Why Academics Leftists and Elitists Need to Treat Ordinary Americans With Respect

nsacpi said:
seems like we have a multitude of problems: low profits at United Heathcare and insane amounts of government money directed toward it

meanwhile back at the ranch our regulators waved through the following:

1) 1994, UHC acquires Ramsey-HMO
2) 1995, UHC acquires MetraHealth Companies
3) 1996, UHC acquires Healthwise of America
4) 1997, UHG acquires Health Partners of Arizona
5) 2001, one of their subsidiaries merges with LifeMark Health Plans

I could go on and on. A merger or acquisition per year almost for the past 30 years. We have CEOs in the healthcare industry on record as holding up the airline industry as the model they are driving toward.

The public needs to wake up. Every business out there would love to be able to buy its way out of having competitors. It has been happening on a grand scale for the past 25 years. We pay a very big price for this. We can either take a passive agressive approach and applaud vigilantes or we make this an issue we hold our elected representatives accountable for.
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I think you’re absolutely dead-on here. UHC doesn’t need to run high margins to deliver better returns for its investors. We have just allowed them to do it through relatively unchecked expansion. We will continue to see higher claim denials and higher costs because a high percentage of Americans do not have a meaningful choice in who their insurer or medical provider is. That is instead typically determined by their employer and their proximity to hospitals. If we let UHC continue to swallow up competing firms and hospital systems to acquire hospitals, the only loser is the consumer.
 
mqt said:
This is also a heavy oversimplification, though I at least find it more compelling of an argument than leftists are teaching people that murder is rad.

What I find less compelling about that argument is it ignores that Republicans hold at least half the blame for the current situation. Whether it would be prudent or not, if Democrats didn’t have to compromise with Republicans on healthcare, there’s a greater chance that healthcare would be socialized. Taxes might be higher and care might be worse, but we wouldn’t be talking about the profit margins of UHC. Where I think the ACA did fail in a lot of respects is it failed to address the relationship between for-profit hospitals and for-profit insurers and instead aimed to legislate around it by subsidizing costs for consumers. Republicans have since taken steps to exacerbate those problems rather than fix or replace the law.
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I don't care if it's democrats or Republicans. The problem is government

And you're next point is such a perfect encapsulation of leftist mindset. We would have worse outcomes. We would have higher costs. But at least the public would be too stupid to understand why
 
sturg33 said:
I don't care if it's democrats or Republicans. The problem is government

And you're next point is such a perfect encapsulation of leftist mindset. We would have worse outcomes. We would have higher costs. But at least the public would be too stupid to understand why
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I was not conceding those points to be true, I was pointing out that our current predicament is in large part because both sides are promising to fix healthcare, but the two approaches are incompatible. Maintaining a for-profit model of healthcare but adding legal conditions that make profits harder to achieve for those two groups is inevitably going to lead to either the government paying a greater share of the increased costs or consumers doing so. I don’t personally believe the current healthcare market has enough competition or elasticity of demand for consumers to effectively bring about changes via typical market forces. So you either have to increasingly subsidize the costs of the consumers, remove popular protections that increase those costs or overhaul the system entirely. I’d personally take my chances with door number 3, but so far our government has increasingly managed to pick none of the above.
 
I also think a lot of the analysis of what to do with the healthcare industry ignores that many people (including me) simply believe the government should prioritize paying for healthcare. Just from a social contract standpoint, I believe it should be a budget priority to pay for healthcare because it helps to keep people alive. I’ve watched as my tax dollars fund war crimes or destabilizing regimes in the name of keeping me safe. On a state and local level I’ve watched the same happen with funding a police state. I never hear anybody suggest we should cut taxes and each pay for these services, despite me never personally needing a soldier or officer to protect me from dying. But hospitals and insurance companies can put a price tag on saving me from a disease that might actually affect whether or not I die?
 
mqt said:
I also think a lot of the analysis of what to do with the healthcare industry ignores that many people (including me) simply believe the government should prioritize paying for healthcare. Just from a social contract standpoint, I believe it should be a budget priority to pay for healthcare because it helps to keep people alive. I’ve watched as my tax dollars fund war crimes or destabilizing regimes in the name of keeping me safe. On a state and local level I’ve watched the same happen with funding a police state. I never hear anybody suggest we should cut taxes and each pay for these services, despite me never personally needing a soldier or officer to protect me from dying. But hospitals and insurance companies can put a price tag on saving me from a disease that might actually affect whether or not I die?
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You act like government healtcare doesn't have claims denied. Which they do, all the time, after waiting 6 months to get your cancer screening

