almost every point. Anyone can look back on your words and see that clearly.
Learn to love Alaska
Gotta say, "my healthcare is better than yours" was a true cherry on the cake. I guess you subscribe to belief that when you go retard, you may as well go full retard.
More power to you.
And emergency claims rarely (if ever) get denied. In fact we seem to have the opposite problem. Insurers are paying obscene amounts to out of network providers (with whom they haven't pre-negotiated) in emergency situations. I've heard of $100k for a one hour consult in an emergency room and insurance has paid it. Again they have to pay out 85% (or more) in claims so you can't blame the insurance companies profits for the problems with our medical system.
In other words, "I don't have any substantive objections and my sole contribution here is to blithely paste links to widely cited documents that just about everyone has already seen". Why even bother?
I'll take science over expertise any day. I am especially wary when the so-called expert analysis is a little more than the rudimentary analysis of a bunch of kids fresh out of school with only a skin-deep exposure to these topics (I have known many such people, including peers of these authors, and while most of them are reasonably intelligent people, their bluster far exceeds their subject matter expertise).
As for Stiglitz, he has not published anything on healthcare and shared any sort of rigorous analysis, so far as I can tell, so I see no reason to defer to his professed (left wing) preferences. He has, however, published stuff closer to his knitting with Amartya Sen, Jean-Paul Fitouss, and others that pertains to the discussion. Indeed, they recommend AIC and AHDI over and above GDP as an indicator of material living conditions.
Here are just a few instructive quotes:
As a source? No, I don't think you don't understand. These services, of which Legatum is just one, have helpfully aggregated a wide variety of indicators from various 3rd parties that measure the sorts of lives that people live (health, happiness, material conditions, etc) and these indicators are overwhelmingly better predicted by household measures like AIC, the same measures that Stiglitz et al recommend, than GDP.
For instance:
Social Progress Index:
I read something recently about an insurance company denying emergency room charges if they didn't think they were warranted (putting the onus onto the insured to determine whether it's a medical emergency or not), but I have no idea how typical that is, and the company was apparently moving towards looking at the original symptoms rather than the diagnosis.
Insurance companies are part of the problem. They add a lot of overhead. They are nowhere near all of the problem.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I provided ample evidence. You simply refused to follow the links. I'm not interested in attempting to spoon feed you further.
Insurance companies add overhead (15% overhead to be exact) but they typically make up for this (and more) by being able to negotiate better rates. The alternative would be mandated rates (or single player). However with single payer (or in many traditional insurance plans), the patients have no incentive to think about costs at all. This is hugely problematic as there is a wide range of expensive (and marginally useful) treatments out there. In single payer, the government becomes the only insurance company and decides what care you do or do not get. This isn't awful. But with no other changes, single payer will give everybody overpriced healthcare until such time as the country can't afford it. High-deductible plans actually seem like a good choice (whether private or government financed, but no country has HSA-like single payer system). One result of this is that we are seeing many "urgent care" places spring up. You go there is you aren't sure how serious something is. I've gone there and been told to just tough it out costing my insurance only like $80 vs an expensive ER visit. I've gone there and told that I'd better get to the emergency room soon or I'll end up being an amputee. Cost an extra $80 over just going to the emergency room but still savings. Consumers have to have an incentive to control their healthcare costs. Those are very difficult to put together. It's not an easy problem.
Now, as soon as rent and mortgage payments come down to 3rd world standards (not to mention food and drug prices) that might matter.
You live better than almost everyone who has ever lived. You should try to appreciate that, and maybe be a little more generous given your position.
About the two questions you asked: advances in many areas are funded by the rich doing just that. Car technology e.g. comes down from luxury cars that cost twice what they need to. There's a lot of medical technology that only the rich can afford this year, but in 20 years will be common. Without a health care system that allows for that, innovation will slow to a crawl (you'll still have the occasional Dr DeBakey, but guys like him are vanishingly rare).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Given the complaints you have about your system, mine can't be worse than yours. Do you know of a ranking of countries by government healthcare? Where I am has had universal healthcare longer than Finland.
Learn to love Alaska
You seem unable to appreciate the situation. Many Americans simply cannot afford to pay what you want them to for healthcare. They don't buy those luxury cars, they either buy older used cars, more basic cars, or no car. No healthcare really isn't an option. Older healthcare still costs a fortune in this country compared to the rest of the world. Basic healthcare costs a fortune in this country compared to the rest of the world.
