You have to make it to paragraph 7, but, this is one hell of an admission
The shutdown conversation no one wants
As the partial government shutdown enters its second week, neither party is leveling with the American people about the hard choices required to get federal spending off a fiscally ruinous trajectory.
President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats used covid-19 to justify chasing the mirage of a European-style welfare state without raising the necessary taxes to pay for it. Now, prodded by the left, party leaders have shut down the government in a bid to permanently extend what was sold in 2021 as emergency subsidies to help people struggling during the pandemic afford health insurance.
And now they do not want to cut a dime, even back to pre-COVID levels which were too high
Yet Democrats have demanded that Republicans agree to extend the covid-era insurance subsidies without proposing any way to pay for it. The Congressional Budget Office estimates this will cost $350 billion over the next decade. These temporary benefits were included in the American Rescue Plan of March 2021 and extended the next year in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act until the end of 2025.
The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act was never actually affordable. President Barack Obama’s signature achievement allowed people to buy insurance on marketplaces with subsidies based on their income. The architects of the program assumed that risk pools would be bigger than they turned out to be. As a result, policies cost more than expected.
It was never meant to be affordable. And, those risk pools tended to be pretty damned big. From the get-go it was expensive for deductibles and premiums, often offset by Other People. Remember this gem from 2013?
But people with no pre-existing conditions like Vinson, a 60-year-old retired teacher, and Waschura, a 52-year-old self-employed engineer, are making up the difference.
“I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,” Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.
“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”
“Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.”
Ocare was always meant as a waypoint towards Single Payer, hoping to drive the insurance companies out of business, but, what happened was that deductibles, premiums, and the cost of service went up, because, hey, if the government is going to pay for it, why not charge more? That’s how you get $500 hammers, instead of going to Lowe’s and buying a good one for $50.
Anyhow
This is how entitlement programs work. Once you habituate people to some generous government handout, they grow dependent on it. And it becomes politically perilous, if not impossible, to fully claw it back. Conservatives fought so hard to stop Obamacare 15 years ago because they anticipated fights like this one.
But, someone is paying for that handout. Let’s not forget that Ocare was so great that Democrats excluded Congress from participating
Unlike residents in every other industrialized nation on Earth, Americans pay about DOUBLE what others pay for healthcare!!! How can that be? Is our healthcare twice as good as that of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, Germany etc? No!! How do they do it? Non-profit, single payer!
The ACA is as affordable as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is beautiful, LOL.
America is circling the drain, thanks to Fat Donnie and his devotees.
Our fantasizing pharmacist wrote:
Actually, yes, it is! Go to any of the countries he listed, and getting health care is hurry up and wait, because they lack the facilities to get to you quickly, the way our system in America works. Health care might be ‘free’ over there — though you have to pay for it in much higher taxes — but it is dragged out and delayed, and patients have to suffer through the time lags.
It’s been several years, but I remember a report on it taking six months to get an MRI in Canada, while, at the same time, a business in Philadelphia was advertising for people to come in for a baseline MRI, so it would be available for physicians should the patients ever develop a serious problem, and their doctors could compare it with the baseline. Canada was short on MRI machines, while we had so many in the US that they were being advertised to drum up more business!
You think that’s an old anecdote? On December 12, 2024, the Fraser Institute reported:
Ultrasound? Our hospitals have portable ultrasound machines and do them at the bedside. MRI? The last time my physician thought I needed an MRI, she first ordered a KUB, a cheaper procedure due to insurance reasons, and it was performed that day. After having the KUB read, she said an MRI was needed, and that was performed the very next day, at the very small local hospital in our relatively poor Appalachian foothills county.
When I toasted my ankle back in March I went to the urgent care the next day because it hurt so much. Got right in. Took X rays. Did a consult with an offsite doc who looked at the X ray. Put me in a boot. Saw the orthopedist that Monday. Diagnosed slightly torn tendon.
That would not have happened in Canada, the UK, etc. I would pretty much have been on my own
The problem is that cost have gone out the roof secondary to Obamacare. Prior to Obama a chest X-ray cost about $30. Now it is around $300. Cardiac ECHO was $300, now about $1000. Much of the cost is due to government mandate.
Having visited Canada several times (work and vacation) and talked to Canadians from working class to professionals they love their system. The Fraser Institute is a right-wing Canadian who oppose single payer healthcare.
Same with Australians. They like their system. The Irish, English, Italians too.
Here in the US, ranking states according the healthcare satisfaction, Utah at 17th is the highest ranked red state. MS, TX, WV, OK, AR the worst, of course.
Our system is absolutely NOT twice as good as other nations. We’re lucky to make the top 10 in global rankings. One big difference is that other nations provide healthcare coverage to all. We have healthcare available to 90%. Here in the US, the poor get fucked over. Bigly. And it’s about to get worse. We’re not in the top 50 in life expectancy. Even those Canadians beggig for MRIs live longer.