Free is not better. It's actually almost always worse, not to mention you have no right to the labor of others
 
sturg33 said:
You act like government healtcare doesn't have claims denied. Which they do, all the time, after waiting 6 months to get your cancer screening

Free is not better. It's actually almost always worse, not to mention you have no right to the labor of others
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I pay taxes that fund the police, and yet crime still happens. I pay premiums for healthcare but cannot afford a surgery without paying monthly installments to a hospital forever. I’m not looking for perfection, but it doesn’t change the fact I’d be willing to pay much more in taxes to fund healthcare.
 
nsacpi said:
Have you considered the possibility that this is why we have so much crime and what this implies as the solution to crime.
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Given that I was apparently educated to be a social Marxist hellbent on the destruction of Western culture, of course I have. I need to know that having a profession dedicated to finding as much crime as possible might not lead to less crime so that I can encourage people to be Trans instead of Christian.
 
mqt said:
I pay taxes that fund the police, and yet crime still happens. I pay premiums for healthcare but cannot afford a surgery without paying monthly installments to a hospital forever. I’m not looking for perfection, but it doesn’t change the fact I’d be willing to pay much more in taxes to fund healthcare.
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No you aren't. You're not even willing to cut spending today while running $1.5T deficits

But do you think things got better worse after ACA?
 
Tapate50 said:
How much more ?
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Here are some figures from an anti-universal healthcare source:

[tw]Americans are likewise unprepared for the colossal price tag of a new government-run Medicare for All system. Senator Bernie Sanders claims his version of the plan would cost $1.4 trillion per year, or $14 trillion over 10 years, partly paid for by individual tax increases. His plan includes a 2.2 percent income tax and a 6.2 percent tax on employers, which likely would be passed on to workers.

Non-partisan researchers, however, have totaled up the real cost of his plan in its first 10 years of implementation and found the number could be much higher.

Thorpe: $24.7 trillion
Urban: $32 trillion
Mercatus: $32.6 trillion
According to researcher Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University, “to fund the program, payroll and income taxes would have to increase from a combined 8.4 percent in the Sanders plan to 20 percent while also retaining all remaining tax increases on capital gains, increased marginal tax rates, the estate tax and eliminating tax expenditures.”[/tw]

I’d happily accept an additional 10-15% in taxes to fund everybody in the country not pay for healthcare, especially when I’d no longer have premiums deducted from my pay. Many would actually come out ahead on that trade.
 
sturg33 said:
No you aren't. You're not even willing to cut spending today while running $1.5T deficits

But do you think things got better worse after ACA?
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How is “you’re not willing to cut spending” an argument against me saying I’m willing to pay more taxes? It’s quite literally what I’m advocating for. I’m not attempting to persuade you to pay more taxes, I’m explaining why I would be willing to do so. I’m also not opposed to finding spending to cut, I just think it need not be done through programs to help people buy food or housing. You spend a lot of your interactions with me arguing against straw men about Leftists in general instead of engaging with my actual arguments. I’m plenty capable of having my own stupid ideas to ruin America without needing to borrow from MSNBC.

I think the ACA made things better for many and worse for many others. I do not agree with you on the cause of the problems, but agree there are many significant ones that are affecting those the law was designed to help. For instance, small business owners and their employees were absolutely wrecked by this law. But my core belief on healthcare is it should be provided as a public service.

You’re free to disagree, and I truly don’t begrudge you for doing so. Governments are frequently bad at governing and I understand your views on taxation and regulation and how less of those can help. I don’t find libertarian views unreasonable and in fact agree with more than you’d think. I also studied Economics and understand that you can’t just print money or give away everything for free. Communism/socialism will always fail because of those pesky humans. But there *are* ways to pay for healthcare if we made it a top budgetary concern. But the reality is that people in this country have to choose between saving their child and buying a home, and they’re going to choose their child. The reality is that until the passage of the ACA, you could be denied care for having a pre-existing condition, and I am ultimately willing to pay a little more in taxes or premiums to stop those things from happening. It’s absolutely fair to question whether or not the worst case scenario projections come to pass. I am simply disagreeing with you, not claiming I’m right and you’re wrong. Where think you are wrong is in my actual point to you that an uptick in leftism in schools caused people to become CEO murder apologists, and that this is particularly unique to any other group of 20-29 year-olds.
 
The day parents realize that academics are mostly evil will be a wonderful day for our future

[Tw]1871585572940382301[/tw]
 
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