Again, you seem to be REALLY generous with other people's limited income.
It sounds like a problem of underfunding the public system, possibly the same sort of monkey wrenching that the right has perpetrated in the U.S. in it's efforts to make sure we all have the most expensive and profitable (for a few) healthcare possible.
It's a common tactic. Push legislation that makes a public service inefficient or insufficient and then claim the sorry state of affairs is somehow intrinsic to a public service.
Hey guys, get a load of this. The guy who said "most richest men" called one of the richest men stupid!
If you don't have 100% control over the money, then by default it is somebody else's business.
It's like saying nobody has the right to know how much money is in your bank account. Well, I beg to differ. Employees at the bank DO have the right to know considering they are part of the equation. Nobody is stopping you from buying gold and storing it in a safe in your closet.
I looked at all your links. None of them provide any evidence that single-payer reduced spending when implemented. You keep trying to change the topic to the fact that the U.S. spends more than other countries, but that's not something we've ever disagreed on in this thread. To recap, the discussion is about "why", which you apparently have no knowledge of and no evidence of beyond your own opinion which contradicts the experience of every country which has implemented it.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Many Americans simply cannot afford to pay what you want them to for healthcare.
Correct. Just like luxury cars. My point is that "luxury health care" funds innovation, and that's the most important thing in the long run.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Then they would be investment companies, not banks.
Banks are free to buy T-Bills and often do. Just in the same way as they can loan money to businesses. 7 years ago, there was a time when they were doing mostly that, and mortgages were tough to get and coming at a significant premium.
Banks are less inclined to write loans to consumers and businesses if higher interest is available at zero risk from a government note ---- as a result, there cannot be a large gap between the short term treasuries and new short term debt for consumers, because the high rates available from the treasury notes will reduce the supply of loans to individuals and businesses until the market interest rates for those rise high enough for the banks to expect profit given the risk of making those loans.
Only if it isn't you or a loved one who can't afford necessary care.
More "I got mine, screw you!" mentality from the well off.
Problem being that parties that push for this enter parliament because populace votes for them. And populace votes for them because the wealthy don't use the public system all that much, and use private one.
So it's not the "right wing" problem. Our "right wing party" is left of US democratic party. It's the society splitting by class lines - problem. And US has a much harsher culture when it comes to splitting society by class and each class voting only for it own benefits, ignoring the whole. So to sell the universal public healthcare in US, the discussion will have to talk about pros and cons for everyone, in an honest way. Because the majority of the populace will benefit from universal healthcare. And because this discussion will inoculate the system from subversion such as one occurring around the Nordics right now for at least two generations.
The actual statement I made, complete with original link containing, oh, evidence, was that "the U.S. spends 40% more per student than the OECD average. That in turn is way more than third world countries spend."
At least learn to read the thread on the page right in front of you before suggesting someone learn to use a search engine.
Also, percent of GDP as a way to compare the price of virtually anything is ridiculous and only serves to attempt to obscure things. We don't compare prices and spending on most products as percent of GDP, we compare the actual cost. When is the last time someone asked you: How much is your rent as a percent of GDP? How much is a loaf of bread as a percent of GDP? What does a pencil cost in percent of GDP? That's stupid.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I've never seen loans hard to get. When was that? When the rates are super-low, the banks stop lending, but brokers do 100x the business. When rates are low, brokers prey on the low interest making a 30 year loan half the payment of regular rates, pushing people into super-high cost houses, then using fraudulent or near fraudulent actions to classify the loans to AAA and sell them off to banks. But even in the '80s, loans weren't hard to get. You just had to pay 10% (or more) for a "low interest" home loan. 2010, when loans were "hard" to get, the issue was the massive investigation into the "subprime" crisis (named to blame poor Blacks, and caused by rich old white men). Loans were restricted by everyone while the mess was cleaned up. Not a full shutdown, but great restrictions on brokers, and limits on new loans as the risk pools we reset from the fraudulent levels.
Learn to love Alaska
You're making assumptions and overgeneralizing.
Keeping the costs of health care down is not a real impressive return on 15% of the take.