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We pay out the nose in the US to our for profit groups – insurance companies, hospitals, physicians groups, drug companies, pharmacies, long term care facilities, administration/executive!… and it all adds up to over twice (on average) compared to all the other advanced nations.
Healthcare is such a difficult problem that only Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Finland, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Israel, Japan, S Korea, Luxembourg, Monaco, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland etc have been able to figure it out.
Yeah right, Rimjob!
You must’ve talked to all of them while trying to sell them on your failed cancer therapy treatment.
Sheesh…
Fat Jeff,
That is a lie. All Canadian doctors that I know hate the Canadian system. They say the only good part is that they can get paid care in the US. The system is built around the concept that limiting care will cause deaths before money is spent. The English I know hate their system and are wondering when it will go broke. You have a bad tendency to lie.
Smelly Ol’ david,
You’re a liar. Nothing you type is ever true. You have a bad tendency to lie.
American right-wingers are refractory to the truth and facts. You have your feeling/beliefs that facts just cannot penetrate.
Do you agree that Americans pay twice as much for healthcare than residents of other wealthy nations?
The conservative Peter Peterson Foundation ranks the US system higher (7th) than does the WHO, Commonwealth Fund, World Pop Rev, Kaiser Family Foundation, Am J Managed Care and others.
https://www.pgpf.org/article/us-healthcare-system-ranks-seventh-worldwide-innovative-but-fiscally-unsustainable/
We’ve been through this apples to donuts comparisons before, Rimjob.
There are so many variables left out of these types of comparisons when they are done.
Start first with the total U.S. population say 320 million to the populations the noted countries.
Not even close.
Then go from there and compare their demographics to the U.S. Yeah go ahead and do it and maybe you’ll start to get the picture, dumbass.
The incensed Mr Dowd wrote:
Yeah, those lily-white Canucks live longer, because they don’t have inner city thugs shooting each other, as well as innocent bystanders! Health care is better, in those lily-white countries of Europe, though I suspect the statistics will see a drop due to surging non-Western immigration. A lack of Western culture leads to an increase in dirt, unsanitary habits, and disease.
Poorer people bring along poorer habits, bring along less sanitary conditions. But, what our oh-so-sympathetic St Louisian fails to understand is that poverty is not a matter or racism, not a matter of evil white people trying to hold down the swarthier, but of culture, and of bad choices. We’ve had over sixty years of the welfare state in the United States, to prove that there’s only so much help you can give poor people before they have to choose not to be poor and take their own action on it.
I grew up poor! But, because I had a mother who reared me right, who reared me not to feel sorry for myself but to get out of bed and go to work, I’m not poor. Oh, we certainly aren’t wealthy, but my wife and I did things right to lift up ourselves from poverty. Mrs Pico grew up on the poor side as well.
So, what has happened for us? I never left the United States until I was 63 years old, never had the resources to take a foreign vacation, but our daughters, whom we also reared right and who get out of bed every day to work, have been to Italy, England, France, Scotland, Spain, and Greece in their thirties. That’s how it’s supposed to be done!
BTW, Canadians are 69.8% white. Amurica is 62% white.
The increasingly shrill Dana, reaffirms his white, christianist supremacy bonafides!!
He blames skin pigment for poverty, ignoring history!! Caucasians are just smarter, crueler, more militaristic, more inventive (they invented steel, guns, gunpowder (ok, slants)), and invaded and conquered the Americas and Africa. And BTW, empathy is a made-up word and philosophy – C.Kirk.
Dana is devoted to the asshole Big Donnie because Big Donnie punishes those that Dana considers inferior and insufficiently christianist – N-egroes, fags & trannies, spics, muzzies, ragheads – all non-christianists, non-caucasians, non-conservatives, non-male-dominants.
Dana has made clear he wants a white, christian, conservative, male-dominated, unregulated economy/environment, fossil fuel-dependent haven!!!
I also grew up dirt poor, a family of 9, but in southern Missouri. And on the poor side of a poor town. We attended elementary schools in the late 50s that, remarkably, were racially integrated!! I had negro friends!! My best friend also came from a huge family, forced by culture to live in “niggertown”! His faher, who had lost a lung in WWII, died when we were sixth graders. His mother was the Cub Scout leader! He did not miss a single day of grade school and went to Kansas U on an athletic scholarship and worked at GM, from where he retired. I worked on a loading dock to pay my way through the local state college ($125/credit hour) majoring in the sciences. My parents were Baptists, but I had rejected religion by high school.
Two poor white boys grew up in America but took different paths.
The difference being Dana grew up,
you did not.
Such a Rimjob.
The report I read was that obtains a CT, especially of the head took at least 6 months, if you had a neoplasm you would die before getting the procedure. Same machine, your dog could be scanned the next day.