Single-payer does not mean everyone gets what they want without cost to them. It's possible to have co-pays and medical screenings. What it does is provide everyone with access to basic health care, which does a whole lot more than high-deductible plans. Most developed countries have something of a public-private mix of payment solutions.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I have all the support in the world - look at the fact that single payer in your state failed miserably. And yours state is easy to do it in.
In the U.S. it's the right. While it;s a bit complicated due to the GOPs unholey alliance "if you'll forgive the pun" with fundamentalist Christianity, the GOP has long represented primarily the upper class, so there's truth in it being a class issue. It's confounded here by the aptly described "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" voting against their own class.
I didn't mean to imply that it's everyone's right.
I find this to be a gross oversimplification, found mainly in fart left edge of US political spectrum. Republicans are the party of the working class working for various production fields and winning this vote with policies aimed at making it easier to get production into US and limit immigration driving the wages of working class down. Democrats are distinctly hostile to these people, down to calling them "deplorables" in last election and openly supporting all of their main class enemies - immigrants and white collar intelligencia.
Democrats appear to be on the other hand the party of big business, who have shown clear support for Clinton in last elections in many non-production industries such as IT.
There's just a whole lot more to US party system and its alliance networks than just "evil christians doing the work of satan and republicans" caricature commonly painted by the same people who call working class "deplorables". Each party has it's own connections and alliances among various strata of society, and interestingly, it seems that our time is the time when many of these connections are shifting. Democrats used to be the party of working class just a couple of decades ago for example, while republicans where the big business party. That has flipped 180.
We live in interesting times when it comes to US politics. Two party system may lock out other parties - but it also causes the two big parties to keep adopting their platforms to various interests, often making friends among those that were their foes just a few decades ago.
You seem to have mistaken me for a Clinton supporter. Because of the DNC's many shenanigans combined with Clinton's abandonment of the rank and file Democrats, I didn't vote for her either. The actual working class and for that matter, the middle class are essentially unrepresented today.
I didn't make any kind of assumptions on your voting pattern. I merely pointed out that you appear to hold same misconceptions on what class is supported by whom as far left edge of US political spectrum.
Working class have a clear representation in Trump. There's absolutely no question about that. His entire "get production jobs back to US, stop immigration, lower taxes on producers so they can invest in US" platform is about as pro-working class as you can get in modern day. The only way you could even think otherwise is if you subscribe to thinking model that to be pro-working class, you have to be socialist or communist. Which is also a far left misconception.
OTOH, raising the minimum wage would be quite pro working class. As would making taxes more progressive. Stopping immigration can go either way depending on how carefully employment of illegals is watched. If that enforcement is lax, it's just a way to make sure there are plenty of illegals who can't complain when their rights are violated. Expanding public healthcare would be a huge benefit to the working class and small businesses that employ them.
You seem rather avid about U.S. politics for someone living in a nordic country where your right is to the left of the Democrats.
What is Bernie Sander's take on this?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
You're once again demonstrating the same far left assumptions, such as that legality of immigration has a significant impact on immigration's impact on working class, or that working class is on minimum wage.
Legality of immigration is all but irrelevant for working class. The fact that there is immigration in the first place is which both creates competition for jobs that would not be there otherwise and suppresses wages. Most industrial workers have healthcare provided by their employer. Most of them are not on the minimum wage but salaried at a significantly higher rate. More progressive tax would indeed help them, to an extent. However as industrial workers tend to be fairly well paid, they may get hit by progressive curve, so that is debatable. Here in Finland, industrial workers pay around 40% of their income as income tax due to progression for example.
Consider though, when the income tax was first imposed, the minimum income that required any payment at all was (in inflation adjusted dollars) $74,000. The average person didn't need to file.
Meanwhile, you are putting words in my mouth and ideas in my head that simply aren't there. I do not assume that all working class people are on minimum wage, but I do recognize that many are and nobody in the upper class is.
What you seem to not realize is that employer paid healthcare is still an expense that limits how many people the employer will hire. It's also why many employers make sure to cut hours for part time employees and not allow them to become full time. Until the ACA came along, it would sometimes force small business owners to shut down entirely just so they could actually get health insurance for themselves. Note, I'm not claiming that ACA is a great solution, or even a proper solution, but it is marginally better than the previous state of affairs.
Can you think of any employer that wouldn't rather not have to deal with health insurance at all? Can you think of any working class person who wouldn't rather not get surprise bills? That wouldn't rather not deal with limits, deductibles, co-pays, billing errors, failures to submit claims, etc, etc, etc? Can you think of any working class people who were happy to not be insurable due to pre-existing conditions?
You talking about "support for minimum wage" among working class infers that working class care in a significant way about it. They do not. As long as immigration is controlled as to not significantly compete with it, they are salaried at rate significantly above minimum wage. This isn't me putting any words in your mouth. This is me addressing misconceptions you demonstrate. Remember, we're talking about political alliances, political parties, and things that such political parties advocate for to gain support of certain societal groups.
For example, you just stated with all seriousness that "employer paid healthcare is still an expense that limits how many people they will hire". This is something that is not considered sane thinking model even in social democracies like mine, because either employer pays for it through payments to the insurer, or through taxes. The money still needs to be paid. Even the most hard line lobbyists of employers group EK around here don't try this level of silliness when they lobby for tools to hire more people.
So I certainly agree that employers would prefer to deal with as few added costs of employment as possible. They're not social organisations, but for profit enterprises. And this is where far left stops, because the core tenet of far left thinking is class warfare. Employers are at war with their employees, and that's that.
In real world on the other hand, they also want efficient workforce, which means they want their workforce to be reasonably healthy. Especially considering the whole "infectious illness" aspect of reality and what it does in a collective of people interacting with each other. Which is why organised healthcare for factory workers was introduced as a concept by the factory owners originally, and why same people understand that providing reasonable health care for their workers benefits their bottom line as long as there isn't a massive oversupply of work force.
Including Amazon.
Yes.
AWS began with someone noticing that they needed a load of computers to cover their peak demand, but most of the time they were below that peak and wondering if they could sell some of their excess capacity. It was never intended to be a large part of their business, just a way of reducing the costs of operating their store. It turned out to be quite profitable...
No, this is a myth.
Here is the story from one of the people who was there. There is another article somewhere (couldn't find it now) quoting the head of infrastructure at Amazon at the time saying there was no way he wouls have given up any capacity to AWS or their customers.
AWS was primarily envisioned to reduce the time spent deploying new services, and yes, that was something that Amazon thought other people would pay for.
All of that may be true of your country, but not this one. Many employers actively avoid providing health insurance for their employees by either limiting their hours so they can be classified as part time or mis-classifying them as contractors. It may be stupid, but that's what they do. Your claim that people making minimum wage are not a significant part of the working class is simply absurd. Even people making more than minimum wage suffer for it since it creates a large pool of people ready to replace them if they demand even a tiny raise.
The article that this discussion is connected to is all about some large businesses that are anything but satisfied with the current state of healthcare in the U.S. Small businesses and sole proprietorships are no more satisfied, they just aren't big enough to make a move like this. Many individuals have complained that they still can't afford healthcare because after paying for the insurance, they don't have enough left over to cover the crazy co-pays and the many things that aren't covered.
Funny, it only takes a few minutes to vote on a bill. Seems like 9 months is more than sufficient. And I was replying to a comments that claimed the Democrats weren't in power. That's bullshit. Democrats need to take responsibility for their inability to govern. They can't keep blaming Republicans for their incompetence and/or poor party management.
No, they are not. They just seem so to you because you've intentionally framed the causality backwards.
How long does it take to write a bill that can pass both houses? Longer than a few minutes.
Certainly. I literally prefaced my first post in this thread with "I think universal healthcare should be pushed through in US, but your arguments are bad, and here's why".
I'm not arguing against universal healthcare. I'm pointing out that arguments used are just too extreme, pushing well beyond reality into falsehoods. Which makes them very easy to debunk, by using social democracies that have universal healthcare as a data point at healthcare system that actually works and is one of the most efficient ones in the world while maintaining cutting edge survival rates for complex and expensive to treat illnesses such as various cancers.
Arguments used need to be far more realistic, and discuss actual, tangible benefits of universal healthcare, while taking care not to slide into extremes of "just how good universal care is". The whole "you get to keep your doctor" lie did more damage to the cause in US than much of right wing propaganda combined.